I.-II.
SLENDER AS WAS JUDE Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming house-buckets of water
to the cottage without resting. Over the door was a little rectangular piece of blue
board, on which was painted in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the
little lead panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were five
bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.
While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an animated conversation
in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, the Drusilla of the signboard, and
some other villagers. Having seen the schoolmaster depart, they were summing up particulars
of the event, and indulging in predictions of his future.
“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy entered.
“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew-come since you was last this
way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, gaunt woman, who spoke tragically
on the most trivial subject, and gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor
in turn. “He come from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck
for ’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 you know, Caroline” (turning
to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’
thy mother and father, poor useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till
I can see what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny
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?” she continued, as the boy, feeling the impact
of their glances like slaps upon his face, moved aside.
The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of Miss or Mrs.
Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him with her—“to kip ’ee company
in your loneliness, fetch water, shet the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the
bit o’ baking.”
Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to take ‘ee to Christminster
wi’ un, and make a scholar of ’ee,” she continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure
he couldn’t ha’ took a better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs
in our family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but I have not
seen the child for years, though she was born in this place, within these four walls,
as it happened. My niece and her husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house
of their own for some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t
go into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take
that step any more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till
the split come! Ah, that a little maid should know such changes! ”
Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went out to the bakehouse,
where he ate the cake provided for his breakfast. The end of his spare time had now
arrived, and emerging from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued
a path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level
of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This vast 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 all round, where it was
lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude.
The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick
f of last year’s produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks
Ɨ that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the fallow by which he had come,
trodden now by he hardly 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 in a piece of new corduroy,
lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving
it of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone
there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient
harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been
the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups
of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches that had populated
the adjoining hamlet had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the
hedge which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves
to lovers who 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 to a woman at whose voice
he had trembled by the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining.
But this neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely
place, possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and in the
other that of a granary good to feed in.
The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds used his clacker
or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off pecking, and rose and went away
on their leisurely wings, burnished like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back
and regarding him warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.
He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic
with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world
which did not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They took upon them more
and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim
as being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that
she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew.
“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You shall have some dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford
to let you have some. Eat, then, my dear little birdies, and make a good meal! ”
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite.
A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as
those lives were, they much resembled his own.
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean and sordid instrument,
offensive both to the birds and to himself as their friend. All at once he became
conscious of a smart blow upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced
to his surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence used.
The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the latter beheld
the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s
cowering frame, the clacker swinging in his hand.
“So it’s ‘Eat, my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear birdies,’ indeed! I’ll
tickle your breeches, and see if you say, ‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And
you’ve been idling at the schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey?
That’s how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!”
Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham had seized his
left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim frame round him at arm’s-length,
again struck Jude on the hind parts with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till
the field echoed with the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.
“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ’ee!” cried the whirling child, as helpless under the
centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked fish swinging to land, and beholding
the hill, the rick, the plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round
him in an amazing circular race. “I—I—sir—only meant that—there was a good crop in
the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner—and you
wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to ’em—O, 0, O!”
This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more than if Jude had
stoutly denied saying anything at all; and he still smacked the whirling urchin, the
clacks of the instrument continuing to resound all across the field and as far as
the ears of distant workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business
of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new church tower just
behind the mist, towards the building of which structure the farmer had largely subscribed,
to testify his love for God and man.
Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the quivering boy
on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it him in payment for his day’s
work, telling him to go home and never let him see him in one of those fields again.
Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway weeping—not from the
pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial
scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with
the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in
the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.
With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the village, and went
homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge and across a pasture. Here he beheld
scores of coupled earthworms 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 have!”
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!
g 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.‘
1 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.
“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 off with that schoolmaster of thine
to Christminster or somewhere ? But, O no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawlƗ 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
2 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 reflecting. 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
sickened 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 something 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.”
The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that field in which
Jude had so disgraced himself There was something unpleasant about the coincidence
for the moment, but the fearsomeness of this fact rather increased his curiosity about
the city. The farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet Christminster
lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, stealing out of the hamlet he descended
into the same hollow which had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving
an inch from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the other side,
till the track joined the highway by a little clump of trees. Here the ploughed land
ended, and all before him was bleak open down.