A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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For this purpose it was necessary that he should recover the
breath and strength which his previous efforts had cost him. So
he still waited, and looked in the face of the enemy.

The crest of this terrible natural facade passed among the
neighbouring inhabitants as being seven hundred feet above the
water it overhung. It had been proved by actual measurement to be
not a foot less than six hundred and fifty.

That is to say, it is nearly three times the height of
Flamborough, half as high again as the South Foreland, a hundred
feet higher than Beachy Head--the loftiest promontory on the east
or south side of this island--twice the height of St. Aldhelm's,
thrice as high as the Lizard, and just double the height of St.
Bee's. One sea-bord point on the western coast is known to
surpass it in altitude, but only by a few feet. This is Great
Orme's Head, in Caernarvonshire.

And it must be remembered that the cliff exhibits an intensifying
feature which some of those are without--sheer perpendicularity
from the half-tide level.

Yet this remarkable rampart forms no headland: it rather walls in
an inlet--the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far
from being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea,
rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten
a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and
unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least
singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On
this account I will call the precipice the Cliff without a Name.*

* See Preface

What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And
upon this dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had
formed a kind of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that
of a Hambro' grape. Moreover it seemed to float off into the
atmosphere, and inspire terror through the lungs.

'This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of
the cliff,' said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid
stoical meditation. 'Now what you are to do is this. Clamber up
my body till your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you
will, I think, be able to climb on to level ground.'

'What will you do?'

'Wait whilst you run for assistance.'

'I ought to have done that in the first place, ought I not?'

'I was in the act of slipping, and should have reached no stand-
point without your weight, in all probability. But don't let us
talk. Be brave, Elfride, and climb.'

She prepared to ascend, saying, 'This is the moment I anticipated
when on the tower. I thought it would come!'

'This is not a time for superstition,' said Knight. 'Dismiss all
that.'

'I will,' she said humbly.

'Now put your foot into my hand: next the other. That's good--
well done. Hold to my shoulder.'

She placed her feet upon the stirrup he made of his hand, and was
high enough to get a view of the natural surface of the hill over
the bank.

'Can you now climb on to level ground?'

'I am afraid not. I will try.'

'What can you see?'

'The sloping common.'

'What upon it?'

'Purple heather and some grass.'

'Nothing more--no man or human being of any kind?'

'Nobody.'

'Now try to get higher in this way. You see that tuft of sea-pink
above you. Get that well into your hand, but don't trust to it
entirely. Then step upon my shoulder, and I think you will reach
the top.'

With trembling limbs she did exactly as he told her. The
preternatural quiet and solemnity of his manner overspread upon
herself, and gave her a courage not her own. She made a spring
from the top of his shoulder, and was up.

Then she turned to look at him.

By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to his own
weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his
feet depended. It was, indeed, originally an igneous protrusion
into the enormous masses of black strata, which had since been
worn away from the sides of the alien fragment by centuries of
frost and rain, and now left it without much support.

It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.

The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than
useless now. It rolled over, out of sight, and away into the same
nether sky that had engulfed the telescope.

One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight
began to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride
uttered a low wild wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her
face with her hands.

Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock
intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face
yet steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch
upon these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft
of vegetation--the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the
rock appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further
descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his arms; but the
incline of the brow being what engineers would call about a
quarter in one, it was sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion
of his weight, but was very far from offering an adequately flat
face to support him.

In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found
time for a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.

She lay on her side above him--her fingers clasped. Seeing him
again steady, she jumped upon her feet.

'Now, if I can only save you by running for help!' she cried.
'Oh, I would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver
me?' And she turned away wildly to run for assistance.

'Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?'

'Three-quarters of an hour.'

'That won't do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is
there nobody nearer?'

'No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.'

'He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a
pole or stick of any kind on the common?'

She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather
and grass.

A minute--perhaps more time--was passed in mute thought by both.
On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She
vanished over the bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized lonliness.

Chapter XXII

'A woman's way.'

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl
along the line of coast between Exmoor and Land's End; but this
outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all.
Their summits are not safe places for scientific experiment on the
principles of air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his
dismay.

He still clutched the face of the escarpment--not with the
frenzied hold of despair, but with a dogged determination to make
the most of his every jot of endurance, and so give the longest
possible scope to Elfride's intentions, whatever they might be.

He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a
blade, not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him
and the past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices
to all strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested
than by the paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on
their outermost ledges.

Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride's hasty disappearance,
but could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed
but a doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole
chance of deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole
being brought; and this possibility was remote indeed. The soil
upon these high downs was left so untended that they were
unenclosed for miles, except by a casual bank or dry wall, and
were rarely visited but for the purpose of collecting or counting
the flock which found a scanty means of subsistence thereon.

At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never
visited him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of
anything connected with his past. He could only look sternly at
Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and strive to
thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment
of a huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a
bottom, which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a
semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each
side of him. He looked far down the facade, and realized more
thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every feature,
and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the
inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of
suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing
forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes.
The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him.
It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated
by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling
seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance
within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive
and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for
never in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those
numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy
of the name. Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest
developments of those ancient dates. The immense lapses of time
each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of
man. They were grand times, but they were mean times too, and
mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his death.

Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this
dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary
sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between this
creature's epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft
landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one
extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all
the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in
the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge
clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms
before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud
huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them
stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms,
the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous
size, the megatherium, and the myledon--all, for the moment, in
juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were
perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as
horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian
outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the
colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms
and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings
of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the
fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of
things. These images passed before Knight's inner eye in less
than half a minute, and he was again considering the actual
present. Was he to die? The mental picture of Elfride in the
world, without himself to cherish her, smote his heart like a
whip. He had hoped for deliverance, but what could a girl do? He
dared not move an inch. Was Death really stretching out his hand?
The previous sensation, that it was improbable he would die, was
fainter now.

However, Knight still clung to the cliff.

To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the
greater part of their days and nights out of doors, Nature seems
to have moods in other than a poetical sense: predilections for
certain deeds at certain times, without any apparent law to govern
or season to account for them. She is read as a person with a
curious temper; as one who does not scatter kindnesses and
cruelties alternately, impartially, and in order, but heartless
severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice. Man's
case is always that of the prodigal's favourite or the miser's
pensioner. In her unfriendly moments there seems a feline fun in
her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in swallowing
the victim.

Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to
adopt it now. He was first spitted on to a rock. New tortures
followed. The rain increased, and persecuted him with an
exceptional persistency which he was moved to believe owed its
cause to the fact that he was in such a wretched state already.
An entirely new order of things could be observed in this
introduction of rain upon the scene. It rained upwards instead of
down. The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with it in
its race up the escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that
they stuck into his flesh like cold needles. Each drop was
virtually a shaft, and it pierced him to his skin. The water-
shafts seemed to lift him on their points: no downward rain ever
had such a torturing effect. In a brief space he was drenched,
except in two places. These were on the top of his shoulders and
on the crown of his hat.

The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here.
It tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to
look upon all opposition which is not animate, as that of the
stolid, inexorable hand of indifference, which wears out the
patience more than the strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did
not assume that slow and sickening form. It was a cosmic agency,
active, lashing, eager for conquest: determination; not an
insensate standing in the way.

Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were
getting weak already. 'She will never come again; she has been
gone ten minutes,' he said to himself.

This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences
just now: she had really been gone but three.

'As many more minutes will be my end,' he thought.

Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
comparisons at such times.

'This is a summer afternoon,' he said, 'and there can never have
been such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life
before.'

He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity;
the air in temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing
attitude in which they approached him that magnified their powers.

He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids,
and into his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of
the sea--visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually
one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them.
We colour according to our moods the objects we survey. The sea
would have been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended
the gazer it was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his
vision. That narrow white border was foam, he knew well; but its
boisterous tosses were so distant as to appear a pulsation only,
and its plashing was barely audible. A white border to a black
sea--his funeral pall and its edging.

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain
descended from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the
unknown; above him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all
that he loved best.

Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was
the voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled
and thrust him hard or softly. The second and distant one was the
moan of that unplummetted ocean below and afar--rubbing its
restless flank against the Cliff without a Name.

Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride?
Perhaps. Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will
rootlessly live on.

Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as
this. Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea. Not with its
natural golden fringe, sweeping the furthest ends of the
landscape, not with the strange glare of whiteness which it
sometimes puts on as an alternative to colour, but as a splotch of
vermilion red upon a leaden ground--a red face looking on with a
drunken leer.

Most men who have brains know it, and few are so foolish as to
disguise this fact from themselves or others, even though an
ostentatious display may be called self-conceit. Knight, without
showing it much, knew that his intellect was above the average.
And he thought--he could not help thinking--that his death would
be a deliberate loss to earth of good material; that such an
experiment in killing might have been practised upon some less
developed life.

A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, is that
inexorable circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence
attempts. Renounce a desire for a long-contested position, and go
on another tack, and after a while the prize is thrown at you,
seemingly in disappointment that no more tantalizing is possible.

Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely, and turned
to contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond.
Into the shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow
him. Let it suffice to state what ensued.

At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something
disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It
was the head of Elfride.

Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.

The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a
friend first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In
rowing seaward to a light-ship or sea-girt lighthouse, where,
without any immediate terror of death, the inmates experience the
gloom of monotonous seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their
countenances at the greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the
visit, is enough to stir the emotions of the most careless
observer.

Knight's upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far
transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had
deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly.
His lips moved to the word 'Elfride,' though the emotion evolved
no sound. His eyes passed all description in their combination of
the whole diapason of eloquence, from lover's deep love to fellow-
man's gratitude for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.

Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know.
She could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come
back, and not deserted him utterly, and it was much.

It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom
Elfride was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a
bird's nest, who mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at
her own insignificance, thus thankful for a sight of her face.
She looked down upon him, her face glistening with rain and tears.
He smiled faintly.

'How calm he is!' she thought. 'How great and noble he is to be
so calm!' She would have died ten times for him then.

The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
longer.

'How much longer can you wait?' came from her pale lips and along
the wind to his position.

'Four minutes,' said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.

'But with a good hope of being saved?'

'Seven or eight.'

He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen,
and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally
thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to
bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into
her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There
is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the
protuberances of clothes, but Elfride's seemed to cling to her
like a glove.

Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising
her hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more
particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began
rending the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and
afterwards twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short
space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or
seven yards long.

'Can you wait while I bind it?' she said, anxiously extending her
gaze down to him.

'Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment
of strength.'

Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into
narrow tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on
a smaller scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed
round and round the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a
tendency to spread abroad.

'Now,' said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by
this time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, 'I
can hold three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in
testing the strength of the knots, one by one.'

She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the
rope between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the
knots slipped.

'Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,'
Elfride exclaimed apprehensively.

She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.

'When you have let it down,' said Knight, already resuming his
position of ruling power, 'go back from the edge of the slope, and
over the bank as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down,
and hold the end with both hands.'

He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but
it involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.

'I have tied it round my waist,' she cried, 'and I will lean
directly upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.'

It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.

'I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,'
she continued, 'to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take
the greatest care, I beg you!'

She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it
would be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back,
and disappeared as she had done before.

The rope was trailing by Knight's shoulders. In a few moments it
twitched three times.

He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.

The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length
only of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was
invaluable now. Not more than half his weight depended entirely
on the linen rope. Half a dozen extensions of the arms,
alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope with his feet,
brought him up to the level of the soil.

He was saved, and by Elfride.

He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang
over the bank.

At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy.
Knight's eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of
each told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-
moment. Moved by an impulse neither could resist, they ran
together and into each other's arms.

At the moment of embracing, Elfride's eyes involuntarily flashed
towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was
no longer to be seen.

An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the
gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of
duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith.
Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her
feeling--volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain
passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a
sufficiently complete result--a glorious crown to all the years of
her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. No
matter: it was infinitely more to be even the slave of the greater
than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as this, though
it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along the
impressionable soul of Elfride.

Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go
nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes
of impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss.
Knight's peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow
him to take advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she
had tacitly made.

Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.

He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown
to toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence
she had obtained the rope.

'Elfride, my Elfride!' he exclaimed in gratified amazement.

'I must leave you now,' she said, her face doubling its red, with
an expression between gladness and shame 'You follow me, but at
some distance.'

'The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you.
God bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.'

'No; I shall get warm running.'

Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or 'costume.' The door had been made upon a woman's
wit, and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight
reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off
her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt.
Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a
woollen and cotton rope.

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