Jude the Obscure | Page 5

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-shet-ters 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,