Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/504

 "No, thank you. Let's go home."

They went along by the silent colleges, and Jude kept stopping.

"What are you looking at?"

"Stupid fancies. I see, in a way, those spirits of the dead again, on this my last walk, that I saw when I first came here!"

"What a curious chap you are!"

"I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling. But I don't revere all of them, as I did then. I don't believe in half of them. The theologians, the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoiled for me by the grind of stern reality!"

The expression of Jude's corpse-like face in the watery lamplight was indeed as if he saw people where there was nobody. At moments he stood still by an archway, like one watching a figure walk out; then he would look at a window like one discerning a familiar face behind it. He seemed to hear voices, whose words he repeated as if to gather their meaning.

"They seem laughing at me!"

"Who?"

"Oh, I was talking to myself! The phantoms all about here, in the college archways and windows. They used to look friendly in the old days, particularly Addison and Gibbon and Johnson and Dr. Browne and Bishop Ken―"

"Come along, do! Phantoms! There's neither living nor dead hereabouts except a damn policeman! I never saw the streets emptier."

"Fancy! The Poet of Liberty used to walk here, and the great Dissector of Melancholy there!"

"I don't want to hear about 'em. They bore me!"

"Walter Raleigh is beckoning to me from that lane—Wycliffe—Harvey—Hooker—Arnold—and a whole crowd of Tractarian Shades—"