A Pair of Blue Eyes

Two years ago, on a fine day in autumn, I read an excerpt of a novel in the Reading Class I'm belonged to.
It was "A Pair of Blue Eyes" by Thomas Hardy, and was introduced as a representative part where a man called Knight is suspending on a cliff.
It was literally "suspense", and it led me to read the story this summer.

The heroin, Elfride, she encounters two men in the remote countryside where she and her father are dwelling. She meets Stephen and then Knight there, and she consequently put her heart and soul into them.
A little immature romance of her with Stephen is somehow in the shadow of her mother who did elopement and left her and her father when Elfride was still a little girl.
She meets Knight after Stephen's departure having promised with her of their marriage, and this image of their love affair occasionally comes into her mind despite her passionate love and her admiration for Knight, and it makes him leave her with mistakenly-thought.

She makes up her mind to get marry for her family and her kin, at last, and moves to London to live with her gentle husband.

However, London is the place where she can't get rid of her memories with the two men; she once went to London with Stephen to proceed their marriage secretly but as soon as she reached London she went back out of fear, and later she tried to visit Knight in London and it was also in vain.

Before long, she began to suffer from her illness and her life was cut short by it. And, a stout name plate on her coffin was left.

Without knowing this novel, the words" pair of blue eyes" remind me of famous pictures of women depicted by Amedeo Modigliani.

When I went to see the exhibition that showed the pictures by the both,Amedeo and his wife Jeanne, I saw a portrait of Jeanne with a pair of blue eyes which look like seeing nothing, painted by Amedeo, being exhibited next to the one of Amedeo with his eyes shut as he is sleeping or meditating, painted by Jeanne.

ウイ(是）としか言えぬと妻を蔑める映画の場面をおもい出だしぬ

I remembered a scene of an old film,
"Great! You cannot say anything but Yes."
He blamed his wife
like he laughed at himself

Although Amedeo was a gifted artist, his art did not see the light of day during his life.
Jeanne supports him well as his wife and as a model for his painting and very understanding his art as a painter, but he sometimes treats her coldly not from the depth of his mind but out of his misery, in an old film that I saw long time ago.
I composed this verse remembering one scene of the film that depicted Modigliani's singular life as an artist, "Les Amants de Montparnasse"(Montparnasse 19)「モンパルナスの灯」, acted by Gerard Philipe and Anouk Aimee.

The colour of the sky became deeper as autumn progresses.
Walking beneath the sky, I feel familiar with the two women, Elfride and Jeanne, with a pair of blue eyes.
Autumn makes people sentimental.

by SunnyFlo, Flickr