Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Melchester


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‘Yes,’ she said shortly, her face changing a little. ‘Though I didn’t
ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been. But I
shouldn’t care if he didn’t come any more!’
It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at
his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude’s feelings of love were
deprecated by her. He went on to something else.
‘This will blow over, dear Sue,’ he said. ‘The Training School
authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some
other, no doubt.’
‘I’ll ask Mr. Phillotson,’ she said decisively.
Sue’s kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no
more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly
unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as
that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The
lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a
parish priest, should learn.
But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with
her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capri-
cious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of
her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she
must have written almost immediately he had gone from her:
‘Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it,
and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to
be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all
my faults. I’ll try not to be like it again.
‘I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from
the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half-an-hour, if you would like?––
Your repentant S
.’
Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the
Cathedral works when she came.
Jude the Obscure


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III.–vi.
M
 a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great
beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard
Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school
at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys’ school in
his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the
south-west as the crow 
flies.
A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to
reveal that the schoolmaster’s plans and dreams so long indulged in
had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the
Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an
unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a
practical purpose––that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might
conduct one of the girls’ schools adjoining his own; for which pur-
pose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not
marry him o
ff-hand.
About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to
Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue,
the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at
Shaston. All the furniture being 
fixed, the books shelved, and the
nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter
nights, and re-attempt some of his old studies––one branch of which
had included Roman-Britannic antiquities*––an unremunerative
labour for a National schoolmaster,* but a subject that after his aban-
donment of the University scheme, had interested him as being a
comparatively unworked mine, practicable to those who, like him-
self, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant,
and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted
views on the civilization of that time.
A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent
hobby of Phillotson at present––his ostensible reason for going alone
into 
fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shut-
ting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he
had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours,
who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be
friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after

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all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown
quite late––to near midnight, indeed––and the light of his lamp,
shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over
in
finite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and
person given over to study, he was not exactly studying.
The interior of the room––the books, the furniture, the school-
master’s loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the 
flickering of the
fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research––more
than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of
his making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true
now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic
notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some months
before, and it was the clerical rendering of word after word that
absorbed him.
He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,
few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its
envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same
womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by
one and read them musingly. At 
first sight there seemed in these
small documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were
straightforward, frank letters signed ‘Sue B.’––just such ones as
would be written during short absences, with no other thought than
their speedy destruction, and chie
fly concerning books in reading
and other experiences of a Training School, forgotten doubtless by
the writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of
them––quite a recent note––the young woman said that she had
received his considerate letter, and that it was honourable and gener-
ous of him to say he would not come to see her oftener than she
desired (the school being such an awkward place for callers, and
because of her strong wish that her engagement to him should not be
known, which it would infallibly be if he visited her oftener). Over
these phrases the schoolmaster pored. What precise shade of satis-
faction was to be gathered from a woman’s gratitude that the man
who loved her had not been often to see her? The problem occupied
him, distracted him.
He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope, from
which he drew a photograph of Sue as a child, long before he had
known her, standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her
hand. There was another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and