Old-Grove Place — Jude the Obscure

Shaston sits on a scarp above Blackmoor, a town of vanished abbey and living vans. Jude climbs to it for the first time and arrives too early. The children hum like gnats. He waits among the abbey gardens, then waits too long: Sue has gone into town at the heels of the last scholar, Phillotson being at Shottsford. In the empty schoolroom he finds the old Marygreen piano and modulates into last week's hymn.

A small hand settles on his bass notes. Don't stop, she says; they played it at the training school. Their hands meet as before her marriage. She calls Old-Grove Place antique and dismal: previous lives crush her there. The spirit-lamp kettle is one of his wedding-presents and sings with satire. A second silent conversation runs under talk of apocryphal gospels. When she offers to visit his church he says no, then that he will not be kind, then that she is a flirt. She flushes, packs him off, and from the high casement names him Joseph, Don Quixote, and Saint Stephen. The social moulds, she says, fit actual shapes no better than constellation drawings fit the stars. She is called Mrs. Richard Phillotson and is not.

He misses the coach. In the dark he finds Old-Grove Place and sees her, hat still on, press a photograph to her bosom and shut the shutter with a tearful face. Whose photograph, he asks the road. He knows he will go again. The saints would have shunned the house. He might fast the whole interval. The human is more powerful in him than the Divine.