IV
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.
