Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (615 page)

On turning the corner and entering the village the first sight that greeted his eyes was that of two figures under one umbrella coming out of the vicarage gate. He was too far back for them to notice him, but he knew in a moment that they were Sue and Phillotson. The latter was holding the umbrella over her head, and they had evidently been paying a visit to the vicar — probably on some business connected with the school work. And as they walked along the wet and deserted lane Jude saw Phillotson place his arm round the girl’s waist; whereupon she gently removed it; but he replaced it; and she let it remain, looking quickly round her with an air of misgiving. She did not look absolutely behind her, and therefore did not see Jude, who sank into the hedge like one struck with a blight. There he remained hidden till they had reached Sue’s cottage and she had passed in, Phillotson going on to the school hard by.

“Oh, he’s too old for her — too old!” cried Jude in all the terrible sickness of hopeless, handicapped love.

He could not interfere. Was he not Arabella’s? He was unable to go on further, and retraced his steps towards Christminster. Every tread of his feet seemed to say to him that he must on no account stand in the schoolmaster’s way with Sue. Phillotson was perhaps twenty years her senior, but many a happy marriage had been made in such conditions of age. The ironical clinch to his sorrow was given by the thought that the intimacy between his cousin and the schoolmaster had been brought about entirely by himself.

CHAPTER VI

Jude’s old and embittered aunt lay unwell at Marygreen, and on the following Sunday he went to see her — a visit which was the result of a victorious struggle against his inclination to turn aside to the village of Lumsdon and obtain a miserable interview with his cousin, in which the word nearest his heart could not be spoken, and the sight which had tortured him could not be revealed.

His aunt was now unable to leave her bed, and a great part of Jude’s short day was occupied in making arrangements for her comfort. The little bakery business had been sold to a neighbour, and with the proceeds of this and her savings she was comfortably supplied with necessaries and more, a widow of the same village living with her and ministering to her wants. It was not till the time had nearly come for him to leave that he obtained a quiet talk with her, and his words tended insensibly towards his cousin.

“Was Sue born here?”

“She was — in this room. They were living here at that time. What made ‘ee ask that?”

“Oh — I wanted to know.”

“Now you’ve been seeing her!” said the harsh old woman. “And what did I tell ‘ee?”

“Well — that I was not to see her.”

“Have you gossiped with her?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t keep it up. She was brought up by her father to hate her mother’s family; and she’ll look with no favour upon a working chap like you — a townish girl as she’s become by now. I never cared much about her. A pert little thing, that’s what she was too often, with her tight-strained nerves. Many’s the time I’ve smacked her for her impertinence. Why, one day when she was walking into the pond with her shoes and stockings off, and her petticoats pulled above her knees, afore I could cry out for shame, she said: ‘Move on, Aunty! This is no sight for modest eyes!’“

“She was a little child then.”

“She was twelve if a day.”

“Well — of course. But now she’s older she’s of a thoughtful, quivering, tender nature, and as sensitive as — ”

“Jude!” cried his aunt, springing up in bed. “Don’t you be a fool about her!”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Your marrying that woman Arabella was about as bad a thing as a man could possibly do for himself by trying hard. But she’s gone to the other side of the world, and med never trouble you again. And there’ll be a worse thing if you, tied and bound as you be, should have a fancy for Sue. If your cousin is civil to you, take her civility for what it is worth. But anything more than a relation’s good wishes it is stark madness for ‘ee to give her. If she’s townish and wanton it med bring ‘ee to ruin.”

“Don’t say anything against her, Aunt! Don’t, please!”

A relief was afforded to him by the entry of the companion and nurse of his aunt, who must have been listening to the conversation, for she began a commentary on past years, introducing Sue Bridehead as a character in her recollections. She described what an odd little maid Sue had been when a pupil at the village school across the green opposite, before her father went to London — how, when the vicar arranged readings and recitations, she appeared on the platform, the smallest of them all, “in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink sash”; how she recited “Excelsior,” “There was a sound of revelry by night,” and “The Raven”; how during the delivery she would knit her little brows and glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as if some real creature stood there —

“Ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven,

wandering from the Nightly shore,

Tell me what thy lordly name is

on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“She’d bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear,” corroborated the sick woman reluctantly, “as she stood there in her little sash and things, that you could see un a’most before your very eyes. You too, Jude, had the same trick as a child of seeming to see things in the air.”

The neighbour told also of Sue’s accomplishments in other kinds:

“She was not exactly a tomboy, you know; but she could do things that only boys do, as a rule. I’ve seen her hit in and steer down the long slide on yonder pond, with her little curls blowing, one of a file of twenty moving along against the sky like shapes painted on glass, and up the back slide without stopping. All boys except herself; and then they’d cheer her, and then she’d say, ‘Don’t be saucy, boys,’ and suddenly run indoors. They’d try to coax her out again. But ‘a wouldn’t come.”

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt that day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the school to see the room in which Sue’s little figure had so glorified itself; but he checked his desire and went on.

It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known him during his residence here were standing in a group in their best clothes. Jude was startled by a salute from one of them:

“Ye’ve got there right enough, then!”

Jude showed that he did not understand.

“Why, to the seat of l’arning — the ‘City of Light’ you used to talk to us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?”

“Yes; more!” cried Jude.

“When I was there once for an hour I didn’t see much in it for my part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not much going on at that.”

“You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought and religion — the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country. All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of infinite motion — the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a well-known writer.”

“Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn’t see nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot o’ beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha’porth o’ cheese, and waited till it was time to come along home. You’ve j’ined a college by this time, I suppose?”

“Ah, no!” said Jude. “I am almost as far off that as ever.”

“How so?”

Jude slapped his pocket.

“Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you — only for them with plenty o’ money.”

“There you are wrong,” said Jude, with some bitterness. “They are for such ones!”

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude’s attention from the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure to a seat in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his prospects in a cold northern light. He had lately felt that he could not quite satisfy himself in his Greek — in the Greek of the dramatists particularly. So fatigued was he sometimes after his day’s work that he could not maintain the critical attention necessary for thorough application. He felt that he wanted a coach — a friend at his elbow to tell him in a moment what sometimes would occupy him a weary month in extracting from unanticipative, clumsy books.

It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely than he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using up his spare hours in a vague labour called “private study” without giving an outlook on practicabilities?

“I ought to have thought of this before,” he said, as he journeyed back. “It would have been better never to have embarked in the scheme at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going, or what I am aiming at… This hovering outside the walls of the colleges, as if expecting some arm to be stretched out from them to lift me inside, won’t do! I must get special information.”

The next week accordingly he sought it. What at first seemed an opportunity occurred one afternoon when he saw an elderly gentleman, who had been pointed out as the head of a particular college, walking in the public path of a parklike enclosure near the spot at which Jude chanced to be sitting. The gentleman came nearer, and Jude looked anxiously at his face. It seemed benign, considerate, yet rather reserved. On second thoughts Jude felt that he could not go up and address him; but he was sufficiently influenced by the incident to think what a wise thing it would be for him to state his difficulties by letter to some of the best and most judicious of these old masters, and obtain their advice.

During the next week or two he accordingly placed himself in such positions about the city as would afford him glimpses of several of the most distinguished among the provosts, wardens, and other heads of houses; and from those he ultimately selected five whose physiognomies seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and far-seeing men. To these five he addressed letters, briefly stating his difficulties, and asking their opinion on his stranded situation.

When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to criticize them; he wished they had not been sent. “It is just one of those intrusive, vulgar, pushing, applications which are so common in these days,” he thought. “Why couldn’t I know better than address utter strangers in such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man with a bad character, for all that they know to the contrary… Perhaps that’s what I am!”

Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply as to his one last chance of redemption. He waited day after day, saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting. While he waited he was suddenly stirred by news about Phillotson. Phillotson was giving up the school near Christminster, for a larger one further south, in Mid-Wessex. What this meant; how it would affect his cousin; whether, as seemed possible, it was a practical move of the schoolmaster’s towards a larger income, in view of a provision for two instead of one, he would not allow himself to say. And the tender relations between Phillotson and the young girl of whom Jude was passionately enamoured effectually made it repugnant to Jude’s tastes to apply to Phillotson for advice on his own scheme.

Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written vouchsafed no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back entirely on himself, as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened hope. By indirect inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had long uneasily suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open scholarships and exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to do this a good deal of coaching would be necessary, and much natural ability. It was next to impossible that a man reading on his own system, however widely and thoroughly, even over the prolonged period of ten years, should be able to compete with those who had passed their lives under trained teachers and had worked to ordained lines.

The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the only one really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of a material kind. With the help of his information he began to reckon the extent of this material obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay, that, at the rate at which, with the best of fortune, he would be able to save money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a position to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance to a matriculation examination. The undertaking was hopeless.

He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the place had exercised over him. To get there and live there, to move among the churches and halls and become imbued with the
genius loci
, had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal thing to do. “Let me only get there,” he had said with the fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat, “and the rest is but a matter of time and energy.” It would have been far better for him in every way if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to Heine’s:

Above the youth’s inspired and flashing eyes

I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise!

Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into his dear Sue’s life by involving her in this collapse. And the painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should now be spared her as far as possible. After all, she had only known a little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged thus unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.