Jude the Obsure

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a

man.

Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.

During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the

afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the

village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.

"Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I've never bin

there--not I. I've never had any business at such a place."

The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that

field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something

unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness

of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The

farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet

Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So,

stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which

had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch

from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the

other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of

trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak

open down.

III

Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of

it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined

the sky. At the very top it was crossed at right angles by a green

"ridgeway"--the Ickneild Street and original Roman road through the

district. This ancient track ran east and west for many miles, and

down almost to within living memory had been used for driving flocks

and herds to fairs and markets. But it was now neglected and

overgrown.

The boy had never before strayed so far north as this from the

nestling hamlet in which he had been deposited by the carrier from a

railway station southward, one dark evening some few months earlier,

and till now he had had no suspicion that such a wide, flat,

low-lying country lay so near at hand, under the very verge of his

upland world. The whole northern semicircle between east and west,

to a distance of forty or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a

bluer, moister atmosphere, evidently, than that he breathed up here.

Not far from the road stood a weather-beaten old barn of reddish-grey

brick and tile. It was known as the Brown House by the people of the

locality. He was about to pass it when he perceived a ladder against

the eaves; and the reflection that the higher he got, the further he

could see, led Jude to stand and regard it. On the slope of the roof

two men were repairing the tiling. He turned into the ridgeway and

drew towards the barn.