Jude the Obsure

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.