第38章 At Christminster(15)

Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written vouchsafed no answer,and the young man was thus thrown back entirely on himself,as formerly,with the added gloom of a weakened hope.By indirect inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had long uneasily suspected,that to qualify himself for certain open scholarships and exhibitions was the only brilliant course.But to do this a good deal of coaching would be necessary,and much natural ability.It was next to impossible that a man reading on his own system,however widely and thoroughly,even over the prolonged period of ten years,should be able to compete with those who had passed their lives under trained teachers and had worked to ordained lines.

The other course,that of buying himself in,so to speak,seemed the only one really open to men like him,the difficulty being simply of a material kind.With the help of his information he began to reckon the extent of this material obstacle,and ascertained,to his dismay,that,at the rate at which,with the best of fortune,he would be able to save money,fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a position to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance to a matriculation examination.

The undertaking was hopeless.

He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the place had exercised over him.To get there and live there,to move among the churches and halls and become imbued with the genius loci ,had seemed to his dreaming youth,as the spot shaped its charms to him from its halo on the horizon,the obvious and ideal thing to do.'Let me only get there,'he had said with the fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat,'and the rest is but a matter of time and energy.'It would have been far better for him in every way if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive precincts,had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits,and thence surveyed his plan in true perspective.Well,all that was clear to him amounted to this,that the whole scheme had burst up,like an iridescent soap-bubble,under the touch of a reasoned inquiry.He looked back at himself along the vista of his past years,and his thought was akin to Heine's:

Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes I see the motley mocking fool's-cap rise!Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into his dear Sue's life by involving her in this collapse.And the painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should now be spared her as far as possible.After all,she had only know a little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged thus unequipped,poor,and unforeseeing.

He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which he awoke from his dream.Not quite knowing what to do with himself,he went up to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built theatre that was set amidst this quaint and singular city.It had windows all round,from which an outlook over the whole town and its edifices could be gained.

Jude's eyes swept all the views in succession,meditatively,mournfully,yet sturdily.Those buildings and their associations and privileges were not for him.From the looming roof of the great library,into which he hardly ever had time to enter,his gaze travelled on to the varied spires,halls,gables,streets,chapels,gardens,quadrangles,which composed the ensemble of this unrivalled panorama.He saw that his destiny lay not with these,but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied,unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists,yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live.

He looked over the town into the country beyond,to the trees which screened her whose presence had at first been the support of his heart,and whose loss was now a maddening torture.But for this blow he might have borne with his fate.With Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile.Without her it was inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should affect him disastrously.Phillotson had no doubt passed through a similar intellectual disappointment to that which now enveloped him.But the schoolmaster had been since blest with the consolation of sweet Sue,while for him there was no consoler.

Descending to the streets,he went listlessly along till he arrived at an inn,and entered it.Here he drank several glasses of beer in rapid succession,and when he came out it was night.By the light of the flickering lamps he rambled home to supper,and had not long been sitting at table when his landlady brought up a letter that had just arrived for him.She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of its possible importance,and on looking at it Jude perceived that it bore the embossed stamp of one of the colleges whose heads he had addressed.'One -at last!'cried Jude.

The communication was brief,and not exactly what he had expected;though it really was from the master in person.It ran thus: 'biblioll college .'Sir,-I have read your letter with interest;and,judging from your deion of yourself as a working-man,I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course.That,therefore,is what I advise you to do.Yours faithfully,'T.tetuphenay .'To Mr.J.fawley ,Stone-mason.'This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude.He had known all that before.