Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Christminster


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panegyrists; yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not
read, nor the high thinkers live.
He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the trees
which screened her whose presence had at 
first been the support of
his heart, and whose loss was now a maddening torture. But for this
blow he might have borne with his fate. With Sue as companion he
could have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was
inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had
subjected himself should a
ffect him disastrously. Phillotson had, no
doubt, passed through a similar intellectual disappointment to that
which now enveloped him. But the schoolmaster had been since blest
with the consolation of sweet Sue; while for him there was no
consoler.
Descending to the streets he went listlessly along till he arrived at
an inn, and entered it. Here he drank several glasses of beer in rapid
succession, and when he came out it was night. By the light of the
flickering lamps he rambled home to supper, and had not long been
sitting at table when his landlady brought up a letter that had just
arrived for him. She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of its
possible importance, and on looking at it Jude perceived that it bore
the embossed stamp of one of the Colleges whose heads he had
addressed. ‘One––at last!’ cried Jude.
The communication was brief; and not exactly what he had
expected; though it really was from the Master in person. It ran thus:
‘B
* C.
‘S
: I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your descrip-
tion of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a
much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and
sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore,
is what I advise you to do. Yours
T. T
.’
‘To Mr. J. F
, Stone-mason.’
This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude. He had known all
that before. He knew it was true. Yet it seemed a hard slap after ten
years of labour, and its e
ffect upon him just now was to make him
rise recklessly from the table and, instead of reading as usual, to go
downstairs and into the street. He stood at a bar and tossed o
ff two
Jude the Obscure


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or three glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he came to a
spot called the Fourways* in the middle of the city, gazing abstract-
edly at the groups of people like one in a trance; till coming to
himself, he began talking to the policeman 
fixed there.
That o
fficer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated himself
an inch and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled, and looking
humorously at Jude said, ‘You’ve had a wet, young man.’
‘No: I’ve only begun,’ he replied cynically.
Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough. He only heard
in part the policeman’s further remarks, having fallen into thought
on what struggling people like himself had stood at that Crossway,
whom nobody ever thought of now. It had more history than the
oldest college in the city. It was literally teeming, strati
fied, with the
shades of human groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy,
farce, real enactments of the intensest kind. At Fourways men had
stood and talked of Napoleon, the loss of America, the execution
of King Charles, the burning of the Martyrs, the Crusades, the
Norman Conquest, possibly of the arrival of Caesar. Here the two
sexes had met for loving, hating, coupling, parting, had waited, had
su
ffered for each other; had triumphed over each other, cursed each
other in jealousy, blessed each other in forgiveness.
He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity in
fin-
itely more palpitating, varied, and compendious, than the gown life.
These struggling men and women before him were the reality of
Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That
was one of the humours of things. The 
floating population of
students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not
Christminster in a local sense at all.
He looked at his watch, and in pursuit of this idea, he went on till
he came to a public hall, where a promenade concert was in progress.
Jude entered, and found the room full of shop youths and girls,
soldiers, apprentices, boys of eleven smoking cigarettes, and light
women of the more respectable and amateur class. He had tapped the
real Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd walked
about and jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon
a platform and sang a comic song.
The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his
flirting and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances––
wistful to gain a little joy. At ten o’clock he came away, choosing a