Chapter: Walking somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration, the boy--an
ancient man in some phases of thought, much younger than his years
in others--was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian, whom,
notwithstanding the gloom, he could perceive to be wearing an
extraordinarily tall hat, a swallow-tailed coat, and a watch-chain
that danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as
its owner swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots.
Jude, beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with him.

"Well, my man!  I'm in a hurry, so you'll have to walk pretty fast
if you keep alongside of me.  Do you know who I am?"

"Yes, I think.  Physician Vilbert?"

"Ah--I'm known everywhere, I see!  That comes of being a public
benefactor."

Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic
population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed,
took care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations.  Cottagers
formed his only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them
alone.  His position was humbler and his field more obscure than
those of the quacks with capital and an organized system of
advertising.  He was, in fact, a survival.  The distances he
traversed on foot were enormous, and extended nearly the whole length
and breadth of Wessex.  Jude had one day seen him selling a pot of
coloured lard to an old woman as a certain cure for a bad leg, the
woman arranging to pay a guinea, in instalments of a shilling a
fortnight, for the precious salve, which, according to the physician,
could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on
Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at great risk to life and
limb.  Jude, though he already had his doubts about this gentleman's
medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a travelled personage, and
one who might be a trustworthy source of information on matters not
strictly professional.

"I s'pose you've been to Christminster, Physician?"

"I have--many times," replied the long thin man.  "That's one of my
centres."

"It's a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?"

"You'd say so, my boy, if you'd seen it.  Why, the very sons of the
old women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin--not
good Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin--cat-Latin, as we
used to call it in my undergraduate days."

"And Greek?"

"Well--that's more for the men who are in training for bishops, that
they may be able to read the New Testament in the original."

"I want to learn Latin and Greek myself."

"A lofty desire.  You must get a grammar of each tongue."

"I mean to go to Christminster some day."

"Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only
proprietor of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all
disorders of the alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness
of breath.  Two and threepence a box--specially licensed by the
government stamp."

"Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?"

"I'll sell you mine with pleasure--those I used as a student."

"Oh, thank you, sir!" said Jude gratefully, but in gasps, for the
amazing speed of the physician's walk kept him in a dog-trot which
was giving him a stitch in the side.

"I think you'd better drop behind, my young man.  Now I'll tell you
what I'll do.  I'll get you the grammars, and give you a first
lesson, if you'll remember, at every house in the village, to
recommend Physician Vilbert's golden ointment, life-drops, and female
pills."

"Where will you be with the grammars?"

"I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely this hour of
five-and-twenty minutes past seven.  My movements are as truly timed
as those of the planets in their courses."

"Here I'll be to meet you," said Jude.

"With orders for my medicines?"

"Yes, Physician."

Jude then dropped behind, waited a few minutes to recover breath,
and went home with a consciousness of having struck a blow for
Christminster.

Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and smiled outwardly
at his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to
him--smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen
to spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as
if a supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures,
giving rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them then.

He honestly performed his promise to the man of many cures, in whom
he now sincerely believed, walking miles hither and thither among
the surrounding hamlets as the Physician's agent in advance.  On the
evening appointed he stood motionless on the plateau, at the place
where he had parted from Vilbert, and there awaited his approach.
The road-physician was fairly up to time; but, to the surprise of
Jude on striking into his pace, which the pedestrian did not diminish
by a single unit of force, the latter seemed hardly to recognize his
young companion, though with the lapse of the fortnight the evenings
had grown light.  Jude thought it might perhaps be owing to his
wearing another hat, and he saluted the physician with dignity.

"Well, my boy?" said the latter abstractedly.

"I've come," said Jude.

"You? who are you?  Oh yes--to be sure!  Got any orders, lad?"

"Yes."  And Jude told him the names and addresses of the cottagers
who were willing to test the virtues of the world-renowned pills and
salve.  The quack mentally registered these with great care.

"And the Latin and Greek grammars?"  Jude's voice trembled with
anxiety.

"What about them?"

"You were to bring me yours, that you used before you took your
degree."

"Ah, yes, yes!  Forgot all about it--all!  So many lives depending on
my attention, you see, my man, that I can't give so much thought as I
would like to other things."

Jude controlled himself sufficiently long to make sure of the truth;
and he repeated, in a voice of dry misery, "You haven't brought 'em!"

"No. But you must get me some more orders from sick people, and I'll
bring the grammars next time."

Jude dropped behind.  He was an unsophisticated boy, but the gift of
sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to children showed him
all at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of.  There was to
be no intellectual light from this source.  The leaves dropped from
his imaginary crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it,
and cried bitterly.

The disappointment was followed by an interval of blankness.  He
might, perhaps, have obtained grammars from Alfredston, but to do
that required money, and a knowledge of what books to order; and
though physically comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as
to be without a farthing of his own.

At this date Mr. Phillotson sent for his pianoforte, and it gave Jude
a lead.  Why should he not write to the schoolmaster, and ask him to
be so kind as to get him the grammars in Christminster?  He might
slip a letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be
sure to reach the desired eyes.  Why not ask him to send any old
second-hand copies, which would have the charm of being mellowed by
the university atmosphere?

To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it.  It was
necessary to act alone.

After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and on the
day of the piano's departure, which happened to be his next birthday,
clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case, directed to
his much-admired friend, being afraid to reveal the operation to his
aunt Drusilla, lest she should discover his motive, and compel him to
abandon his scheme.

The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and weeks, calling
every morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was
stirring.  At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village, and he
saw from the ends of it that it contained two thin books.  He took it
away into a lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its
possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable
sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one
language into those of another.  He concluded that a grammar of the
required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or
clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would
enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his
own speech into those of the foreign one.  His childish idea was, in
fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is
everywhere known as Grimm's Law--an aggrandizement of rough rules to
ideal completeness.  Thus he assumed that the words of the required
language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the
given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art
being furnished by the books aforesaid.

When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of
Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to
the Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely
believe his eyes.

The book was an old one--thirty years old, soiled, scribbled
wantonly over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the
letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier
than his own day.  But this was not the cause of Jude's amazement.
He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation,
as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but
the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both
Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the
cost of years of plodding.

Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the
elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of
an hour.  As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his
face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the
interstices of the straw.  This was Latin and Greek, then, was it
this grand delusion!  The charm he had supposed in store for him was
really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he
presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!
There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the
little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he
wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another,
that he had never been born.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his
trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were
further advanced than those of his grammarian.  But nobody did come,
because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his
gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

 While walking home Jude meets a quack doctor, Physician Vilbert. Jude questions him about Christminster and offers to get orders for Vilbert's pills and potions if Vilbert agrees to bring him his old Greek and Latin grammar texts. Jude works hard for two weeks and keeps his part of the bargain, but Vilbert lets him down. Intuitively Jude realizes the man is a fraud and is bitterly disappointed. In the meantime, Phillotson sends for his piano, which he left behind with Aunt Drusilla, and Jude secretly encloses a letter asking him to send his old grammar texts. But when they do arrive, Jude finds in dismay that instead of a general rule or formula for translating one language into another, each Latin or Greek word has to be committed to memory individually. Disillusioned by the enormity of the task, he falls into a fit of depression.

