Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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by the southern road was materially increased by the auction. A few
days later he entered a dingy broker’s shop in the main street of the
town, and amid a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a clothes-
horse, rolling pin, brass candlestick, swing looking-glass, and other
things at the back of the shop, evidently just brought in from a sale,
he perceived a framed photograph, which turned out to be his own
portrait.
It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local
man in bird’s-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly
given her on their wedding-day. On the back was still to be read,
‘Jude to Arabella,’ with the date. She must have thrown it in with the
rest of her property at the auction.
‘Oh,’ said the broker, seeing him look at this and the other articles
in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself: ‘It is
a small lot of stu
ff that was knocked down to me at a cottage sale out
on the road to Marygreen. The frame is a very useful one, if you take
out the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling.’
The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as brought
home to him by this mute and undesigned evidence of her sale of his
portrait and gift, was the conclusive little stroke required to demol-
ish all sentiment in him. He paid the shilling, took the photograph
away with him, and burnt it, frame and all, when he reached his
lodging.
Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had
departed. He had sent a message o
ffering to see her for a formal
leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise, since
she was bent on going, which perhaps was true. On the evening
following their emigration, when his day’s work was done, he came
out of doors after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too
familiar road towards the upland whereon had been experienced the
chief emotions of his life. It seemed to be his own again.
He could not realize himself. On the old track he seemed to be a
boy still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at
the top of that hill, inwardly 
fired for the first time with ardours
for Christminster and scholarship. ‘Yet I am a man,’ he said. ‘I have
a wife. More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having dis-
agreed with her, disliked her, had a scu
ffle with her, and parted
from her.’
He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at
At Marygreen
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which the parting between his father and his mother was said to have
occurred.
A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what
he had taken for that city, had seemed to be visible. A milestone, now
as always, stood at the roadside hard by. Jude drew near it, and felt
rather than read the mileage to the city. He remembered that once on
his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an inscrip-
tion on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations. It had
been done in the 
first week of his apprenticeship, before he had been
diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman. He wondered if
the inscription were legible still, and going to the back of the mile-
stone brushed away the nettles. By the light of a match he could still
discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long ago:
THITHER
J. F.
The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles, lit
in his soul a spark of the old 
fire. Surely his plan should be to move
onward through good and ill––to avoid morbid sorrow even though
he did see uglinesses in the world? Bene agere et lætari––to do good
cheerfully––which he had heard to be the philosophy of one
Spinoza,* might be his own even now.
He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original
intention.
By moving to a spot a little way o
ff he uncovered the horizon in a
north-easterly direction. There actually rose the faint halo, a small
dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith. It was
enough for him. He would go to Christminster as soon as the term of
his apprenticeship expired.
He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his prayers.
Jude the Obscure
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