Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

PART SECOND
AT CHRISTMINSTER

---

‘Save his own soul he hath no star.’
*––S

‘Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit;
Tempore crevit amor.’
*––O


---

 
II.–i.
T
 next noteworthy move in Jude’s life was that in which he
appeared gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some
three years’ later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella,
and the disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her. He was
walking towards Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to the
south-west of it.
He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and Alfredston:
he was out of his apprenticeship, and with his tools at his back
seemed to be in the way of making a new start––the start to which,
barring the interruption involved in his intimacy and married
experience with Arabella, he had been looking forward for about ten
years.
Jude would now have been described as a young man with a for-
cible, meditative, and earnest, rather than handsome, cast of coun-
tenance. He was of dark complexion with dark harmonizing eyes,
and he wore a closely trimmed black beard of more advanced growth
than is usual at his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair,
was some trouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust
that settled on it in the pursuit of his trade. His capabilities in the
latter, having been acquired in the country, were of an all-round sort,
including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for the
restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind. In London he
would probably have become specialized and have made himself a
‘moulding mason,’ a ‘foliage sculptor’––perhaps a ‘statuary.’
He had that afternoon driven in a cart from Alfredston to the
village nearest the city in this direction, and was now walking the
remaining four miles rather from choice than from necessity, having
always fancied himself arriving thus.
The ultimate impulse to come had had a curious origin––one
more nearly related to the emotional side of him than to the intel-
lectual, as is often the case with young men. One day while in lodg-
ings at Alfredston he had gone to Marygreen to see his old aunt, and
had observed between the brass candle-sticks on her mantelpiece the

---

photograph of a pretty girlish face in a broad hat with radiating
folds under the brim like the rays of a halo. He had asked who
she was. His grand-aunt had gru
ffly replied that she was his
cousin Sue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family; and on
further questioning the old woman had replied that the girl lived in
Christminster, though she did not know where, or what she was
doing.
His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it haunted him;
and ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of
following his friend the schoolmaster thither.
He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle declivity, and
obtained his 
first near view of the city. Grey stoned and dun-roofed;
it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almost with the tip of
one small toe within it, at the northernmost point of the crinkled line
along which the leisurely Thames strokes the 
fields of that ancient
kingdom. The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset, a vane here and
there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle to a picture of
sober secondary and tertiary hues.
Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pol-
lard willows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted
the outmost lamps of the town––some of those lamps which had sent
into the sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his
days of dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes
at him dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all
these years in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much
want him now.
He was a species of Dick Whittington,* whose spirit was touched
to 
finer issues than a mere material gain. He went along the outlying
streets with the cautious tread of an explorer. He saw nothing of the
real city in the suburbs on this side. His 
first want being a lodging he
scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to o
ffer on inexpen-
sive terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded; and
after inquiry took a room in a suburb nick-named Beersheba,* though
he did not know this at the time. Here he installed himself, and
having had some tea sallied forth.
It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he
opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ru
ffled and
fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he
should take to reach the heart of the place.