Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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hedge and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earth-
worms lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as
they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was
impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of
them at each tread.
Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who
could not himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home
a nest of young birds without lying awake in misery half the night
after, and often reinstating them and the nest in their original place
the next morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or
lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the
sap was up, and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to
him in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called,
suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good
deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life* should
signify that all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way
on tiptoe among the earthworms, without killing a single one.
On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a
little girl, and when the customer was gone she said: ‘Well, how do
you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?’
‘I’m turned away.’
‘What?’
‘Mr. Troutham have turned me away, because I let the rooks have
a few peckings of corn. And there’s my wages––the last I shall ever
hae!’
He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.
‘Ah!’ said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon
him a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon
her hands doing nothing. ‘If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do!
There, don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much
better than myself, come to that. But ’tis as Job said: “Now they that
are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have
disdained to have set with the dogs of my 
flock.”* His father was my
father’s journeyman, anyhow; and I must have been a fool to let ’ee
go to work for ’n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ’ee out of
mischty.’
More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for
dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view,
and only secondarily from a moral one.
At Marygreen
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‘Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham
planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t
go o
ff with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or some-
where.* But O no––poor or’nary child––there never was any sprawl*
on thy side of the family, and never will be!’
‘Where is this beautiful city, aunt; this place where Mr. Phillotson
is gone to?’ asked the boy after meditating in silence.
‘Lord––you ought to know where the city of Christminster is.
Near a score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you
ever to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.’
‘And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?’
‘How can I tell!’
‘Couldn’t I go to see him?’
‘Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t
ask such as that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in
Christminster, nor folk in Christminster with we.’*
Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an
undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near
the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and
the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw
hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at
the white brightness, vaguely re
flecting. Growing up* brought
responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had
thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That
mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sick-
ened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at
the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as
you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of
shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be some-
thing glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the
little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to
be a man.
Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang
up. During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in
the afternoon when there was nothing more to be done he went into
the village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.
‘Christminster. O, well––out by there yonder; though I’ve never
bin there––not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.’