Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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other supporting him, she led him indoors, and placed him in the
only easy-chair the meagrely furnished house a
fforded, stretching
his feet upon another, and pulling o
ff his boots. Jude, now getting
towards his sober senses, could only say, ‘Dear, dear Sue!’ in a voice
broken by grief and contrition.
She asked him if he wanted anything to eat, but he shook his head.
Then telling him to go to sleep, and that she would come down early
in the morning and get him some breakfast, she bade him
good-night, and ascended the stairs.
Almost immediately he fell into a heavy slumber, and did not wake
till dawn. At 
first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his
situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness of a
right mind. She knew the worst of him––the very worst. How could
he face her now? She would soon be coming down to see about
breakfast, as she had said, and there would he be in all his shame,
confronting her. He could not bear the thought, and softly drawing
on his boots and taking his hat from the nail on which she had hung
it he slipped noiselessly out of the house.
His 
fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot, and hide, and
perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to him was Mary-
green. He called at his lodging in Christminster, where he found
awaiting him a note of dismissal from his employer; and having
packed up he turned his back upon the city that had been such a
thorn in his side, and struck southward into Wessex. He had no
money left in his pocket, his small savings, deposited at one of the
banks in Christminster, having fortunately been left untouched. To
get to Marygreen, therefore, his only course was walking; and the
distance being nearly twenty miles, he had ample time to complete
on the way the sobering process begun in him.
At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston. Here he
pawned his waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a mile or two
slept under a rick that night. At dawn he rose, shook o
ff the hayseeds
and stems from his clothes, and started again, breasting the long
white road up the hill to the downs, which had been visible to him a
long way o
ff, and passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had
carved his hopes years ago.
He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at breakfast.
Weary and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed of his ordinary
clearness of brain, he sat down by the well, thinking as he did so
At Christminster
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what a poor Christ he made.* Seeing a trough of water near he bathed
his face, and went on to the cottage of his great-aunt, whom he
found breakfasting in bed, attended by the woman who lived with
her.
‘What––out o’ work?’ asked his relative, regarding him through
eyes sunken deep under lids heavy as pot-covers, no other cause for
his tumbled appearance suggesting itself to one whose whole life had
been a struggle with material things.
‘Yes,’ said Jude heavily. ‘I think I must have a little rest.’
Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room and lay
down in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the artizan. He fell
asleep for a short while, and when he awoke it was as if he had
awakened in hell. It was hell––‘the hell of conscious failure’ both in
ambition and in love. He thought of that previous abyss into which
he had fallen before leaving this part of the country; the deepest deep
he had supposed it then; but it was not so deep as this. That had been
the breaking in of the outer bulwarks of his hope; this was of his
second line.
If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous
tension which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied
to his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his
mouth like those in the Laocoon,* and corrugations between his
brows.
A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the
chimney like the pedal notes of an organ. Each ivy leaf overgrowing
the wall of the churchless churchyard hard by, now abandoned,
pecked its neighbour smartly, and the vane on the new Victorian-
Gothic church in the new spot had already begun to creak. Yet
apparently it was not always the outdoor wind that made the deep
murmurs; it was a voice. He guessed its origin in a moment or
two: the curate was praying with his aunt in the adjoining room.
He remembered her speaking of him. Presently the sounds ceased,
and a step seemed to cross the landing. Jude sat up, and shouted
‘Hoi!’
The step made for his door, which was open, and a man looked in.
It was a young clergyman.
‘I think you are Mr. Highbridge,’* said Jude. ‘My aunt has men-
tioned you more than once. Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow
gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one
Jude the Obscure
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time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing
and another.’
Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and movements,
by an unconscious bias dwelling less upon the intellectual and ambi-
tious side of his dream, and more upon the theological, though this
had, up till now, been merely a portion of the general plan of
advancement.
‘Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me,’ added
Jude in conclusion. ‘And I don’t regret the collapse of my University
hopes one jot. I wouldn’t begin again if I were sure to succeed. I
don’t care for social success any more at all. But I do feel I should
like to do some good thing; and I bitterly regret the church, and the
loss of my chance of being her ordained minister.’
The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had
grown deeply interested, and at last he said: ‘If you feel a real call to
the ministry, and I won’t say from your conversation that you do not,
for it is that of a thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the
Church as a licentiate.* Only you must make up your mind to avoid
strong drink.’
‘I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to
support me!’
At Christminster
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