Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure


---

Jude shifted the child into a more easy position on his arm, and
concluded: ‘And what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst
of me. I am in a chaos of principles––groping in the dark––acting by
instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came
here 
first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away
one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have
anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations
which do me and nobody else any harm,* and actually give pleasure to
those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I
was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you. I cannot
explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere
in our social formulas; what it is can only be discovered by men or
women with greater insight than mine,––if, indeed, they ever dis-
cover it––at least in our time. “For who knoweth what is good for
man in this life?––and who can tell a man what shall be after him
under the sun?” ’
‘Hear, hear,’ said the populace.
‘Well preached!’ said Tinker Taylor. And privately to his neigh-
bours: ‘Why, one of them jobbing pa’sons swarming about here, that
takes the services when our head Reverends want a holiday, wouldn’t
ha’ discoursed such doctrine for less than a guinea down. Hey? I’ll
take my oath not one o’ ’em would. And then he must have had it
wrote down for ’n. And this only a working man.’
As a sort of objective commentary on Jude’s remarks there drove
up at this moment with a belated Doctor, robed and panting, a cab
whose horse failed to stop at the exact point required for setting
down the hirer; who jumped out and entered the door. The driver,
alighting, began to kick the animal in the belly.
‘If that can be done,’ said Jude, ‘at college gates in the most
religious and educational city in the world, what shall we say as to
how far we’ve got?’
‘Order!’ said one of the policemen, who had been engaged with a
comrade in opening the large doors opposite the college. ‘Keep yer
tongue quiet, my man, while the procession passes.’ The rain came
on more heavily, and all who had umbrellas opened them. Jude was
not one of these, and Sue only possessed a small one, half sunshade.
She had grown pale, though Jude did not notice it then.
‘Let us go on, dear,’ she whispered, endeavouring to shelter him,
‘We haven’t any lodgings yet, remember, and all our things are at the
At Christminster Again


---

station; and you are by no means well yet. I am afraid this wet will
hurt you!’
‘They are coming now.––Just a moment, and I’ll go,’ said he.
A peal of six bells struck out, human faces began to crowd the
windows around, and the procession of Heads of Houses and new
Doctors emerged, their red and black gowned forms passing across
the 
field of Jude’s vision like inaccessible planets across an object
glass.*
As they went their names were called by knowing informants; and
when they reached the old round theatre of Wren a cheer rose high.
‘Let’s go that way!’ cried Jude, and though it now rained steadily
he seemed not to know it, and took them round to the Theatre. Here
they stood upon the straw that was laid to drown the discordant
noise of wheels, where the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts
encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceed-
ings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their
children, as at ludicrous persons who had no business there.
‘I wish I could get in!’ he said to her fervidly. ‘Listen––I may catch
a few words of the Latin speech by staying here; the windows are
open.’
However, beyond the peals of the organ, and the shouts and hur-
rahs between each piece of oratory, Jude’s standing in the wet did not
bring much Latin to his intelligence more than, now and then, a
sonorous word in um or ibus.
‘Well––I’m an outsider to the end of my days!’ he sighed after a
while. ‘Now I’ll go, my patient Sue. How good of you to wait in the
rain all this time––to gratify my infatuation! I’ll never care any more
about the infernal cursed place, upon my soul I won’t! But what
made you tremble so when we were at the barrier? And how pale you
are, Sue!’
‘I saw Richard amongst the people on the other side.’
‘Ah––did you!’
‘He is evidently come up to Jerusalem* to see the festival like the
rest of us, and on that account is probably living not so very far away.
He had the same hankering for the University that you had, in a
milder form. I don’t think he saw me, though he must have heard
you speaking to the crowd. But he seemed not to notice.’
‘Well––suppose he did. Your mind is free from worries about him
now, my Sue?’