The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his flirting
and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances--wistful
to gain a little joy. At ten o'clock he came away, choosing a
circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the college whose head
had just sent him the note.
The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the
lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote
along the wall: "_I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you:
yea, who knoweth not such things as these?_"--Job xii. 3.
VII
The stroke of scorn relieved his mind, and the next morning he
laughed at his self-conceit. But the laugh was not a healthy one.
He re-read the letter from the master, and the wisdom in its lines,
which had at first exasperated him, chilled and depressed him now.
He saw himself as a fool indeed.
Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he could not
proceed to his work. Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a
student, there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with
Sue. That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him
through his marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency, till,
unable to bear it longer, he again rushed for distraction to the
real Christminster life. He now sought it out in an obscure and
low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies
of the place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply
by its quaintness. Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced
that he was at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was hopeless to
expect anything.
In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one,
Jude still retaining his seat in the corner, though his money was all
spent, and he had not eaten anything the whole day except a biscuit.
He surveyed his gathering companions with all the equanimity
and philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly,
and made friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed
church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in
earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed
auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and
Uncle Joe. There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and
surplice-maker's assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters
of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed
"Bower o' Bliss" and "Freckles"; some horsey men "in the know"
of betting circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two
devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates;
they had slipped in by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups,
and stayed to drink and smoke short pipes with the racing gents
aforesaid, looking at their watches every now and then.