第5章 At Marygreen(5)

He was about to pass it when he perceived a ladder against the eaves;and the reflection that the higher he got,the further he could see,led Jude to stand and regard it.On the slope of the roof two men were repairing the tiling.He turned into the ridgeway and drew towards the barn.

When he had wistfully watched the workmen for some time he took courage,and ascended the ladder till he stood beside them.

'Well,my lad,and what may you want up here?~'

'I wanted to know where the city of Christminster is,if you please.'

'Christminster is out across there,by that clump.You can see it -at least you can on a clear day.Ah,no,you can't now.'

The other tiler,glad of any kind of diversion from the monotony of his labour,had also turned to look towards the quarter designated.

'You can't often see it in weather like this,'he said.'The time I've noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame,and it looks like -I don't know what.'

'The heavenly Jerusalem,'suggested the serious urchin.

'Ay -though I should never ha'thought of it myself....But Ican't see no Christminster to-day.'

The boy strained his eyes also;yet neither could he see the far-off city.He descended from the barn,and abandoning Christminster with the versatility of his age he walked along the ridge-track,looking for any natural objects of interest that might lie in the banks thereabout.When he repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he observed that the ladder was still in its place,but that the men had finished their day's work and gone away.

It was waning towards evening;there was still a faint mist,but it had cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country and along the river-courses.He thought again of Christminster,and wished,since he had come two or three miles from his aunt's house on purpose,that he could have seen for once this attractive city of which he had been told.But even if he waited here it was hardly likely that the air would clear before night.Yet he was loth to leave the spot,for the northern expanse became lost to view on retreating towards the village only a few hundred yards.

He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men had designated,and perched himself on the highest rung,overlying the tiles.He might not be able to come so far as this for many days.Perhaps if he prayed,the wish to see Christminster might be forwarded.People said that,if you prayed,things sometimes came to you,even though they sometimes did not.He had read in a tract that a man who had begun to build a church,and had no money to finish it,knelt down and prayed,and the money came in by the next post.Another man tried the same experiment,and the money did not come;but he found afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew.This was not discouraging,and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung,where,resting against those above it,he prayed that the mist might rise.

He then seated himself again,and waited.In the course of ten or fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon,as it had already done elsewhere,and about a quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted,the sun's position being partially uncovered,and the beams streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud.The boy immediately looked back in the old direction.

Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape,points of light like the topaz gleamed.The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes,till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes,windows,wet roof slates,and other shining spots upon the spires,domes,freestone-work,and varied outlines that were faintly revealed.

It was Christminster,unquestionably;either directly seen,or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their shine,going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles.The vague city became veiled in mist.Turning to the west,he saw that the sun had disappeared.The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark,and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.

He anxiously descended the ladder,and started homewards at a run,trying not to think of giants,Herne the Hunter,Apollyon lying in wait for Christian,or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his forehead and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on board the bewitched ship.He knew that he had grown out of belief in these horrors,yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights in the cottage windows,even though this was not the home of his birth,and his great-aunt did not care much about him.

Inside and round about that old woman's 'shop'window,with its twenty-four little panes set in lead-work,the glass of some of them oxidized with age,so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles exhibited within,and forming part of a stock which a strong man could have carried,Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time.But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he was always beholding a gorgeous city -the fancied place he had likened to the new Jerusalem,though there was perhaps more of the painter's imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer.And the city acquired a tangibility,a permanence,a hold on his life,mainly from the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had so much reverence was actually living there;not only so,but living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.