“Hear, hear,” said the populace.
“Well preached!” said Tinker Taylor. And privately to his neighbours: “Why, one of them jobbing pa’sons swarming about here, that takes the services when our head reverends want a holiday, wouldn’t ha’ discoursed such doctrine for less than a guinea down. Hey? I’ll take my oath not one o’ ’em would! And then he must have had it wrote down for ’n. And this only a working-man!”
As a sort of objective commentary on Jude’s remarks there drove up at this moment with a belated Doctor, robed and panting, a cab whose horse failed to stop at the exact point required for setting down the hirer, who jumped out and entered the door. The driver, alighting, began to kick the animal in the belly.
“If that can be done,” said Jude, “at college gates in the most religious and educational city in the world, what shall we say as to how far we’ve got?”
“Order!” said one of the policemen, who had been engaged with a comrade in opening the large doors opposite the college. “Keep yer tongue quiet, my man, while the procession passes.” The rain came on more heavily, and all who had umbrellas opened them. Jude was not one of these, and Sue only possessed a small one, half sunshade. She had grown pale, though Jude did not notice it then.
“Let us go on, dear,” she whispered, endeavouring to shelter him. “We haven’t any lodgings yet, remember, and all our things are at the station; and you are by no means well yet. I am afraid this wet will hurt you!”
“They are coming now. Just a moment, and I’ll go!” said he.
A peal of six bells struck out, human faces began to crowd the windows around, and the procession of heads of houses and new Doctors emerged, their red and black gowned forms passing across the field of Jude’s vision like inaccessible planets across an object-glass.
As they went their names were called by knowing informants, and when they reached the old round theatre of Wren a cheer rose high.
“Let’s go that way!” cried Jude, and though it now rained steadily he seemed not to know it, and took them round to the theatre. Here they stood upon the straw that was laid to drown the discordant noise of wheels, where the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous persons who had no business there.