Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

impedimenta
, and bade his friends goodbye.
‘I shan’t forget you, Jude,’ he said smiling, as the cart moved o
ff.
‘Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and
read all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember
you hunt me out for old acquaintance sake.’
The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the
corner by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at
the edge of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he
went to help his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a
Jude the Obscure


---

quiver in his lip now, and after opening the well-cover to begin
lowering the bucket he paused and leant with his forehead and arms
against the frame-work, his face wearing the 
fixity of a thoughtful
child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time. The
well into which he was looking was as ancient as the village itself, and
from his present position appeared as a long circular perspective
ending in a shining disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred
feet down. There was a lining of green moss near the top, and, nearer
still the hart’s-tongue fern.
He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
morning like this, and would never draw there any more. ‘I’ve seen
him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing just as I
do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home.
But he was too clever to bide here any longer––a small sleepy place
like this!’
A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morn-
ing was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as a
thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
interrupted by a sudden outcry:
‘Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!’
It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door
towards the garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far o
ff. The
boy quickly waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a
great e
ffort for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket
into his own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath,
started with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon
the well stood––nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather
hamlet of Marygreen.*
It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years,
and many trees felled on the green. Above all the original church,
hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped,* had been taken
down and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
rockeries in the 
flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a
At Marygreen


---

tall new building of modern Gothic* design, unfamiliar to English
eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliter-
ator of historic records who had run down from London and back in
a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the
Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliter-
ated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses
warranted to last 
five years.
Jude the Obscure


---

I.–ii.
S
 as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming
house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door
was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted in
yellow letters, ‘Drusilla Fawley, Baker.’ Within the little lead panes
of the window––this being one of the few old houses left––were 
five
bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.*
While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could
hear an animated conversation in progress within-doors between
his great-aunt, the Drusilla of the signboard, and some other vil-
lagers. Having seen the schoolmaster depart they were summing up