Short Fiction

arch and wall and buttress; he had acquired greater power over the material he had to use and he had learnt of a hundred stones and hues and effects that he could never have thought of in the beginning. His sense of colour had grown finer and colder; he cared no more for the enamelled gold-lined brightness that had pleased him first, the brightness of an illuminated missal; he sought now for blue colourings like the sky and for the subtle hues of great distances, for recondite shadows and sudden broad floods of purple opalescence and for grandeur and space. He wearied altogether of carvings and pictures and inlaid ornamentation and all the little careful work of men. “Those were pretty things,” he said of his earlier decorations; and had them put aside into subordinate buildings where they would not hamper his main design. Greater and greater grew his artistry. With awe and amazement people saw the Pearl of Love sweeping up from its first beginnings to a superhuman breadth and height and magnificence. They did not know clearly what they had expected, but never had they expected so sublime a thing as this. “Wonderful are the miracles,” they whispered, “that love can do,” and all the women in the world, whatever other loves they had, loved the Prince for the splendour of his devotion.

Through the middle of the building ran a great aisle, a vista, that the Prince came to care for more and more. From the inner entrance of the building he looked along the length of an immense pillared gallery and across the central area from which the rose-hued columns had long since vanished, over the top of the pavilion under which lay the sarcophagus, through a marvellously designed opening, to the snowy wildernesses of the great mountain, the Lord of all Mountains, two hundred miles away. The pillars and arches and buttresses and galleries soared and floated on either side, perfect yet unobtrusive, like great archangels waiting in the shadows about the presence of God. When men saw that austere beauty for the first time they were exalted, and then they shivered and their hearts bowed down.

Very often would the Prince come to stand there and look at that vista, deeply moved and not yet fully satisfied. The Pearl of Love had still something for him to do, he felt, before his task was done. Always he would order some little alteration to be made or some recent alterations to be put back again. And one day he said that the sarcophagus would be clearer and simpler without the pavilion; and after regarding it very steadfastly for a long time, he had the pavilion dismantled and removed.

The next day he came and said nothing, and the next day and the next. Then for two days he stayed away altogether. Then he returned, bringing with him an architect and two master craftsmen and a small retinue.

All looked, standing together silently in a little group, amidst the serene vastness of their achievement. No trace of toil remained in its perfection. It was as if the God of nature’s beauty had taken over their offspring to himself.

Only one thing there was to mar the absolute harmony. There was a certain disproportion about the sarcophagus. It had never been enlarged⁠—and indeed how could it have been enlarged?⁠—since the early days. It challenged the eye; it nicked the streaming lines. In that sarcophagus was the casket of lead and silver, and in the casket of lead and silver was the Queen, the dear immortal cause of all this beauty. But now that sarcophagus seemed no more than a little dark oblong that lay incongruously in the great vista of the Pearl of Love. It was as if someone had dropped a small valise upon the crystal sea of heaven.

Long the Prince mused, but no one knew the thoughts that passed through his mind.

At last he spoke. He pointed.

“Take that thing away,” he said.

Endnotes

1. No European is known to have seen a live Aepyornis, with the doubtful exception of MacAndrew, who visited Madagascar in 1745.

   —⁠H. G. W.

   ↩

2. “Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera.” Quart. Journ. Entomological Soc., 1863 ↩

3. “Rejoinder to certain Remarks,” etc. Quart. Journ. Entomological Soc. 1864. ↩

4. “Further Remarks,” etc. Quart. Journ. Entomological Soc. ↩

Colophon

Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories published between 1894 and 1909 by
H. G. Wells.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Kenneth Williams and David Grigg,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2008 and 2013 by
Charles Bidwell, Stephen Blundell, Aaron Cannon, Chris Curnow, eagkw, Stephanie Johnson, Paul Murray, Lindy Walsh, David Widger, Kenneth Williams, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
In the Laboratory,
a painting completed in about 1856 by
Henry Alexander.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
February 15, 2019, 9:08 p.m.
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