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.
V
During the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular
vehicle might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-roads
near Marygreen, driven in a quaint and singular way.
In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books
Jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead
languages. In fact, his disappointment at the nature of those
tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further
glorifying the erudition of Christminster. To acquire languages,
departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them
inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which gradually
led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent
process. The mountain-weight of material under which the ideas lay
in those dusty volumes called the classics piqued him into a dogged,
mouselike subtlety of attempt to move it piecemeal.
He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty
maiden aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability, and the
business of the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence. An
aged horse with a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at
a sale, a creaking cart with a whity-brown tilt obtained for a few
pounds more, and in this turn-out it became Jude's business thrice a
week to carry loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters
immediately round Marygreen.
The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the conveyance
itself than in Jude's manner of conducting it along its route.
Its interior was the scene of most of Jude's education by "private
study." As soon as the horse had learnt the road and the houses
at which he was to pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would
slip the reins over his arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a
strap attached to the tilt, the volume he was reading, spread the
dictionary on his knees, and plunge into the simpler passages from
Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the case might be, in his purblind
stumbling way, and with an expenditure of labour that would have made
a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears; yet somehow getting at the
meaning of what he read, and divining rather than beholding the
spirit of the original, which often to his mind was something else
than that which he was taught to look for.