From 77d17b5c9f934a8a4f0ad43774aa7e727c86e2f1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Matthew Butterick <mb@mbtype.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 17:03:07 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] segfault demo

---
 quad/samples.rkt        |   16 +-
 quad/segfault.rkt       |   16 +
 quad/texts/segfault.txt | 3869 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 3 files changed, 3895 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 quad/segfault.rkt
 create mode 100644 quad/texts/segfault.txt

diff --git a/quad/samples.rkt b/quad/samples.rkt
index 6a6f4a39..a62491b4 100644
--- a/quad/samples.rkt
+++ b/quad/samples.rkt
@@ -16,13 +16,17 @@
                    "Firstlinerhere" (column-break) "Secondlinerhere" (column-break) "Thirdlinerhere"))
 
 
-(define (make-jude jude-text)
-  (define jude-blocks (map (λ(s) (regexp-replace* #rx"\n" s " ")) (string-split (file->string jude-text) "\n\n")))
+(define (make-sample jude-text [line-limit #f])
+  (define sample-string (if line-limit
+                            (let ([lines (file->lines jude-text)])
+                              (string-join (take lines (min line-limit (length lines))) "\n"))
+                            (file->string jude-text)))
+  (define jude-blocks (map (λ(s) (regexp-replace* #rx"\n" s " ")) (string-split sample-string "\n\n")))
   (apply block '(font "Equity Text B" measure 360 leading 14 column-count 1 column-gutter 10 size 11.5 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) (add-between (map (λ(jb) (block #f (box '(width 10)) (optical-kern) jb)) jude-blocks) (block-break))))
 
-(define (jude) (make-jude "texts/jude.txt"))
-(define (jude0) (make-jude "texts/jude0.txt"))
-(define (judebig) (make-jude "texts/judebig.txt"))
-
+(define (jude) (make-sample "texts/jude.txt"))
+(define (jude0) (make-sample "texts/jude0.txt"))
+(define (judebig) (make-sample "texts/judebig.txt"))
+(define (segfault) (make-sample "texts/segfault.txt"))
 
 (define (jude1) (block '(font "Equity Text B" measure 150 leading 14 column-count 4 size 11 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) "this—is—a—test—of—em—dashes—breakable—or—not?"))
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/quad/segfault.rkt b/quad/segfault.rkt
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..8744d9c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/quad/segfault.rkt
@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+#lang racket/base
+(require "main.rkt" "samples.rkt" "render.rkt" "world.rkt" racket/class)
+
+(module+ main
+  (define line-limit (with-handlers ([exn:fail? (λ(exn) #f)])
+                       (string->number (vector-ref (current-command-line-arguments) 0))))
+  (parameterize ([world:quality-default world:max-quality]
+                 [world:paper-width-default 412]
+                 [world:paper-height-default 600])
+    (define path "texts/segfault.txt")
+    (displayln "Making text sample")
+    (define text-sample (time (make-sample path line-limit)))
+    (displayln "Typsetting sample")
+    (define typeset-sample (time (typeset text-sample)))
+    (displayln "Rendering sample to PDF")
+    (time (send (new pdf-renderer%) render-to-file typeset-sample "texts/segfault.pdf"))))
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/quad/texts/segfault.txt b/quad/texts/segfault.txt
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..1e85f630
--- /dev/null
+++ b/quad/texts/segfault.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3869 @@
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.
+
+The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
+The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
+horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
+miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
+departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly
+furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
+by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
+cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
+which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm
+having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
+purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
+moving house.
+
+The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
+sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when
+the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
+everything would be smooth again.
+
+The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
+standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
+The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
+should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
+the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
+lodgings just at first.
+
+A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
+packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
+spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
+great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve
+found a place to settle in, sir.”
+
+“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
+
+It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an
+old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till
+Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started
+to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
+and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
+
+“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
+
+Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
+scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life,
+but one who had attended the night school only during the present
+teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must
+be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
+disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
+
+The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
+Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
+he was sorry.
+
+“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
+
+“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
+
+“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
+Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
+
+“I think I should now, sir.”
+
+“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university
+is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man
+who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be
+a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
+Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
+and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
+spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
+have elsewhere.”
+
+The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house
+was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
+the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in
+the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
+removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
+
+The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
+o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
+impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.
+
+“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
+“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
+all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
+me out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
+
+The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
+by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
+of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
+his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip
+now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
+paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
+his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the
+pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was
+looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
+position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
+disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
+There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
+hart’s-tongue fern.
+
+He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
+that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
+morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen
+him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
+do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
+But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place
+like this!”
+
+A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
+was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as
+a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a sudden outcry:
+
+“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
+
+It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
+garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
+waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
+for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
+own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
+with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
+stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
+of Marygreen.
+
+It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
+an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
+was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
+history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
+and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
+many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
+hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
+down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
+utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
+rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
+a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
+eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
+obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
+in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
+the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
+grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
+graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
+warranted to last five years.
+
+
+
+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 sign-board, and some other villagers. Having
+seen the school-master 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 of last year’s produce standing
+in the midst of the arable, the rooks 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 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—oh, oh, oh!”
+
+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 hae!”
+
+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! 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.’ 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, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl 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 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?”
+
+“Could 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? Oh, 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.