Chapter: The stroke of scorn relieved his mind, and the next morning he
laughed at his self-conceit. But the laugh was not a healthy one.
He re-read the letter from the master, and the wisdom in its lines,
which had at first exasperated him, chilled and depressed him now.
He saw himself as a fool indeed.

Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he could not
proceed to his work.  Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a
student, there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with
Sue.  That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him
through his marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency, till,
unable to bear it longer, he again rushed for distraction to the
real Christminster life.  He now sought it out in an obscure and
low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies
of the place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply
by its quaintness.  Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced
that he was at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was hopeless to
expect anything.

In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one,
Jude still retaining his seat in the corner, though his money was all
spent, and he had not eaten anything the whole day except a biscuit.
He surveyed his gathering companions with all the equanimity
and philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly,
and made friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed
church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in
earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed
auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and
Uncle Joe.  There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and
surplice-maker's assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters
of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed
"Bower o' Bliss" and "Freckles"; some horsey men "in the know"
of betting circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two
devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates;
they had slipped in by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups,
and stayed to drink and smoke short pipes with the racing gents
aforesaid, looking at their watches every now and then.

The conversation waxed general.  Christminster society was
criticized, the dons, magistrates, and other people in authority
being sincerely pitied for their shortcomings, while opinions on how
they ought to conduct themselves and their affairs to be properly
respected, were exchanged in a large-minded and disinterested manner.

Jude Fawley, with the self-conceit, effrontery, and _aplomb_ of
a strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks somewhat
peremptorily; and his aims having been what they were for so many
years, everything the others said turned upon his tongue, by a sort
of mechanical craze, to the subject of scholarship and study, the
extent of his own learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that
would have appeared pitiable to himself in his sane hours.

"I don't care a damn," he was saying, "for any provost, warden,
principal, fellow, or cursed master of arts in the university!  What
I know is that I'd lick 'em on their own ground if they'd give me a
chance, and show 'em a few things they are not up to yet!"

"Hear, hear!" said the undergraduates from the corner, where they
were talking privately about the pups.

"You always was fond o' books, I've heard," said Tinker Taylor, "and
I don't doubt what you state.  Now with me 'twas different.  I always
saw there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my
steps accordingly, or I shouldn't have been the man I am."

"You aim at the Church, I believe?" said Uncle Joe.  "If you are such
a scholar as to pitch yer hopes so high as that, why not give us a
specimen of your scholarship?  Canst say the Creed in Latin, man?
That was how they once put it to a chap down in my country."

"I should think so!" said Jude haughtily.

"Not he!  Like his conceit!" screamed one of the ladies.

"Just you shut up, Bower o' Bliss!" said one of the undergraduates.
"Silence!"  He drank off the spirits in his tumbler, rapped with it
on the counter, and announced, "The gentleman in the corner is going
to rehearse the Articles of his Belief, in the Latin tongue, for the
edification of the company."

"I won't!" said Jude.

"Yes--have a try!" said the surplice-maker.

"You can't!" said Uncle Joe.

"Yes, he can!" said Tinker Taylor.

"I'll swear I can!" said Jude.  "Well, come now, stand me a small
Scotch cold, and I'll do it straight off."

"That's a fair offer," said the undergraduate, throwing down the
money for the whisky.

The barmaid concocted the mixture with the bearing of a person
compelled to live amongst animals of an inferior species, and the
glass was handed across to Jude, who, having drunk the contents,
stood up and began rhetorically, without hesitation:

"_Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Factorem coeli et terrae,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium._"

"Good!  Excellent Latin!" cried one of the undergraduates, who,
however, had not the slightest conception of a single word.

A silence reigned among the rest in the bar, and the maid stood
still, Jude's voice echoing sonorously into the inner parlour, where
the landlord was dozing, and bringing him out to see what was going
on.  Jude had declaimed steadily ahead, and was continuing:

"_Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus
est.  Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas._"

"That's the Nicene," sneered the second undergraduate.  "And we
wanted the Apostles'!"

"You didn't say so!  And every fool knows, except you, that the
Nicene is the most historic creed!"

"Let un go on, let un go on!" said the auctioneer.

But Jude's mind seemed to grow confused soon, and he could not get
on.  He put his hand to his forehead, and his face assumed an
expression of pain.

"Give him another glass--then he'll fetch up and get through it,"
said Tinker Taylor.

Somebody threw down threepence, the glass was handed, Jude stretched
out his arm for it without looking, and having swallowed the liquor,
went on in a moment in a revived voice, raising it as he neared the
end with the manner of a priest leading a congregation:

"_Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre
Filioque procedit.  Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et
conglorificatur.  Qui locutus est per prophetas.

"Et unam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam.  Confiteor unum
Baptisma in remissionem peccatorum.  Et exspecto Resurrectionem
mortuorum.  Et vitam venturi saeculi.  Amen._"

"Well done!" said several, enjoying the last word, as being the first
and only one they had recognized.

Then Jude seemed to shake the fumes from his brain, as he stared
round upon them.

"You pack of fools!" he cried.  "Which one of you knows whether I
have said it or no?  It might have been the Ratcatcher's Daughter
in double Dutch for all that your besotted heads can tell!  See what
I have brought myself to--the crew I have come among!"

The landlord, who had already had his license endorsed for harbouring
queer characters, feared a riot, and came outside the counter; but
Jude, in his sudden flash of reason, had turned in disgust and left
the scene, the door slamming with a dull thud behind him.

He hastened down the lane and round into the straight broad street,
which he followed till it merged in the highway, and all sound of his
late companions had been left behind.  Onward he still went, under
the influence of a childlike yearning for the one being in the world
to whom it seemed possible to fly--an unreasoning desire, whose ill
judgement was not apparent to him now.  In the course of an hour,
when it was between ten and eleven o'clock, he entered the village of
Lumsdon, and reaching the cottage, saw that a light was burning in
a downstairs room, which he assumed, rightly as it happened, to be
hers.

Jude stepped close to the wall, and tapped with his finger on the
pane, saying impatiently, "Sue, Sue!"

She must have recognized his voice, for the light disappeared from
the apartment, and in a second or two the door was unlocked and
opened, and Sue appeared with a candle in her hand.

"Is it Jude?  Yes, it is!  My dear, dear cousin, what's the matter?"

"Oh, I am--I couldn't help coming, Sue!" said he, sinking down upon
the doorstep.  "I am so wicked, Sue--my heart is nearly broken,
and I could not bear my life as it was!  So I have been drinking,
and blaspheming, or next door to it, and saying holy things in
disreputable quarters--repeating in idle bravado words which ought
never to be uttered but reverently!  Oh, do anything with me,
Sue--kill me--I don't care!  Only don't hate me and despise me like
all the rest of the world!"

"You are ill, poor dear!  No, I won't despise you; of course I won't!
Come in and rest, and let me see what I can do for you.  Now lean on
me, and don't mind."  With one hand holding the candle and the other
supporting him, she led him indoors, and placed him in the only easy
chair the meagrely furnished house afforded, stretching his feet upon
another, and pulling off his boots.  Jude, now getting towards his
sober senses, could only say, "Dear, dear Sue!" in a voice broken by
grief and contrition.

She asked him if he wanted anything to eat, but he shook his head.
Then telling him to go to sleep, and that she would come down early
in the morning and get him some breakfast, she bade him good-night
and ascended the stairs.

Almost immediately he fell into a heavy slumber, and did not wake
till dawn.  At first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his
situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness
of a right mind.  She knew the worst of him--the very worst.  How
could he face her now?  She would soon be coming down to see about
breakfast, as she had said, and there would he be in all his shame
confronting her.  He could not bear the thought, and softly drawing
on his boots, and taking his hat from the nail on which she had hung
it, he slipped noiselessly out of the house.

His fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot and hide, and
perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to him was Marygreen.
He called at his lodging in Christminster, where he found awaiting
him a note of dismissal from his employer; and having packed up he
turned his back upon the city that had been such a thorn in his
side, and struck southward into Wessex.  He had no money left in
his pocket, his small savings, deposited at one of the banks in
Christminster, having fortunately been left untouched.  To get to
Marygreen, therefore, his only course was walking; and the distance
being nearly twenty miles, he had ample time to complete on the way
the sobering process begun in him.

At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston.  Here he pawned
his waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a mile or two, slept
under a rick that night.  At dawn he rose, shook off the hayseeds and
stems from his clothes, and started again, breasting the long white
road up the hill to the downs, which had been visible to him a long
way off, and passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had carved
his hopes years ago.

He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at breakfast.
Weary and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed of his ordinary
clearness of brain, he sat down by the well, thinking as he did so
what a poor Christ he made.  Seeing a trough of water near he bathed
his face, and went on to the cottage of his great-aunt, whom he found
breakfasting in bed, attended by the woman who lived with her.

"What--out o' work?" asked his relative, regarding him through eyes
sunken deep, under lids heavy as pot-covers, no other cause for his
tumbled appearance suggesting itself to one whose whole life had been
a struggle with material things.

"Yes," said Jude heavily.  "I think I must have a little rest."

Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room and lay down
in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the artizan.  He fell
asleep for a short while, and when he awoke it was as if he had
awakened in hell.  It WAS hell--"the hell of conscious failure," both
in ambition and in love.  He thought of that previous abyss into
which he had fallen before leaving this part of the country; the
deepest deep he had supposed it then; but it was not so deep as this.
That had been the breaking in of the outer bulwarks of his hope:
this was of his second line.

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous
tension which he was now undergoing.  But that relief being denied to
his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about
his mouth like those in the Laocoon, and corrugations between his
brows.

A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the chimney
like the pedal notes of an organ.  Each ivy leaf overgrowing the wall
of the churchless church-yard hard by, now abandoned, pecked its
neighbour smartly, and the vane on the new Victorian-Gothic church in
the new spot had already begun to creak.  Yet apparently it was not
always the outdoor wind that made the deep murmurs; it was a voice.
He guessed its origin in a moment or two; the curate was praying with
his aunt in the adjoining room.  He remembered her speaking of him.
Presently the sounds ceased, and a step seemed to cross the landing.
Jude sat up, and shouted "Hoi!"

The step made for his door, which was open, and a man looked in.
It was a young clergyman.

"I think you are Mr. Highridge," said Jude.  "My aunt has mentioned
you more than once.  Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone
to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one
time.  Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and
another."

Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and movements, by
an unconscious bias dwelling less upon the intellectual and ambitious
side of his dream, and more upon the theological, though this had, up
till now, been merely a portion of the general plan of advancement.

"Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me," added
Jude in conclusion.  "And I don't regret the collapse of my
university hopes one jot.  I wouldn't begin again if I were sure to
succeed.  I don't care for social success any more at all.  But I do
feel I should like to do some good thing; and I bitterly regret the
Church, and the loss of my chance of being her ordained minister."

The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had grown deeply
interested, and at last he said: "If you feel a real call to the
ministry, and I won't say from your conversation that you do not,
for it is that of a thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the
Church as a licentiate.  Only you must make up your mind to avoid
strong drink."

"I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to
support me!"





Part Third


AT MELCHESTER



   "For there was no other girl, O bridegroom,
    like her!"--SAPPHO (H. T. Wharton).

 The next day, in a state of deep depression, Jude goes to a tavern and becomes very drunk. Wallowing in self-pity, he criticizes the university and its scholars and boasts of his own learning. When asked to prove his claims, he recites the Nicene Creed in Latin. He finally leaves the pub and goes out walking. Utterly dejected, he decides to visit Sue at Lumsdon, which he reaches late at night. Sue listens to him as he confesses his misdeeds. Then she encourages him to get some sleep. At dawn, Jude feels ashamed of having come to see her and decides to slip away. On returning to Christminster, he finds he has lost his job and decides to go to his aunt's house at Marygreen. Once there, he realizes his folly and has a talk with a clergyman who is visiting his aunt. The clergyman, Mr. Highridge, suggests that Jude could train to enter the church as a licentiate, rather attend the university.

