To Mr. J. FAWLEY, Stone-mason.
This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude. He had known all
that before. He knew it was true. Yet it seemed a hard slap after
ten years of labour, and its effect upon him just now was to make him
rise recklessly from the table, and, instead of reading as usual, to
go downstairs and into the street. He stood at a bar and tossed off
two or three glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he
came to a spot called The Fourways in the middle of the city, gazing
abstractedly at the groups of people like one in a trance, till,
coming to himself, he began talking to the policeman fixed there.
That officer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated himself
an inch and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled, and looking
humorously at Jude, said, "You've had a wet, young man."
"No; I've only begun," he replied cynically.
Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough. He only heard in
part the policeman's further remarks, having fallen into thought on
what struggling people like himself had stood at that crossway, whom
nobody ever thought of now. It had more history than the oldest
college in the city. It was literally teeming, stratified, with the
shades of human groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce;
real enactments of the intensest kind. At Fourways men had stood
and talked of Napoleon, the loss of America, the execution of King
Charles, the burning of the Martyrs, the Crusades, the Norman
Conquest, possibly of the arrival of Caesar. Here the two sexes had
met for loving, hating, coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered,
for each other; had triumphed over each other; cursed each other in
jealousy, blessed each other in forgiveness.
He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely
more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life.
These struggling men and women before him were the reality of
Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster.
That was one of the humours of things. The floating population
of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not
Christminster in a local sense at all.
He looked at his watch, and, in pursuit of this idea, he went on till
he came to a public hall, where a promenade concert was in progress.
Jude entered, and found the room full of shop youths and girls,
soldiers, apprentices, boys of eleven smoking cigarettes, and light
women of the more respectable and amateur class. He had tapped the
real Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd walked
about and jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon
a platform and sang a comic song.