Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

particulars of the event, and indulging in predictions of his future.
‘And who’s he?’ asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the
boy entered.
‘Well ye med ask it Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew––come
since you was last this way.’ The old inhabitant who answered was a
tall, gaunt woman who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject,
and gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. ‘He
come from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago,*
worse luck for ’n, Belinda’ (turning to the right) ‘where his father
was living, and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two
days, as you know Caroline’ (turning to the left). ‘It would ha’ been a
blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too wi’ thy mother and
father, poor useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I
can see what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him
earn any penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer
Troutham. It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?’
she continued as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps
upon his face, moved aside.
The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good
plan of Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indi
fferently) to
have him with her––‘to kip ’ee company in your loneliness, fetch
water, shet the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’
baking.’
Miss Fawley doubted it. . . . ‘Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster
to take ’ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ’ee,’ she

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continued, in frowning pleasantry. ‘I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a
better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our
family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same, so I’ve heard, but I
have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this place,
within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband
after they were married didn’ get a house of their own for some year
or more; and then they only had one till––well, I won’t go into that.
Jude my child, don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take
that step any more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own,
Belinda, till the split come. Ah, that a little maid should know such
changes!’
Jude, 
finding the general attention again centering on himself,
went out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his
breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging
from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back, he pursued a
path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the
general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-
field. This vast
concave was the scene of his labours for Mr. Troutham, the farmer,
and he descended into the midst of it.
The brown surface of the 
field went right up towards the sky all
round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the
actual verge, and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the
uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in
the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the
path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he
hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family.
‘How ugly it is here!’ he murmured.
The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in
a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the
expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history
beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and
stone there really attached associations enough and to spare––echoes
of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy
deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site 
first or last of energy,
gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had
squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches that had
populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there between
reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the 
field from
a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would