Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure


---

asked if Mr. Jude Fawley was at work in the yard. It so happened that
Jude had gone out somewhere or other that afternoon, which infor-
mation she received with a look of disappointment, and went away
immediately. When Jude returned they told him, and described her,
whereupon he exclaimed, ‘Why––that’s my cousin Sue!’
He looked along the street after her, but she was out of sight. He
had no longer any thought of a conscientious avoidance of her, and
resolved to call upon her that very evening. And when he reached his
lodging he found a note from her––a 
first note––one of those docu-
ments which, simple and commonplace in themselves, are seen
retrospectively to have been pregnant with impassioned con-
sequences. The very unconsciousness of a looming drama which is
shown in such innocent 
first epistles from women to men or vice
versa
, makes them, when such a drama follows and they are read over
by the purple or lurid light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and
in cases, terrible.
Sue’s was of the most artless and natural kind. She addressed him
as her dear cousin Jude; said she had only just learnt by the merest
accident that he was living in Christminster, and reproached him
with not letting her know. They might have had such nice times
together, she said, for she was thrown much upon herself, and had
hardly any congenial friend. But now there was every probability of
her soon going away, so that the chance of companionship would be
lost perhaps for ever.
A cold sweat overspread Jude at the news that she was going away.
That was a contingency he had never thought of, and it spurred him
to write all the more quickly to her. He would meet her that very
evening, he said, one hour from the time of writing, at the cross in
the pavement which marked the spot of the martyrdoms.
When he had despatched the note by a boy he regretted that in his
hurry he should have suggested to her to meet him out of doors,
when he might have said he would call upon her. It was, in fact, the
country custom to meet thus, and nothing else had occurred to him.
Arabella had been met in the same way, unfortunately, and it might
not seem respectable to a dear girl like Sue. However it could not be
helped now, and he moved towards the point a few minutes before
the hour, under the glimmer of the newly lighted lamps.
The broad street was silent, and almost deserted, although it was
not late. He saw a 
figure on the other side, which turned out to be
At Christminster


---

hers, and they both converged towards the cross-mark at the same
moment. Before either had reached it, she called out to him:
‘I am not going to meet you just there,* for the 
first time in my life!
Come further on.’
The voice, though positive and silvery, had been tremulous. They
walked on in parallel lines, and, waiting her pleasure, Jude watched
till she showed signs of closing in, when he did likewise, the place
being where the carriers’ carts stood in the daytime, though there
was none on the spot then.
‘I am sorry that I asked you to meet me, and didn’t call,’ began
Jude with the bashfulness of a lover. ‘But I thought it would save
time if we were going to walk.’
‘O––I don’t mind that,’ she said with the freedom of a friend. ‘I
have really no place to ask anybody in to. What I meant was that the
place you chose was so horrid––I suppose I ought not to say
horrid,––I mean gloomy and inauspicious in its associations. . . . But
isn’t it funny to begin like this, when I don’t know you yet?’ She
looked him up and down curiously, though Jude did not look much
at her.
‘You seem to know me more than I know you,’ she added.
‘Yes––I have seen you now and then.’
‘And you knew who I was, and didn’t speak? And now I am going
away.’
‘Yes. That’s unfortunate. I have hardly any other friend. I have,
indeed, one very old friend here somewhere, but I don’t quite like to
call on him just yet. I wonder if you know anything of him––Mr.
Phillotson? A parson somewhere about the county, I think he is.’
‘No––I only know of one Mr. Phillotson. He lives a little way out
in the country, at Lumsdon. He’s a village schoolmaster.’
‘Ah. I wonder if he’s the same! Surely it is impossible. Only a
schoolmaster still! Do you know his Christian name––is it Richard?’
‘Yes––it is. I’ve directed books to him, though I’ve never seen
him.’
‘Then he couldn’t do it!’ Jude’s countenance fell, for how could he
succeed in an enterprise wherein the great Phillotson had failed? He
would have had a day of despair if the news had not arrived during
his sweet Sue’s presence, but even at this moment he had visions of
how Phillotson’s failure in the grand University scheme would
depress him when she had gone.
Jude the Obscure


---

‘As we are going to take a walk, suppose we go and call upon him?’
said Jude suddenly. ‘It is not late.’
She agreed, and they went along up a hill, and through some
prettily wooded country. Presently the embattled tower and square
turret of the church rose into the sky, and then the schoolhouse.
They inquired of a person in the street if Mr. Phillotson was likely to
be at home, and were informed that he was always at home. A knock
brought him to the schoolhouse door, with a candle in his hand and a
look of inquiry on his face which had grown thin and careworn since
Jude last set eyes on him.
That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson should
be of this homely complexion destroyed at one stroke the halo which
had surrounded the schoolmaster’s 
figure in Jude’s imagination ever
since their parting. It created in him at the same time a sympathy
with Phillotson as an obviously much chastened and disappointed
man. Jude told him his name, and said he had come to see him as an
old friend who had been kind to him in his youthful days.
‘I don’t remember you in the least,’ said the schoolmaster
thoughtfully. ‘You were one of my pupils you say? Yes, no doubt; but
they number so many thousands by this time of my life, and have
naturally changed so much, that I remember very few except the
quite recent ones.’
‘It was out at Marygreen,’ said Jude, wishing he had not come.
‘Yes. I was there a short time. And is this an old pupil too?’
‘No––that’s my cousin. . . . I wrote to you for some grammars, if
you recollect, and you sent them.’
‘Ah––yes!––I do dimly recall that incident.’
‘It was very kind of you to do it. And it was you who 
first started
me on that course. On the morning you left Marygreen, when your
goods were on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your
scheme was to be a University man and enter the church––that a
degree was the necessary hall-mark of one who wanted to do
anything as a theologian or teacher.’
‘I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did not
keep my own counsel. The idea was given up years ago.’
‘I have never forgotten it. It was that which brought me to this