Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written
vouchsafed no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back
entirely on himself, as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened
hope. By indirect inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had
long uneasily suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open
scholarships and exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to
do this a good deal of coaching would be necessary, and much natural
ability. It was next to impossible that a man reading on his own
system, however widely and thoroughly, even over the prolonged period
of ten years, should be able to compete with those who had passed
their lives under trained teachers and had worked to ordained lines.
The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the
only one really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of
a material kind. With the help of his information he began to reckon
the extent of this material obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay,
that, at the rate at which, with the best of fortune, he would be
able to save money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a
position to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance
to a matriculation examination. The undertaking was hopeless.
He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the
place had exercised over him. To get there and live there, to move
among the churches and halls and become imbued with the _genius
loci_, had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its
charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal
thing to do. "Let me only get there," he had said with the
fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat, "and the rest is but a
matter of time and energy." It would have been far better for him in
every way if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive
precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object
of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true
perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that
the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under
the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the
vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to Heine's:
Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes
I see the motley mocking fool's-cap rise!
Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into
his dear Sue's life by involving her in this collapse. And the
painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should
now be spared her as far as possible. After all, she had only known
a little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged
thus unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.