第39章 At Christminster(16)

He knew it was true.Yet it seemed a hard slap after ten years of labour,and its effect upon him just now was to make him rise recklessly from the table,and,instead of reading as usual,to go downstairs and into the street.He stood at a bar and tossed off two or three glasses,then unconsciously sauntered along till he came to a spot called The Fourways in the middle of the city,gazing abstractedly at the groups of people like one in a trance,till,coming to himself,he began talking to the policeman fixed there.

That officer yawned,stretched out his elbows,elevated himself an inch and a half on the balls of his toes,smiled,and looking humorously at Jude,said,'You've had a wet,young man.'

'No;I've only begun,'he replied cynically.

Whatever his wetness,his brains were dry enough.He only heard in part the policeman's further remarks,having fallen into thought on what struggling people like himself had stood at that crossway,whom nobody ever thought of now.It had more history than the oldest college in the city.It was literally teeming,stratified,with the shades of human groups,who had met there for tragedy,comedy,farce;real enactments of the intensest kind.At Fourways men had stood and talked of Napoleon,the loss of America,the execution of King Charles,the burning of the Martyrs,the Crusades,the Norman Conquest,possibly of the arrival of Caesar.Here the two sexes had met for loving,hating,coupling,parting;had waited,had suffered,for each other;had triumphed over each other;cursed each other in jealousy,blessed each other in forgiveness.

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating,varied,and compendious than the gown life.These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster,though they knew little of Christ or Minster.That was one of the humours of things.

The floating population of students and teachers,who did know both in a way,were not Christminster in a local sense at all.

He looked at his watch,and,in pursuit of this idea,he went on till he came to a public hall,where a promenade concert was in progress.

Jude entered,and found the room full of shop youths and girls,soldiers,apprentices,boys of eleven smoking cigarettes,and light women of the more respectable and amateur class.He had tapped the real Christminster life.A band was playing,and the crowd walked about and jostled each other,and every now and then a man got upon a platform and sang a comic song.

The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his flirting and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances -wistful to gain a little joy.At ten o'clock he came away,choosing a circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the college whose head had just sent him the note.

The gates were shut,and,by an impulse,he took from his pocket the lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there,and wrote along the wall:

'I have understanding as well as you;I am not inferior to you:yea,who knoweth not such things as these ?'-Job xii.3.

The stroke of scorn relieved his mind,and the next morning he laughed at his self-conceit.But the laugh was not a healthy one.He re-read the letter from the master,and the wisdom in its lines,which had at first exasperated him,chilled and depressed him now.He saw himself as a fool indeed.

Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion,he could not proceed to his work.Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a student,there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with Sue.That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him through his marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency,till,unable to bear it longer,he again rushed for distraction to the real Christminster life.He now sought it out in an obscure and low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies of the place,and in brighter times would have interested him simply by its quaintness.Here he sat more or less all the day,convinced that he was at bottom a vicious character,of whom it was hopeless to expect anything.

In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one,Jude still retaining his seat in the corner,though his money was all spent,and he had not eaten anything the whole day except a biscuit.

He surveyed his gathering companions with all the equanimity and philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly,and made friends with several:

to wit,Tinker Taylor,a decayed church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in earlier years,but was somewhat blasphemous now;also a red-nosed auctioneer;also two Gothic masons like himself,called Uncle Jim and Uncle Joe.There were present,too,some clerks,and a gown-and surplice-maker's assistant;two ladies who sported moral characters of various depths of shade,according to their company,nicknamed 'Bower o'Bliss'and 'Freckles';some horsey men 'in the know'of betting circles;a travelling actor from the theatre,and two devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates;they had slipped in by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups,and stayed to drink and smoke short pipes with the racing gents aforesaid,looking at their watches every now and then.

The conversation waxed general.Christminster society was criticized,the dons,magistrates,and other people in authority being sincerely pitied for their shortcomings,while opinions on how they ought to conduct themselves and their affairs to be properly respected,were exchanged in a large-minded and disinterested manner.