The Arrow of Gold quotes

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 Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be a little Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell.

for they had startled me a little and had amused me considerably. But they had left me untouched. Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine. Except for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not matured me.

I was as young as before. Inconceivably young⁠—still beautifully unthinking⁠—infinitely receptive.

You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a kingdom. Why should I? You don’t want to think of things which you meet every day in the newspapers and in conversation.

“Oh,” I murmured, and then after the slightest of pauses I heard the second of Mr. J. K. Blunt’s declarations.

“Yes,” he said. “Je suis Américain, catholique et gentilhomme,”

in a tone contrasting so strongly with the smile, which, as it were, underlined the uttered words, that I was at a loss whether to return the smile in kind or acknowledge the words with a grave little bow.

“I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but she was without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all the priceless items he had accumulated in that house—the most admirable …”

“Ah! But, you see, of all the objects there she was the only one that was alive,”

pointed out Blunt with the slightest possible flavour of sarcasm.

or something of the sort. It needn’t be from ear to ear, but it’s a fact that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and feeling.

Young man, beware of women with small mouths.

Beware of the others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign. Well, the royalist sympathizers can’t charge Doña Rita with any lack of generosity from what I hear. Why should I judge her?

And then to Mills:

“Out of a temple? We know what that means.”

His dark eyes flashed: “And must it be really in the mountains?” he added.

“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!

and in both cases they are concerned not only with the nature of the facts but with the intensity of my sensations. It may be, too, that I learned to love the sea for itself only at that time.

Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two mistresses of life’s values.

The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to generation fell upon my heart at last:

Offered to start for Bastia by mail-boat in the morning. All the time the handsome and mature Madame Léonore sat by, smiling faintly, amused at her great man joining like this in a frolic of boys. She said the last words of that evening:

“You men never grow up,”

touching lightly the grey hair above his temple.

At these words she cast her eyes down and in the moment of deep silence I watched the slight rising and falling of her breast. Then Mills pronounced distinctly:

“Goodbye, old Enchantress.”

They shook hands cordially. “Goodbye, poor Magician,” she said.

One wondered whether these two women belonged to the same scheme of creation. One was secretly amazed to see them standing together, speaking to each other, having words in common, understanding each other. And yet! …

Our psychological sense is the crudest of all; we don’t know, we don’t perceive how superficial we are.

The simplest shades escape us, the secret of changes, of relations. No, upon the whole, the only feature (and yet with enormous differences) which Therese had in common with her sister, as I told Doña Rita, was amiability.

If that life ever had any purpose or any aim outside itself I would have said that it threw a shadow across its path. But it hadn’t. There had been no path. But there was a shadow, the inseparable companion of all light.

No illumination can sweep all mystery out of the world.

After the departed darkness the shadows remain, more mysterious because as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one was free before. What if they were to be victorious at the last? They, or what perhaps lurks in them:

I had good hold of his arm. Suddenly he dropped the formal French and pronounced in his inflexible voice:

“For a pair of white arms, Señor. Bueno.”

Mr. Blunt’s expression had grown even more indulgent if that were possible. Yet there was something ineradicably ambiguous about that man. I did not like the indefinable tone in which he observed:

“You are perfectly reckless in what you say, Doña Rita. It has become a habit with you of late.”

“While with you reserve is a second nature, Don Juan.”

She let me take my hat out of her hand and while I was putting it on my head I heard an austere whisper:

“Madame should listen to her heart.”

Austere is not the word; it was almost freezing, this unexpected, dispassionate rustle of words. I had to repress a shudder, and as coldly as herself I murmured:

“Oh, that! …

Madame is like a child.

” It was impossible to get the bearing of that utterance from that girl who, as Doña Rita herself had told me, was the most taciturn of human beings; and yet of all human beings the one nearest to herself.

“Yes! But in that case what’s the use of living in fear and torment?” she went on, revealing a little more of herself to my astonishment. She opened the door for me and added:

“Those that don’t care to stoop ought at least make themselves happy.”

I turned in the very doorway: “There is something which prevents that?” I suggested.

Obviously I could have nothing to do with her. My five minutes’ meditation in the middle of the bedroom came to an end without even a sigh.

The dead don’t sigh, and for all practical purposes I was that, except for the final consummation, the growing cold, the rigor mortis⁠—that blessed state!

With measured steps I crossed the landing to my sitting-room.

She dropped a calm: “Yes—there is nothing like romance while one is young. So I will call you Monsieur George,” she paused and then added,

“I could never get old,” in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would remark, “I could never learn to swim,”

and I had the presence of mind to say in a tone to match, “C’est évident, Madame.” It was evident. She couldn’t get old;

“Those unforgiven tears! Oh, you simple soul!

Don’t you know that people never cry for anybody but themselves?

… Amigo George, tell me—what are we doing in this world?”

The answer was a hurried, nervous whisper: “I tell you it was time.

I rang because I had no strength to push you away.

”

“It seems to me,” she went on in a voice like a wave of love itself, “that one should try to understand before one sets up for being unforgiving.

Forgiveness is a very fine word. It is a fine invocation.

”

Rose had come up close to me. She met my words by a despairing outward movement of her hands as though she were giving everything up.

“I see it clearly now that Madame has no friends,”

she declared with such a force of restrained bitterness that it nearly made me pause. But the very obscurity of actuating motives drove me on and I stepped out through the doorway muttering: “Everything is as Madame wishes it.”

I didn’t believe in my power of persuasion. I had no powers. I slunk on and on, shivering with cold, through the uproarious streets. Bedlam was loose in them. It was the time of Carnival.

Small objects of no value have the secret of sticking to a man in an astonishing way.

I had nearly lost my liberty and even my life, I had lost my ship, a money-belt full of gold, I had lost my companions, had parted from my friend;

It was the last evening of Carnival.

The same masks, the same yells, the same mad rushes, the same bedlam of disguised humanity blowing about the streets in the great gusts of mistral that seemed to make them dance like dead leaves on an earth where all joy is watched by death.

But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study. The hair of his very whiskers was perfectly still. I had now given up all idea of the letter to Rita. Suddenly he spoke again:

“Women are the origin of all evil. One should never trust them. They have no honour. No honour!”

he repeated, striking his breast with his closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white.

I had only the resultant, settled feeling. I had, however, a thought, too. It came on me suddenly, and I asked myself with rage and astonishment: “Must I then kill that brute?” There didn’t seem to be any alternative.

Between him and Doña Rita I couldn’t hesitate.

I believe I gave a slight laugh of desperation. The suddenness of this sinister conclusion had in it something comic and unbelievable. It loosened my grip on my mental processes. A Latin tag came into my head about the facile descent into the abyss.

“Yes, we had to wreck the little vessel. It was awful. I feel like a murderer. But she had to be killed.”

“Because I loved her too much. Don’t you know that love and death go very close together?”

“I could feel almost happy that it is all over, if you hadn’t had to lose your love. Oh, amigo George, it was a safe love for you.”

“Well, I have kept an impression of great solidity. I’ll admit that. A woman of granite.”

“A doctor once told me that I was made to last forever,” she said.

“But essentially it’s the same thing,” I went on. “Granite, too, is insensible.”

I expected it to come, but it didn’t come. I must say, though, that I was swimmy in my head and now and then had a noise as of the sea in my ears, so I might not have heard it.

The woman of granite, built to last forever, continued to look at the glowing logs which made a sort of fiery ruin on the white pile of ashes.

“I will tell you how it is,” I said. “When I have you before my eyes there is such a projection of my whole being towards you that I fail to see you distinctly. It was like that from the beginning.

“Would you prefer to be a sham—that one could forget?”

“You will never forget me,” she said in the same tone at the glowing embers.

“Evil or good. But, my dear, I feel neither an evil nor a sham. I have got to be what I am, and that, amigo, is not so easy;

All the above is the analysis of one short moment.

Images are to words like light to sound⁠—incomparably swifter.

And all this was really one flash of light through my mind. A comforting thought succeeded it: that both doors were locked and that really there was no danger.

I called out to her quite openly, “Do keep your self-control.” And she called back to me in a clear voice: “Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this? But don’t ask for the impossible.

He was born to be laughed at.

”

And presently my breathing fell into the quiet rhythm of the sleep which descended on her at last.

My thought was that now nothing mattered in the world because I had the world safe resting in my arms⁠—or was it in my heart?

Suddenly my heart seemed torn in two within my breast and half of my breath knocked out of me. It was a tumultuous awakening. The day had come.