American fiction -- 19th century; Short stories, American
“That’s no doubt why I don’t feel homesick any more,” she
responded, smiling. “Where two of the faithful are gathered together
they can form a miniature Prague of their own. If I decide to stay in
England, I shall send for a lot of my Prague friends to come and visit
me, and you can send for an equal number of yours; and then we’ll turn
this bright particular corner of the British Empire into a province of
Bohemia, and the County may be horrified with reason. But meanwhile,
let’s be Pragueians in practice as well as theory. Let’s go to the
strawberry beds, and steal some strawberries,” was her conclusion.
She walked a little in front of him. Her garden-hat had come off,
and she was swinging it at her side, by its ribbons. Will noticed the
strong, lithe sway and rhythm of her body, as she moved. “What a woman
she is,” he thought; “how one feels her sex.” And with that,
he all at once became aware of a singular depression. “Surely,” a
malevolent little voice within him argued, “woman that she is, and
having passed all her life with the subjects of Florizel, surely,
surely, she must have had... experiences. She must have loved—she must
have been loved.” And (as if it was any of his business!) a kind of
vague jealousy of her past, a kind of suspiciousness and irrelevant
resentment, began to burn, a small dull spot of pain, somewhere in his
breast.
She, apparently, was in the highest spirits. There was something
expressive of joyousness in the mere way she tripped over the grass,
swinging her garden-hat like a basket; and presently she fell to
singing, merrily, in a light voice, that prettiest of old French songs,
Les Trots Princesses, dancing forward to its measure:
“Derrièr’ chez mon père,
(Vole, vole, mon cour, vole!)
Derrièr’ chez mon père,
Ya un pommier doux,
Tout doux, et iou,
Ya un pommier doux.”
“Don’t you like that song?” she asked. “The tune of it is like
the smell of faded rose-leaves, isn’t it?”
And suddenly she began to sing a different one, possibly an
improvisation:
“ And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,
The strawberry beds, the strawberry beds,
And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,
On Christmas day in the morning.”
And when they had reached the strawberry beds, she knelt, and plucked a
great red berry, and then leapt up again, and held it to her cousin’s
lips, saying, “Bite—but spare my fingers.” And so, laughing, she
fed it to him, while he, laughing too, consumed it. But when her pink
finger-tips all but touched his lips, his heart had a convulsion, and
it was only by main-force that he restrained his kisses. And he said
to himself, “I must go back to town to-morrow. This will never do.
It would be the devil to pay if I should let myself fall in love with
her.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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