Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure


---

not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest, and in that
ancient corn
field many a man had made love-promises to a woman at
whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after ful
filling
them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor the rooks
around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, possessing in
the one view only the quality of a work-ground, and in the other that
of a granary good to feed in.
The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few
seconds used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left
o
ff pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, bur-
nished like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding
him warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.
He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart
grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed,
like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why
should he frighten them away? They took upon them more and more
the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners––the only friends he
could claim as being in the least degree interested in him, for his
aunt had often told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and
they alighted anew.
‘Poor little dears!’ said Jude, aloud. ‘You shall have some dinner
you shall! There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can a
fford to
let you have some. Eat, then, my dear little birdies, and make a good
meal!’
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude
enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his
own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much
resembled his own.
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a
mean and sordid instrument, o
ffensive both to the birds and to him-
self as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow
upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his
surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of o
ffence
used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed
eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham
himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the
clacker swinging in his hand.
‘So it’s “Eat, my dear birdies,” is it, young man! “Eat dear bir-
dies,” indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches and see if you say “Eat, dear
At Marygreen


---

birdies,” again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the school-
master’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye hey! That’s how you
earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks o
ff my corn!’
Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric,
Troutham had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging
his slim frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the
hind parts with the 
flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed
with the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each
revolution.
‘Don’t ’ee, sir––please don’t ’ee!’ cried the whirling child, as help-
less under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked 
fish
swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the plantation, the
path, and the rooks going round and round him in an amazing circu-
lar race. ‘I––I––sir––only meant that––there was a good crop in the
ground––I saw ’em sow it––and the rooks could have a little bit for
dinner––and you wouldn’t miss it, sir––and Mr. Phillotson said I
was to be kind to ’em––O, O, O!’
This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even
more than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all; and he
still smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument con-
tinuing to resound all across the 
field and as far as the ears of distant
workers who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his busi-
ness of clacking with great assiduity and echoing from the brand-
new church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of
which structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love
for God and man.
Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and deposit-
ing the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket
and gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go
home and never let him see him in one of those 
fields again.
Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway
weeping; not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from
the perception of the 
flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what
was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the
awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been
a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt
for life.
With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in
the village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high