The Arrow of Gold

by Joseph Conrad

  “As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita’s aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allègre was away. But Allègre’s goings and comings were sudden and unannounced; and that morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged street, had slipped in through the gateway in ignorance of Allègre’s return and unseen by the porter’s wife.

  “The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her regret of having perhaps got the kind porter’s wife into trouble.

  “The old woman said with a peculiar smile: ‘Your face is not of the sort that gets other people into trouble. My gentleman wasn’t angry. He says you may come in any morning you like.’

  “Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours. Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls them. She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking. She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance. She told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence. She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping. She is of peasant stock, you know. This is the true origin of the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and of the ‘Byzantine Empress’ which excited my dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa during the gatherings in Allègre’s exclusive Pavilion: the Doña Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of art from some unknown period; the Doña Rita of the initiated Paris. Doña Rita and nothing more—unique and indefinable.” He stopped with a disagreeable smile.

  “And of peasant stock?” I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.

  “Oh! All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II,” said Captain Blunt moodily. “You see coats of arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable caserios. As far as that goes she’s Doña Rita right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of others. In your eyes, for instance, Mills. Eh?”

  For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.

  “Why think about it at all?” he murmured coldly at last. “A strange bird is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate of such a bird is bound to be ill-defined, uncertain, questionable. And so that is how Henry Allègre saw her first? And what happened next?”

  “What happened next?” repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected surprise in his tone. “Is it necessary to ask that question? If you had asked how the next happened. . . But as you may imagine she hasn’t told me anything about that. She didn’t,” he continued with polite sarcasm, “enlarge upon the facts. That confounded Allègre, with his impudent assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn’t wonder) made the fact of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus. I really can’t tell how the minds and the imaginations of such aunts and uncles are affected by such rare visitations. Mythology may give us a hint. There is the story of Danae, for instance.”

  “There is,” remarked Mills calmly, “but I don’t remember any aunt or uncle in that connection.”

  “And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition of some unique objects of art. The sly approaches, the astute negotiations, the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of beauty, you know.”

  With his dark face and with the perpetual smiles playing about his grimness, Mr. Blunt appeared to me positively satanic. Mills’ hand was toying absently with an empty glass. Again they had forgotten my existence altogether.

  “I don’t know how an object of art would feel,” went on Blunt, in an unexpectedly grating voice, which, however, recovered its tone immediately. “I don’t know. But I do know that Rita herself was not a Danae, never, not at any time of her life. She didn’t mind the holes in her stockings. She wouldn’t mind holes in her stockings now. . . That is if she manages to keep any stockings at all,” he added, with a sort of suppressed fury so funnily unexpected that I would have burst into a laugh if I hadn’t been lost in astonishment of the simplest kind.

  “No—really!” There was a flash of interest from the quiet Mills.

  “Yes, really,” Blunt nodded and knitted his brows very devilishly indeed. “She may yet be left without a single pair of stockings.”

  “The world’s a thief,” declared Mills, with the utmost composure. “It wouldn’t mind robbing a lonely traveller.”

  “He is so subtle.” Blunt remembered my existence for the purpose of that remark and as usual it made me very uncomfortable. “Perfectly true. A lonely traveller. They are all in the scramble from the lowest to the highest. Heavens! What a gang! There was even an Archbishop in it.”

  “Vous plaisantez,” said Mills, but without any marked show of incredulity.

  “I joke very seldom,” Blunt protested earnestly. “That’s why I haven’t mentioned His Majesty—whom God preserve. That would have been an exaggeration. . . However, the end is not yet. We were talking about the beginning. I have heard that some dealers in fine objects, quite mercenary people of course (my mother has an experience in that world), show sometimes an astonishing reluctance to part with some specimens, even at a good price. It must be very funny. It’s just possible that the uncle and the aunt have been rolling in tears on the floor, amongst their oranges, or beating their heads against the walls from rage and despair. But I doubt it. And in any case Allègre is not the sort of person that gets into any vulgar trouble. And it’s just possible that those people stood open-mouthed at all that magnificence. They weren’t poor, you know; therefore it wasn’t incumbent on them to be honest. They are still there in the old respectable warehouse, I understand. They have kept their position in their quartier, I believe. But they didn’t keep their niece. It might have been an act of sacrifice! For I seem to remember hearing that after attending for a while some school round the corner the child had been set to keep the books of that orange business. However it might have been, the first fact in Rita’s and Allègre’s common history is a journey to Italy, and then to Corsica. You know Allègre had a house in Corsica somewhere. She has it now as she has everything he ever had; and that Corsican palace is the portion that will stick the longest to Doña Rita, I imagine. Who would want to buy a place like that? I suppose nobody would take it for a gift. The fellow was having houses built all over the place. This very house where we are sitting belonged to him. Doña Rita has given it to her sister, I understand. Or at any rate the sister runs it. She is my landlady . . .”

  “Her sister here!” I exclaimed. “Her sister!”

  Blunt turned to me politely, but only for a long mute gaze. His eyes were in deep shadow and it struck me for the first time then that there was something fatal in that man’s aspect as soon as he fell silent. I think the effect was purely physical, but in consequence whatever he said seemed inadequate and as if produced by a commonplace, if uneasy, soul.

  “Doña Rita brought her down from her mountains on purpose. She is asleep somewhere in this house, in one of the vacant rooms. She lets them, you know, at extortionate prices, that is, if people will pay them, for she is easily intimidated. You see, she has never seen such an enormous town before in her life, nor yet so many strange people. She has been keeping house for the uncle-priest in some mountain gorge for years and years. It’s extraordinary he should have let her go. There is something mysterious there, some reason or other. It’s either theology or Family. The saintly uncle in his wild parish would know nothing of any other reasons. She wears a rosary at her waist. Direct
ly she had seen some real money she developed a love of it. If you stay with me long enough, and I hope you will (I really can’t sleep), you will see her going out to mass at half-past six; but there is nothing remarkable in her; just a peasant woman of thirty-four or so. A rustic nun. . . .”

  I may as well say at once that we didn’t stay as long as that. It was not that morning that I saw for the first time Therese of the whispering lips and downcast eyes slipping out to an early mass from the house of iniquity into the early winter murk of the city of perdition, in a world steeped in sin. No. It was not on that morning that I saw Doña Rita’s incredible sister with her brown, dry face, her gliding motion, and her really nun-like dress, with a black handkerchief enfolding her head tightly, with the two pointed ends hanging down her back. Yes, nun-like enough. And yet not altogether. People would have turned round after her if those dartings out to the half-past six mass hadn’t been the only occasion on which she ventured into the impious streets. She was frightened of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger but as if of a contamination. Yet she didn’t fly back to her mountains because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity of purpose, predatory instincts. . . .

  No, we didn’t remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much as her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand. She was prayerful. She was terrible. Her one-idead peasant mind was as inaccessible as a closed iron safe. She was fatal. . . It’s perfectly ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now; but writing to you like this in all sincerity I don’t mind appearing ridiculous. I suppose fatality must be expressed, embodied, like other forces of this earth; and if so why not in such people as well as in other more glorious or more frightful figures?

  We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt’s half-hidden acrimony develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the man Allègre and the girl Rita. Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills with that story, passed on to what he called the second act, the disclosure, with, what he called, the characteristic Allègre impudence—which surpassed the impudence of kings, millionaires, or tramps, by many degrees—the revelation of Rita’s existence to the world at large. It wasn’t a very large world, but then it was most choicely composed. How is one to describe it shortly? In a sentence it was the world that rides in the morning in the Bois.

  In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of his wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent creatures of the air, he had given her amongst other accomplishments the art of sitting admirably on a horse, and directly they returned to Paris he took her out with him for their first morning ride.

  “I leave you to judge of the sensation,” continued Mr. Blunt, with a faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth. “And the consternation,” he added venomously. “Many of those men on that great morning had some one of their womankind with them. But their hats had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were under some sort of obligation to Allègre. You would be astonished to hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to mince matters, owed money to Allègre. And I don’t mean in the world of art only. In the first rout of the surprise some story of an adopted daughter was set abroad hastily, I believe. You know ‘adopted’ with a peculiar accent on the word—and it was plausible enough. I have been told that at that time she looked extremely youthful by his side, I mean extremely youthful in expression, in the eyes, in the smile. She must have been . . .”

  Blunt pulled himself up short, but not so short as not to let the confused murmur of the word “adorable” reach our attentive ears.

  The heavy Mills made a slight movement in his chair. The effect on me was more inward, a strange emotion which left me perfectly still; and for the moment of silence Blunt looked more fatal than ever.

  “I understand it didn’t last very long,” he addressed us politely again. “And no wonder! The sort of talk she would have heard during that first springtime in Paris would have put an impress on a much less receptive personality; for of course Allègre didn’t close his doors to his friends and this new apparition was not of the sort to make them keep away. After that first morning she always had somebody to ride at her bridle hand. Old Doyen, the sculptor, was the first to approach them. At that age a man may venture on anything. He rides a strange animal like a circus horse. Rita had spotted him out of the corner of her eye as he passed them, putting up his enormous paw in a still more enormous glove, airily, you know, like this” (Blunt waved his hand above his head), “to Allègre. He passes on. All at once he wheels his fantastic animal round and comes trotting after them. With the merest casual ‘Bonjour, Allègre’ he ranges close to her on the other side and addresses her, hat in hand, in that booming voice of his like a deferential roar of the sea very far away. His articulation is not good, and the first words she really made out were ‘I am an old sculptor. . . Of course there is that habit. . . But I can see you through all that. . . ’

  He put his hat on very much on one side. ‘I am a great sculptor of women,’ he declared. ‘I gave up my life to them, poor unfortunate creatures, the most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most loved. . . Two generations of them. . . Just look at me full in the eyes, mon enfant.’

  “They stared at each other. Doña Rita confessed to me that the old fellow made her heart beat with such force that she couldn’t manage to smile at him. And she saw his eyes run full of tears. He wiped them simply with the back of his hand and went on booming faintly. ‘Thought so. You are enough to make one cry. I thought my artist’s life was finished, and here you come along from devil knows where with this young friend of mine, who isn’t a bad smearer of canvases—but it’s marble and bronze that you want. . . I shall finish my artist’s life with your face; but I shall want a bit of those shoulders, too. . . You hear, Allègre, I must have a bit of her shoulders, too. I can see through the cloth that they are divine. If they aren’t divine I will eat my hat. Yes, I will do your head and then—nunc dimittis.’

  “These were the first words with which the world greeted her, or should I say civilization did; already both her native mountains and the cavern of oranges belonged to a prehistoric age. ‘Why don’t you ask him to come this afternoon?’ Allègre’s voice suggested gently. ‘He knows the way to the house.’

  “The old man said with extraordinary fervour, ‘Oh, yes I will,’ pulled up his horse and they went on. She told me that she could feel her heart-beats for a long time. The remote power of that voice, those old eyes full of tears, that noble and ruined face, had affected her extraordinarily she said. But perhaps what affected her was the shadow, the still living shadow of a great passion in the man’s heart.

  “Allègre remarked to her calmly: ‘He has been a little mad all his life.’”

  CHAPTER III

  Mills lowered the hands holding the extinct and even cold pipe before his big face.

  “H’m, shoot an arrow into that old man’s heart like this? But was there anything done?”

  “A terra-cotta bust, I believe. Good? I don’t know. I rather think it’s in this house. A lot of things have been sent down from Paris here, when she gave up the Pavilion. When she goes up now she stays in hotels, you know. I imagine it is locked up in one of these things,” went on Blunt, pointing towards the end of the studio where amongst the monumental presses of dark oak lurked the shy dummy which had worn the stiff robes of the Byzantine Empress and the amazing hat of the “Girl,” rakishly. I wondered whether that dummy had travelled from Paris, too, and whether with or without its head. Perhaps that head had been left behind, having rolled into a corner of some empty room in the dismantled Pavilion. I represented it to myself very lonely, without features, like a turnip, with a mere peg sticking out where the neck should have been. And Mr. Blunt was talking on.

  “There are treasures behind these locked doors, brocades, old jewels
, unframed pictures, bronzes, chinoiseries, Japoneries.”

  He growled as much as a man of his accomplished manner and voice could growl. “I don’t suppose she gave away all that to her sister, but I shouldn’t be surprised if that timid rustic didn’t lay a claim to the lot for the love of God and the good of the Church. . .

  “And held on with her teeth, too,” he added graphically.

  Mills’ face remained grave. Very grave. I was amused at those little venomous outbreaks of the fatal Mr. Blunt. Again I knew myself utterly forgotten. But I didn’t feel dull and I didn’t even feel sleepy. That last strikes me as strange at this distance of time, in regard of my tender years and of the depressing hour which precedes the dawn. We had been drinking that straw-coloured wine, too, I won’t say like water (nobody would have drunk water like that) but, well . . . and the haze of tobacco smoke was like the blue mist of great distances seen in dreams.

  Yes, that old sculptor was the first who joined them in the sight of all Paris. It was that old glory that opened the series of companions of those morning rides; a series which extended through three successive Parisian spring-times and comprised a famous physiologist, a fellow who seemed to hint that mankind could be made immortal or at least everlastingly old; a fashionable philosopher and psychologist who used to lecture to enormous audiences of women with his tongue in his cheek (but never permitted himself anything of the kind when talking to Rita); that surly dandy Cabanel (but he only once, from mere vanity), and everybody else at all distinguished including also a celebrated person who turned out later to be a swindler. But he was really a genius. . . All this according to Mr. Blunt, who gave us all those details with a sort of languid zest covering a secret irritation.

  “Apart from that, you know,” went on Mr. Blunt, “all she knew of the world of men and women (I mean till Allègre’s death) was what she had seen of it from the saddle two hours every morning during four months of the year or so. Absolutely all, with Allègre self-denyingly on her right hand, with that impenetrable air of guardianship. Don’t touch! He didn’t like his treasures to be touched unless he actually put some unique object into your hands with a sort of triumphant murmur, ‘Look close at that.’ Of course I only have heard all this. I am much too small a person, you understand, to even . . .”