Jude the Obscure, Page 2

  II

  Slender as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimminghouse-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the doorwas a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was paintedin yellow letters, "Drusilla Fawley, Baker." Within the little leadpanes of the window--this being one of the few old houses left--werefive bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willowpattern.

  While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear ananimated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Havingseen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars ofthe event, and indulging in predictions of his future.

  "And who's he?" asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boyentered.

  "Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He's my great-nephew--come sinceyou was last this way." The old inhabitant who answered was a tall,gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, andgave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. "He comefrom Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago--worse luckfor 'n, Belinda" (turning to the right) "where his father was living,and was took wi' the shakings for death, and died in two days, as youknow, Caroline" (turning to the left). "It would ha' been a blessingif Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi' thy mother and father, pooruseless boy! But I've got him here to stay with me till I can seewhat's to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn anypenny he can. Just now he's a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham.It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?" shecontinued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slapsupon his face, moved aside.

  The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan ofMiss or Mrs. Fawley's (as they called her indifferently) to have himwith her--"to kip 'ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shetthe winder-shetters o' nights, and help in the bit o' baking."

  Miss Fawley doubted it.... "Why didn't ye get the schoolmaster totake 'ee to Christminster wi' un, and make a scholar of 'ee," shecontinued, in frowning pleasantry. "I'm sure he couldn't ha' took abetter one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in ourfamily rather. His cousin Sue is just the same--so I've heard; butI have not seen the child for years, though she was born in thisplace, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and herhusband, after they were married, didn' get a house of their own forsome year or more; and then they only had one till--Well, I won't gointo that. Jude, my child, don't you ever marry. 'Tisn't for theFawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was likea child o' my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a littlemaid should know such changes!"

  Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, wentout to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for hisbreakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emergingfrom the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued apath northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in thegeneral level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. Thisvast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer,and he descended into the midst of it.

  The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky allround, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out theactual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on theuniformity of the scene were a rick of last year's produce standingin the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, andthe path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by hehardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family.

  "How ugly it is here!" he murmured.

  The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings ina piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to theexpanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all historybeyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stonethere really attached associations enough and to spare--echoes ofsongs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdydeeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last,of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups ofgleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matchesthat had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up therebetween reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided thefield from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to loverswho would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest;and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises toa woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time afterfulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude northe rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place,possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, andin the other that of a granary good to feed in.

  The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few secondsused his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left offpecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnishedlike tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding himwarily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.

  He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heartgrew sympathetic with the birds' thwarted desires. They seemed, likehimself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why shouldhe frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect ofgentle friends and pensioners--the only friends he could claim asbeing in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had oftentold him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alightedanew.

  "Poor little dears!" said Jude, aloud. "You SHALL have some dinner--you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can affordto let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make agood meal!"

  They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Judeenjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united hisown life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they muchresembled his own.

  His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a meanand sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himselfas their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blowupon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to hissurprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offenceused. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazedeyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Trouthamhimself, his red face glaring down upon Jude's cowering frame, theclacker swinging in his hand.

  "So it's 'Eat my dear birdies,' is it, young man? 'Eat, dearbirdies,' indeed! I'll tickle your breeches, and see if you say,'Eat, dear birdies,' again in a hurry! And you've been idling at theschoolmaster's too, instead of coming here, ha'n't ye, hey? That'show you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!"

  Whilst saluting Jude's ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Trouthamhad seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slimframe round him at arm's-length, again struck Jude on the hind partswith the flat side of Jude's own rattle, till the field echoed withthe blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.

  "Don't 'ee, sir--please don't 'ee!" cried the whirling child, ashelpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hookedfish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, theplantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in anamazing circular race. "I--I sir--only meant that--there was a goodcrop in the ground--I saw 'em sow it--and the rooks could have alittle bit for dinner--and you wouldn't miss it, sir--and Mr.Phillotson said I was to be kind to 'em--oh, oh, oh!"

  This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even morethan if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he stillsmacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuingto resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distantworkers--who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his businessof clacking with great assiduity--and echoing from the brand-newchurch tower just behind the mist, towards the building of whichstructure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love forGod and man.

 
; Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositingthe quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket andgave it him in payment for his day's work, telling him to go home andnever let him see him in one of those fields again.

  Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackwayweeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from theperception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what wasgood for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awfulsense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a yearin the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt forlife.

  With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in thevillage, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedgeand across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthwormslying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, asthey always did in such weather at that time of the year. It wasimpossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of themat each tread.

  Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could nothimself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest ofyoung birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, andoften reinstating them and the nest in their original place the nextmorning. 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 upand the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in hisinfancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggestedthat he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal beforethe fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify thatall was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoeamong the earthworms, without killing a single one.

  On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to alittle girl, and when the customer was gone she said, "Well, how doyou 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 fewpeckings 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 hima lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her handsdoing 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 thanmyself, come to that. But 'tis as Job said, 'Now they that areyounger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would havedisdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.' His father was myfather's journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let 'eego to work for 'n, which I shouldn't ha' done but to keep 'ee out ofmischty."

  More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than fordereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view,and only secondarily from a moral one.

  "Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Trouthamplanted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn'tgo off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere?But, oh no--poor or'nary child--there never was any sprawl on thyside of the family, and never will be!"

  "Where is this beautiful city, Aunt--this place where Mr. Phillotsonis gone to?" asked the boy, after meditating in silence.

  "Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near ascore of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you everto have much to do with, poor boy, I'm a-thinking."

  "And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?"

  "How can I tell?"

  "Could I go to see him?"

  "Lord, no! You didn't grow up hereabout, or you wouldn't ask such asthat. We've never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, norfolk in Christminster with we."

  Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be anundemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter nearthe pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, andthe position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled hisstraw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of theplaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing upbrought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite ashe had thought. Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for.That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards anothersickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourselfto be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in itscircumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seizedwith a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemedto be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glareshit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warpedit.

  If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be aman.

  Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in theafternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into thevillage. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.

  "Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I've never binthere--not I. I've never had any business at such a place."

  The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay thatfield in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was somethingunpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomenessof this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. Thefarmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yetChristminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So,stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow whichhad witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inchfrom the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on theother side till the track joined the highway by a little clump oftrees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleakopen down.