Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/105

 I

next noteworthy move in Jude's life was that in which he appeared gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some three years' later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella, and the disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her. He was walking towards Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to the southwest.

He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and Alfredston; he was out of his apprenticeship, and, with his tools at his back, seemed to be in the way of making a new start--the start to which, barring the interruption involved in his intimacy and married experience with Arabella, he had been looking forward for about ten years.

Jude would now have been described as a young man with a forcible, meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance. He was of dark complexion, with dark harmonizing eyes, and he wore a closely trimmed black beard of more advanced growth than is usual at his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was some trouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust that settled on it in the pursuit of his trade. His capabilities in the latter, having been acquired in the country, were of an all-round sort, including monumental stone-cutting, Gothic free-stone work for the restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind. In London he would probably have become specialized, and have made himself a moulding mason, a "foliage sculptor"—perhaps a "statuary."