The Life of Thomas Hardy
Near by is the London and Southwestern railway station; it is half-real. It links Wessex with the hinterland: Southampton and London. Standing without humor in a barren lot, it represents the antenna, the tentacle of scientific civilization, piercing the land of high romance. You think of the disheartening "progress" pictured in The Well Beloved.
You wander down the street again. The name hoarded above a draper's shop catches your eye. It is "Henry Knight." Instantly you are looking into Elfride's blue eyes. They are anxious, terror-stricken. Knight is hanging, clinging to the sheer face of the ghastly towering Cliff Without A Name. Wind and rain lash him grimly, bent on destroying him. He can hold out but a little longer. The eyes of a fossil in the rock survey him malignantly. . . .
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 . . .
Time closed up like a fan before him . . .
Pitiless nature had then two voices . . .
The sea would have been a 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. . . .
That adventure took place on the rugged coast, not many miles from this street. Doesn't it smack more strongly of reality than these woolens and linens in orderly array at the draper's?
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