The Arrow of Gold

by Joseph Conrad
THE ARROW OF GOLD - A STORY BETWEEN TWO NOTES

FIRST NOTE
The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of

manuscript which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman
only. She seems to have been the writer's childhood's friend.

They had parted as children, or very little more than children.
Years passed. Then something recalled to the woman the companion

of her young days and she wrote to him: "I have been hearing of
you lately. I know where life has brought you. You certainly

selected your own road. But to us, left behind, it always looked
as if you had struck out into a pathless desert. We always

regarded you as a person that must be given up for lost. But you
have turned up again; and though we may never see each other, my

memory welcomes you and I confess to you I should like to know the
incidents on the road which has led you to where you are now."

And he answers her: "I believe you are the only one now alive who
remembers me as a child. I have heard of you from time to time,

but I wonder what sort of person you are now. Perhaps if I did
know I wouldn't dare put pen to paper. But I don't know. I only

remember that we were great chums. In fact, I chummed with you
even more than with your brothers. But I am like the pigeon that

went away in the fable of the Two Pigeons. If I once start to tell
you I would want you to feel that you have been there yourself. I

may overtax your patience with the story of my life so different
from yours, not only in all the facts but altogether in spirit.

You may not understand. You may even be shocked. I say all this
to myself; but I know I shall succumb! I have a distinct

recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you
always could make me do whatever you liked."

He succumbed. He begins his story for her with the minute
narration of this adventure which took about twelve months to

develop. In the form in which it is presented here it has been
pruned of all allusions to their common past, of all asides,

disquisitions, and explanations addressed directly to the friend of
his childhood. And even as it is the whole thing is of

considerable length. It seems that he had not only a memory but
that he also knew how to remember. But as to that opinions may

differ.
This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in

Marseilles. It ends there, too. Yet it might have happened
anywhere. This does not mean that the people concerned could have

come together in pure space. The locality had a definite
importance. As to the time, it is easily fixed by the events at

about the middle years of the seventies, when Don Carlos de
Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe against

the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for the
throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of

Guipuzcoa. It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender's
adventure for a Crown that History will have to record with the

usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the
departing romance. Historians are very much like other people.

However, History has nothing to do with this tale. Neither is the
moral justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. If

anything it is perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects
for his buried youth, as he lives it over again at the end of his

insignificant course on this earth. Strange person - yet perhaps
not so very different from ourselves.

A few words as to certain facts may be added.
It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long

adventure. But from certain passages (suppressed here because
mixed up with irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the

time of the meeting in the cafe, Mills had already gathered, in
various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who had been

introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had
learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived

furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his
best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set

(one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on
the other making friends with the people of the Old Town, pilots,

coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather
absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already credited with an

ill-defined and vaguelyillegalenterprise in the Gulf of Mexico.
At once it occurred to Mills that this eccentricyoungster was the

very person for what the legitimist sympathizers had very much at
heart just then: to organize a supply by sea of arms and

ammunition to the Carlist detachments in the South. It was
precisely to confer on that matter with Dona Rita that Captain

Blunt had been despatched from Headquarters.
Mills got in touch with Blunt at once and put the suggestion before

him. The Captain thought this the very thing. As a matter of
fact, on that evening of Carnival, those two, Mills and Blunt, had

been actually looking everywhere for our man. They had decided
that he should be drawn into the affair if it could be done. Blunt

naturally wanted to see him first. He must have estimated him a
promising person, but, from another point of view, not dangerous.

Thus lightly was the notorious (and at the same time mysterious)
Monsieur George brought into the world; out of the contact of two

minds which did not give a single thought to his flesh and blood.
Their purpose explains the intimate tone given to their first

conversation and the sudden introduction of Dona Rita's history.
Mills, of course, wanted to hear all about it. As to Captain Blunt

- I suspect that, at the time, he was thinking of nothing else. In
addition it was Dona Rita who would have to do the persuading; for,

after all, such an enterprise with its ugly and desperate risks was
not a trifle to put before a man - however young.

It cannot be denied that Mills seems to have acted somewhat
unscrupulously. He himself appears to have had some doubt about

it, at a given moment, as they were driving to the Prado. But
perhaps Mills, with his penetration, understood very well the

nature he was dealing with. He might even have envied it. But
it's not my business to excuse Mills. As to him whom we may regard

as Mills' victim it is obvious that he has never harboured a single
reproachful thought. For him Mills is not to be criticized. A

remarkable instance of the great power of mere individuality over
the young.

PART ONE
CHAPTER I

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of
universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One

of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a
Cannebiere it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular

expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the
spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big
cafes in a resplendent row. That evening I strolled into one of

them. It was by no means full. It looked deserted, in fact,
festal and overlighted, but cheerful. The wonderful street was

distinctly cold (it was an evening of carnival), I was very idle,
and I was feeling a little lonely. So I went in and sat down.

The carnival time was drawing to an end. Everybody, high and low,
was anxious to have the last fling. Companies of masks with linked

arms and whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy
rushes while gusts of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as

the eye could reach. There was a touch of bedlam in all this.
Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither

masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony
with the bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely