Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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hair making a very distinct and attractive picture of her, which just
disclosed, too, the thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter moods.
It was a duplicate of the one she had given Jude, and would have
given to any man. Phillotson brought it half-way to his lips, but
withdrew it in doubt at her perplexing phrases: ultimately kissing
the dead pasteboard with all the passionateness, and more than all
the devotion, of a young man of eighteen.
The schoolmaster’s was an unhealthy-looking, old-fashioned face,
rendered more old-fashioned by his style of shaving. A certain
gentlemanliness had been imparted to it by nature, suggesting an
inherent wish to do rightly by all. His speech was a little slow, but his
tones were sincere enough to make his hesitation no defect. His
greying hair was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle of his
crown. There were four lines across his forehead, and he only wore
spectacles when reading at night. It was almost certainly a renunci-
ation forced upon him by his academic purpose rather than a distaste
for women, which had hitherto kept him from closing with one of
the sex in matrimony.
Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were repeated
many and oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys,
whose quick and penetrating regard would frequently become
almost intolerable to the self-conscious master in his present anxious
care for Sue, making him, in the grey hours of morning, dread to
meet anew the gimlet glances, lest they should read what the dream
within him was.
He had honourably acquiesced in Sue’s announced wish that he
was not often to visit her at the Training School; but at length, his
patience being sorely tried, he set out one Sunday afternoon to pay
her an unexpected call. There the news of her departure––expulsion
as it might almost have been considered––was 
flashed upon him
without warning or mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a
few minutes to behold her face; and when he turned away he could
hardly see the road before him.
Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the subject,
although it was fourteen days old. A short re
flection told him that
this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for
silence as any degree of blameworthiness.
They had informed him at the school where she was living, and
having no immediate anxiety about her comfort his thoughts took
At Melchester
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the direction of a burning indignation against the Training School
Committee. In his bewilderment Phillotson entered the adjacent
cathedral, just now in a direly dismantled state by reason of the
repairs. He sat down on a block of freestone, regardless of the dusty
imprint it made on his breeches; and his listless eyes following the
movements of the workmen he presently became aware that the
reputed culprit, Sue’s lover Jude, was one amongst them.
Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the
model of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson’s
tentative courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the
younger man’s mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet
him, to communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson’s
success in obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude,
he had frankly recognized that he did not wish to see or hear of his
senior any more, learn anything of his pursuits, or even imagine
again what excellencies might appertain to his character. On this
very day of the schoolmaster’s visit Jude was expecting Sue, as she
had promised; and when therefore he saw the schoolmaster in the
nave of the building; saw moreover, that he was coming to speak to
him, he felt no little embarrassment; which Phillotson’s own
embarrassment prevented his observing.
Jude joined him, and they both withdrew from the other workmen
to the spot where Phillotson had been sitting. Jude o
ffered him a
piece of sackcloth for a cushion, and told him it was dangerous to sit
on the bare block.
‘Yes; yes,’ said Phillotson abstractedly as he reseated himself, his
eyes resting on the ground as if he were trying to remember where
he was. ‘I won’t keep you long. It was merely that I have heard that
you have seen my little friend Sue recently. It occurred to me to
speak to you on that account. I merely want to ask––about her.’
‘I think I know what!’ Jude hurriedly said. ‘About her escaping
from the Training School, and her––coming to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well’––Jude for a moment felt an unprincipled and 
fiendish wish
to annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery
which love for the same woman renders possible to men the
most honourable in every other relation of life, he could send o
ff
Phillotson in agony and defeat by saying that the scandal was true,
and that Sue had irretrievably committed herself with him. But his