He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries,
mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on
the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked
by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude:
there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea;
jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.
For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the
stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the
name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he
lost it under stress of his old idea. He would accept any employment
which might be offered him on the strength of his late employer's
recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only.
This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.
Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching and
imitating went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some
temporary and local cause. He did not at that time see that
mediaevalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other
developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic
architecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity
of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in
reverence was not yet revealed to him.
Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and thought
again of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he seemed to
feel in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion. How he wished he
had that pretty portrait of her! At last he wrote to his aunt to
send it. She did so, with a request, however, that he was not to
bring disturbance into the family by going to see the girl or her
relations. Jude, a ridiculously affectionate fellow, promised
nothing, put the photograph on the mantel-piece, kissed it--he did
not know why--and felt more at home. She seemed to look down and
preside over his tea. It was cheering--the one thing uniting him to
the emotions of the living city.
There remained the schoolmaster--probably now a reverend parson.
But he could not possibly hunt up such a respectable man just yet;
so raw and unpolished was his condition, so precarious were his
fortunes. Thus he still remained in loneliness. Although people
moved round him he virtually saw none. Not as yet having mingled
with the active life of the place it was largely non-existent to him.
But the saints and prophets in the window-tracery, the paintings
in the galleries, the statues, the busts, the gargoyles, the
corbel-heads--these seemed to breathe his atmosphere. Like all
newcomers to a spot on which the past is deeply graven he heard that
past announcing itself with an emphasis altogether unsuspected by,
and even incredible to, the habitual residents.