Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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‘Lord, he’s nobody, though you med think so. He used to drive old
Drusilla Fawley’s bread-cart out at Marygreen till he ’prenticed
himself at Alfredston. Since then he’s been very stuck up, and always
reading. He wants to be a scholar, they say.’
‘O, I don’t care what he is, or anything about ’n. Don’t you think
it, my child!’
‘O, don’t ye! You needn’t try to deceive us! What did you stay
talking to him for if you didn’t want un? Whether you do or whether
you don’t, he’s as simple as a child. I could see it as you courted on
the bridge, when he looked at ’ee as if he had never seen a woman
before in his born days. Well––he’s to be had by any woman who can
get him to care for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch him the
right way.’
At Marygreen
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I.–vii.
T
 next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the
sloping ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the
black mark on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his
lamp in past months.
It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting
with Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been
resolving to set this afternoon apart for a special purpose––the re-
reading of his Greek Testament––his new one, with better type than
his old copy, following Griesbach’s text as amended by numerous
correctors, and with variorum readings in the margin. He was proud
of the book, having obtained it by boldly writing to its London
publisher, a thing he had never done before.
He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s reading,
under the quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as formerly, where he
now slept only two nights a week. But a new thing, a great hitch, had
happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life,
and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed o
ff its winter skin,
and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new
one.
He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down, opened
the book, and with his elbows 
firmly planted on the table, and his
hands to his temples, began at the beginning:
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ∆ΙΑΘΗΚΗ*
Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait
indoors, poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him.
There was a something in her, too, which was very winning, apart
from promises. He ought not to break faith with her. Even though he
had only Sundays and week-day evenings for reading he could a
fford
one afternoon, seeing that other young men a
fforded so many. After
to-day he would never probably see her again. Indeed, it would be
impossible, considering what his plans were.
In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary mus-
cular power seized hold of him, something which had nothing in

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common with the spirits and in
fluences that had moved him hith-
erto. This seemed to care little for his reason and his will, nothing for
his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent
schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar, in a direction
which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no
respect and whose life had nothing in common with his own except
locality.
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ∆ΙΑΘΗΚΗ was no more heeded, and the pre-
destinate Jude sprang up and across the room. Foreseeing such an
event he had already arrayed himself in his best clothes. In three
minutes he was out of the house and descending by the path across
the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground which lay between the vil-
lage and the isolated house of Arabella in the dip beyond the
upland.
As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two
hours, easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for
reading after tea.
Passing the few unhealthy 
fir-trees and cottage where the path
joined the highway he hastened along, and struck away to the left,
descending the steep side of the country to the west of the Brown
House. Here at the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook
that oozed from it, and followed the stream till he reached her dwell-
ing. A smell of piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the
originators of that smell. He entered the garden, and knocked at the
door with the knob of his stick.
Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male voice on
the inside said:
‘Arabella! Here’s your young man come coorting! Mizzel,* my
girl!’
Jude winced at the words. Courting in such a business-like aspect
as it evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking
of. He was going to walk with her, perhaps kiss her, but ‘courting’
was too coolly purposeful to be anything but repugnant to his ideas.
The door was opened and he entered, just as Arabella came
downstairs in radiant walking attire.
‘Take a chair, Mr. What’s-your-name?’ said her father, an ener-
getic black-whiskered man, in the same business-like tones Jude had
heard from outside.
‘I’d rather go out at once, wouldn’t you?’ she whispered to Jude.