Chapter: Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean
bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and
compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs.  He
had to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed
by many of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the
colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances:
some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above
ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all.  The
spirits of the great men had disappeared.

The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally,
less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and
comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually
executed those forms.  He examined the mouldings, stroked them as
one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in
the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm,
or convenient to the tool.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or
less defective real.  Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been
inflicted on the aged erections.  The condition of several moved him
as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings.  They were
wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly
struggle against years, weather, and man.

The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he was
not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as he
had intended.  He had come to work, and to live by work, and the
morning had nearly gone.  It was, in one sense, encouraging to think
that in a place of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of
his trade to do in the business of renovation.  He asked his way to
the workyard of the stone-mason whose name had been given him at
Alfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the rubbers and
chisels.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration.  Here, with keen edges
and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had
seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls.  These were the ideas in
modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry.
Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they
were new.  They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical.
How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries,
mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on
the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed.  They were marked
by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude:
there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea;
jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.

For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the
stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the
name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges.  But he
lost it under stress of his old idea.  He would accept any employment
which might be offered him on the strength of his late employer's
recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only.
This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.

Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching and
imitating went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some
temporary and local cause.  He did not at that time see that
mediaevalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other
developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic
architecture and its associations had no place.  The deadly animosity
of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in
reverence was not yet revealed to him.

Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and thought
again of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he seemed to
feel in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion.  How he wished he
had that pretty portrait of her!  At last he wrote to his aunt to
send it.  She did so, with a request, however, that he was not to
bring disturbance into the family by going to see the girl or her
relations.  Jude, a ridiculously affectionate fellow, promised
nothing, put the photograph on the mantel-piece, kissed it--he did
not know why--and felt more at home.  She seemed to look down and
preside over his tea.  It was cheering--the one thing uniting him to
the emotions of the living city.

There remained the schoolmaster--probably now a reverend parson.
But he could not possibly hunt up such a respectable man just yet;
so raw and unpolished was his condition, so precarious were his
fortunes.  Thus he still remained in loneliness.  Although people
moved round him he virtually saw none.  Not as yet having mingled
with the active life of the place it was largely non-existent to him.
But the saints and prophets in the window-tracery, the paintings
in the galleries, the statues, the busts, the gargoyles, the
corbel-heads--these seemed to breathe his atmosphere.  Like all
newcomers to a spot on which the past is deeply graven he heard that
past announcing itself with an emphasis altogether unsuspected by,
and even incredible to, the habitual residents.

For many days he haunted the cloisters and quadrangles of the
colleges at odd minutes in passing them, surprised by impish
echoes of his own footsteps, smart as the blows of a mallet.  The
Christminster "sentiment," as it had been called, ate further and
further into him; till he probably knew more about those buildings
materially, artistically, and historically, than any one of their
inmates.

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of
his enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of
that enthusiasm he really was.  Only a wall divided him from those
happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental
life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read,
mark, learn, and inwardly digest.  Only a wall--but what a wall!

Every day, every hour, as he went in search of labour, he saw them
going and coming also, rubbed shoulders with them, heard their
voices, marked their movements.  The conversation of some of the
more thoughtful among them seemed oftentimes, owing to his long and
persistent preparation for this place, to be peculiarly akin to his
own thoughts.  Yet he was as far from them as if he had been at the
antipodes.  Of course he was.  He was a young workman in a white
blouse, and with stone-dust in the creases of his clothes; and in
passing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather saw
through him as through a pane of glass at their familiars beyond.
Whatever they were to him, he to them was not on the spot at all; and
yet he had fancied he would be close to their lives by coming there.

But the future lay ahead after all; and if he could only be so
fortunate as to get into good employment he would put up with the
inevitable.  So he thanked God for his health and strength, and took
courage.  For the present he was outside the gates of everything,
colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside.  Those
palaces of light and leading; he might some day look down on the
world through their panes.

At length he did receive a message from the stone-mason's yard--that
a job was waiting for him.  It was his first encouragement, and he
closed with the offer promptly.

He was young and strong, or he never could have executed with such
zest the undertakings to which he now applied himself, since they
involved reading most of the night after working all the day.  First
he bought a shaded lamp for four and six-pence, and obtained a good
light.  Then he got pens, paper, and such other necessary books as he
had been unable to obtain elsewhere.  Then, to the consternation of
his landlady, he shifted all the furniture of his room--a single one
for living and sleeping--rigged up a curtain on a rope across the
middle, to make a double chamber out of one, hung up a thick blind
that nobody should know how he was curtailing the hours of sleep,
laid out his books, and sat down.

Having been deeply encumbered by marrying, getting a cottage, and
buying the furniture which had disappeared in the wake of his wife,
he had never been able to save any money since the time of those
disastrous ventures, and till his wages began to come in he was
obliged to live in the narrowest way.  After buying a book or two
he could not even afford himself a fire; and when the nights reeked
with the raw and cold air from the Meadows he sat over his lamp in
a great-coat, hat, and woollen gloves.

From his window he could perceive the spire of the cathedral, and the
ogee dome under which resounded the great bell of the city.  The tall
tower, tall belfry windows, and tall pinnacles of the college by the
bridge he could also get a glimpse of by going to the staircase.
These objects he used as stimulants when his faith in the future was
dim.

Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into details of
procedure.  Picking up general notions from casual acquaintance, he
never dwelt upon them.  For the present, he said to himself, the one
thing necessary was to get ready by accumulating money and knowledge,
and await whatever chances were afforded to such an one of becoming
a son of the University.  "For wisdom is a defence, and money is a
defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life
to them that have it."  His desire absorbed him, and left no part of
him to weigh its practicability.

At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from his poor old
aunt, on the subject which had previously distressed her--a fear that
Jude would not be strong-minded enough to keep away from his cousin
Sue Bridehead and her relations.  Sue's father, his aunt believed,
had gone back to London, but the girl remained at Christminster.  To
make her still more objectionable, she was an artist or designer of
some sort in what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse, which was
a perfect seed-bed of idolatry, and she was no doubt abandoned to
mummeries on that account--if not quite a Papist. (Miss Drusilla
Fawley was of her date, Evangelical.)

As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a theological, this
news of Sue's probable opinions did not much influence him one way or
the other, but the clue to her whereabouts was decidedly interesting.
With an altogether singular pleasure he walked at his earliest spare
minutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt's description; and
beheld in one of them a young girl sitting behind a desk, who was
suspiciously like the original of the portrait.  He ventured to enter
on a trivial errand, and having made his purchase lingered on the
scene.  The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women.  It contained
Anglican books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plaster
angels on brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses
that were almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals.
He felt very shy of looking at the girl in the desk; she was so
pretty that he could not believe it possible that she should belong
to him.  Then she spoke to one of the two older women behind the
counter; and he recognized in the accents certain qualities of his
own voice; softened and sweetened, but his own.  What was she doing?
He stole a glance round.  Before her lay a piece of zinc, cut to
the shape of a scroll three or four feet long, and coated with a
dead-surface paint on one side.  Hereon she was designing or
illuminating, in characters of Church text, the single word


   A L L E L U J A


"A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!" thought he.

Her presence here was now fairly enough explained, her skill in
work of this sort having no doubt been acquired from her father's
occupation as an ecclesiastical worker in metal.  The lettering on
which she was engaged was clearly intended to be fixed up in some
chancel to assist devotion.

He came out.  It would have been easy to speak to her there and then,
but it seemed scarcely honourable towards his aunt to disregard her
request so incontinently.  She had used him roughly, but she had
brought him up: and the fact of her being powerless to control him
lent a pathetic force to a wish that would have been inoperative as
an argument.

So Jude gave no sign.  He would not call upon Sue just yet.  He had
other reasons against doing so when he had walked away.  She seemed
so dainty beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dusty
trousers that he felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as he
had felt about Mr. Phillotson.  And how possible it was that she had
inherited the antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as
far as a Christian could, particularly when he had told her that
unpleasant part of his history which had resulted in his becoming
enchained to one of her own sex whom she would certainly not admire.

Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was there.
The consciousness of her living presence stimulated him.  But she
remained more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began
to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams.

Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was engaged with some
more men, outside Crozier College in Old-time Street, in getting a
block of worked freestone from a waggon across the pavement, before
hoisting it to the parapet which they were repairing.  Standing in
position the head man said, "Spaik when he heave! He-ho!"  And they
heaved.

All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow,
pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing object
should have been removed.  She looked right into his face with
liquid, untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to
combine, keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their
expression, as well as that of her lips, taking its life from some
words just spoken to a companion, and being carried on into his face
quite unconsciously.  She no more observed his presence than that of
the dust-motes which his manipulations raised into the sunbeams.

His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled, and turned
his face away with a shy instinct to prevent her recognizing him,
though as she had never once seen him she could not possibly do so;
and might very well never have heard even his name.  He could
perceive that though she was a country-girl at bottom, a latter
girlhood of some years in London, and a womanhood here, had taken
all rawness out of her.

When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on her.  He had
been so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her
general mould and build.  He remembered now that she was not a large
figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant.
That was about all he had seen.  There was nothing statuesque in her;
all was nervous motion.  She was mobile, living, yet a painter might
not have called her handsome or beautiful.  But the much that she was
surprised him.  She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity
that was his.  How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate,
almost accursed stock, have contrived to reach this pitch of
niceness?  London had done it, he supposed.

From this moment the emotion which had been accumulating in his
breast as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized
locality he dwelt in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this
half-visionary form; and he perceived that, whatever his obedient
wish in a contrary direction, he would soon be unable to resist the
desire to make himself known to her.

He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since there were
crushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in any
other.

The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong.
The second was that they were cousins.  It was not well for cousins
to fall in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion.
The third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage
usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would
duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be
intensified to a tragic horror.

Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only a
relation's mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard her in
a practical way as some one to be proud of; to talk and nod to;
later on, to be invited to tea by, the emotion spent on her being
rigorously that of a kinsman and well-wisher.  So would she be to him
a kindly star, an elevating power, a companion in Anglican worship,
a tender friend.

 Jude starts looking for a job in Christminster, and as soon as he is offered one , he accepts it. By night he studies sincerely. He spends his money on books, pens and paper even though he cannot afford a fire. When it is too cold, he sits up reading wrapped in a greatcoat, hat and woolen gloves. He persuades his aunt to send him the portrait of Sue and she does so, but reluctantly, and with a warning not to contact Sue. But Jude learns that Sue is working in an ecclesiastical goods shop and eventually discovers her there one day at work. He does not introduce himself to her. Later, she passes him by on the street. He notices her elegance and sophistication in contrast to his own rustic ways. He still does not speak to her and resolves not to think of her except as a relative.

