Jude the Obscure | Page 7

nest of
young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and
often re-instating them and the nest in their original place the next
morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from
a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the
tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. This
weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the
sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the
curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with
him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the
earthworms, without killing a single one.
On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a little
girl, and when the customer was gone she said, "Well, how do you
come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?"
"I'm turned away."
"What?"
"Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few
peckings of corn. And there's my wages--the last I shall ever hae!"
He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.
"Ah!" said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him a
lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands
doing nothing. "If you can't skeer birds, what can ye do? There! don't
ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than myself,
come to that. But 'tis as Job said, 'Now they that are younger than I
have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set
with the dogs of my flock.' His father was my father's journeyman,
anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let 'ee go to work for 'n, which I
shouldn't ha' done but to keep 'ee out of mischty."
More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for
dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, and
only secondarily from a moral one.

"Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham
planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn't go
off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? But,
oh no-- poor or'nary child--there never was any sprawl on thy side of
the family, and never will be!"
"Where is this beautiful city, Aunt--this place where Mr. Phillotson is
gone to?" asked the boy, after meditating in silence.
"Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a
score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever to
have much to do with, poor boy, I'm a-thinking."
"And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?"
"How can I tell?"
"Could I go to see him?"
"Lord, no! You didn't grow up hereabout, or you wouldn't ask such as
that. We've never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor
folk in Christminster with we."
Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an
undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near the
pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and the
position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat
over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the
white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought
responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.
Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards
one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of
harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your
time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you
were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All
around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and
the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook
it, and warped it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a
man.
Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.
During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the
afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the
village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.
"Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I've never bin
there-- not I. I've never had any business at such a place."
The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that
field in which Jude