Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark
of Christminster he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned
to the Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could
scarcely believe his eyes.
The book was an old one––thirty years old, soiled, scribbled wan-
tonly over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the
letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier
than his own day. But this was not the cause of Jude’s amazement.
He learnt for the 
first time that there was no law of transmutation as
in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the
grammarian did not recognize it); but that every word in both Latin
and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost
of years of plodding.
Jude 
flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of
the elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter
of an hour. As he had often done before he pulled his hat over his
face, and watched* the sun peering insidiously at him through the
interstices of the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it; this
grand delusion! The charm he had supposed in store for him was
really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.
What brains they must have in Christminster and the great
schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens
of thousands. There were no brains in his head equal to this busi-
ness, and as the little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat
at him he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see
another, that he had never been born.
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked
him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his
notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But
nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing
recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out
of the world.
At Marygreen
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I.–v.
D
 the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular
vehicle might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-
roads near Marygreen, driven in a quaint and singular way.
In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books
Jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the
dead languages. In fact his disappointment at the nature of
those tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further
glorifying the erudition of Christminster. To acquire languages,
departed or living, in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew
them inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which
gradually led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presup-
posed patent process. The mountain-weight of material under
which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the classics
piqued him into a dogged, mouselike subtlety of attempt to move it
piecemeal.
He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty
maiden aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability; and the busi-
ness of the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence. An aged
horse with a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at a
sale, a creaking cart with a whity-brown tilt obtained for a few
pounds more; and in this turn-out it became Jude’s business thrice a
week to carry loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters
immediately around Marygreen.
The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the conveyance itself
than in Jude’s manner of conducting it along its route. Its interior
was the scene of most of Jude’s education by ‘private study.’ As soon
as the horse had learnt the road, and the houses at which he was to
pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his
arm, ingeniously 
fix open, by means of a strap attached to the tilt,
the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on his knees, and
plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar, Virgil or Horace, as
the case might be, in his purblind stumbling way, and with an
expenditure of labour that would have made a tender-hearted peda-
gogue shed tears; yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he
read, and divining rather than beholding the spirit of the original,

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which often to his mind was something else than that which he was
taught to look for.
The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old
Delphin editions,* because they were superseded, and therefore
cheap. But, bad for idle schoolboys, it did so happen that they were
passably good for him. The hampered and lonely itinerant conscien-
tiously covered up the marginal readings and used them merely on
points of construction, as he would have used a comrade or tutor
who should have happened to be passing by. And though Jude may
have had little chance of becoming a scholar by these rough and
ready means, he was in the way of getting into the groove he wished
to follow.
While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had already
been thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the
thoughts of these minds so remote yet so near, the bony old horse
pursued his rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of
Dido* by the stoppage of his cart and the voice of some old woman
crying, ‘Two to-day, baker, and I return this stale one.’
He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others
without his seeing them, and by degrees the people of the neigh-
bourhood began to talk about his method of combining work and
play (such they considered his reading to be), which though prob-
ably convenient enough to himself was not altogether a safe proceed-
ing for other travellers along the same roads. There were murmurs.
Then a private resident of an adjoining place informed the local
policeman that the baker’s boy should not be allowed to read while
driving, and insisted that it was the constable’s duty to catch him in
the act, and take him to the police court at Alfredston and get him
fined for dangerous practices on the highway. The policeman there-
upon lay in wait for Jude, and one day accosted him and cautioned
him.
As Jude had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to heat the
oven, and mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in
the day, he was obliged to go to bed at night immediately after laying
the sponge; so that if he could not read his classics on the highways
he could hardly study at all. The only thing to be done was, there-
fore, to keep a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he could in
the circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as anybody
loomed in the distance, the policeman in particular. To do that