The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea IslandsMaugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset)
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The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands
Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset)
Oceania -- Fiction
"If you had asked them I have no doubt that they would have thought it
impossible to suppose their love could ever cease. Do we not know that
the essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity? And yet
perhaps in Red there was already a very little seed, unknown to himself
and unsuspected by the girl, which would in time have grown to
weariness. For one day one of the natives from the cove told them that
some way down the coast at the anchorage was a British whaling-ship."
"'Gee,' he said, 'I wonder if I could make a trade of some nuts and
plantains for a pound or two of tobacco.'"
"The pandanus cigarettes that Sally made him with untiring hands were
strong and pleasant enough to smoke, but they left him unsatisfied; and
he yearned on a sudden for real tobacco, hard, rank, and pungent. He had
not smoked a pipe for many, months. His mouth watered at the thought of
it. One would have thought some premonition of harm would have made
Sally seek to dissuade him, but love possessed her so completely that it
never occurred to her any power on earth could take him from her. They
went up into the hills together and gathered a great basket of wild
oranges, green, but sweet and juicy; and they picked plantains from
around the hut, and coconuts from their trees, and breadfruit and
mangoes; and they carried them down to the cove. They loaded the
unstable canoe with them, and Red and the native boy who had brought
them the news of the ship paddled along outside the reef."
"It was the last time she ever saw him."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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