Jude the Obscure | Page 6

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