Jude Arrives in Christminster — Jude the Obscure

Three years later Jude walks the last miles into Christminster with his tools on his back, taking up the start his marriage interrupted. A photograph of cousin Sue Bridehead on his aunt's mantel helped tip longing into motion; she would not give him the picture. He takes a cheap room in a suburb later nicknamed Beersheba, opens a map under a lamp, and wanders the colleges after dark, touching mouldings and letting the wind stand in for dead scholars.

A bell clangs a hundred-and-one strokes as the gates shut. He stays out, feeling the carvings, because ten years of imagining the place outweigh one night's rest. He talks aloud to poets and theologians until a policeman asks what he is doing sitting so long on a plinth-stone. Back in his room he reads, then falls asleep to borrowed voices: Arnold on the beautiful city, a hymn that teaches him to live so he may dread the grave as little as his bed. The night makes him a guest of the place. The policeman makes him a workman on a stone.

Morning breaks the spell. He starts up thinking he has overslept, then remembers the living aims the night had buried. His sweet-faced cousin is here all the time, and his old schoolmaster too. The words about the schoolmaster have less zest than the words about Sue.