The Pearl Of Love by H.G. Wells, 1925
The magic trick:
Promising in the first paragraph what the story may be
We’ve got a really good love story here for you today.
It’s a love story that can easily be interpreted as about many things – obsession, the artistic pursuit, singular focus, etc.
The story suggests in the very first paragraph that it may be “the cruellest of stories or only a gracious fable of the immortality of beauty.”
What an introduction! Talk about an intriguing promise.
And that’s quite a trick on Wells’s part.
The selection:
The story is laid in North India, which is the most fruitful soil for sublime love stories of all the lands in the world. It was in a country of sunshine and lakes and rich forests and hills and fertile valleys; and far away the great mountains hung in the sky, peaks, crests, and ridges of inaccessible and eternal snow. There was a young prince, lord of all the land; and he found a maiden of indescribable beauty and delightfulness and he made her his queen and laid his heart at her feet. Love was theirs, full of joys and sweetness, full of hope, exquisite, brave and marvellous love, beyond anything you have ever dreamt of love. It was theirs for a year and a part of a year; and then suddenly, because of some venomous sting that came to her in a thicket, she died.
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