Chapter: Slender as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimming
house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting.  Over the door
was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted
in yellow letters, "Drusilla Fawley, Baker."  Within the little lead
panes of the window--this being one of the few old houses left--were
five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow
pattern.

While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an
animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,
the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers.  Having
seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of
the event, and indulging in predictions of his future.

"And who's he?" asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy
entered.

"Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams.  He's my great-nephew--come since
you was last this way."  The old inhabitant who answered was a tall,
gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and
gave a phrase of her 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-shetters 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, 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 nest of
young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and
often reinstating 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 had so disgraced himself.  There was something
unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness
of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city.  The
farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet
Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one.  So,
stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which
had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch
from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the
other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of
trees.  Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak
open down.

 Jude returns to his aunt's house with the buckets full of water and finds his aunt talking with her friends. She is explaining his origins; that he is an orphan and has been with her for a year. She reveals that his parents' marriage was an unhappy one, and that Jude has a great love for books, like his cousin Sue. Aunt Drusilla considers him quite useless and wonders why the schoolmaster did not take Jude with him to Christminster to make a scholar of him. She also warns Jude never to marry as she believes the Fawleys have bad luck in marriage. Jude goes off to the fields, where he is working for Farmer Troutham, scaring the rooks off the corn with a clacker. Feeling sorry for the birds after some time, he allows them to feed on the corn. But soon he is caught by Troutham, who is outraged. He gives Jude a good beating and dismisses him from his job. As Jude returns home, he weeps in pain and disgrace. His aunt scolds him and again wishes he had gone with Phillotson to Christminster; that way, he would have been off her hands. In a miserable mood, Jude goes off to a high point in the village, hoping to catch a glimpse of Christminster from a distance.

