The Arrow of Gold

The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph
Conrad

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Title: The Arrow of Gold
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release Date: October, 1997 [EBook #1083] [This file was first posted

on October 29, 1997] [Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]
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Language: English
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ARROW OF GOLD ***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

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