On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour.
It fell upon the ears of another person who sat bending over his
books at a not very distant spot in the same city. Being Saturday
night the morrow was one on which Jude had not set his alarm-clock to
call him at his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as
was his custom, two or three hours later than he could afford to do
on any other day of the week. Just then he was earnestly reading
from his Griesbach's text. At the very time that Sue was tossing and
staring at her figures, the policeman and belated citizens passing
along under his window might have heard, if they had stood still,
strange syllables mumbled with fervour within--words that had for
Jude an indescribable enchantment: inexplicable sounds something
like these:-"_All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis
auton:_"
Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard
to close:-"_Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di
autou!_"
IV
He was a handy man at his trade, an all-round man, as artizans in
country-towns are apt to be. In London the man who carves the boss
or knob of leafage declines to cut the fragment of moulding which
merges in that leafage, as if it were a degradation to do the second
half of one whole. When there was not much Gothic moulding for
Jude to run, or much window-tracery on the bankers, he would go out
lettering monuments or tombstones, and take a pleasure in the change
of handiwork.
The next time that he saw her was when he was on a ladder executing
a job of this sort inside one of the churches. There was a short
morning service, and when the parson entered Jude came down from his
ladder, and sat with the half-dozen people forming the congregation,
till the prayer should be ended, and he could resume his tapping. He
did not observe till the service was half over that one of the women
was Sue, who had perforce accompanied the elderly Miss Fontover
thither.
Jude sat watching her pretty shoulders, her easy, curiously
nonchalant risings and sittings, and her perfunctory genuflexions,
and thought what a help such an Anglican would have been to him in
happier circumstances. It was not so much his anxiety to get on with
his work that made him go up to it immediately the worshipers began
to take their leave: it was that he dared not, in this holy spot,
confront the woman who was beginning to influence him in such an
indescribable manner. Those three enormous reasons why he must
not attempt intimate acquaintance with Sue Bridehead, now that his
interest in her had shown itself to be unmistakably of a sexual kind,
loomed as stubbornly as ever. But it was also obvious that man could
not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any rate,
wanted something to love. Some men would have rushed incontinently
to her, snatched the pleasure of easy friendship which she could
hardly refuse, and have left the rest to chance. Not so Jude--at
first.