A Backward Glance

The Arrow of Gold — By Joseph Conrad

As we read Mr. Conrad's latest published book we find ourselves wishing once again that it were a common practice among authors to let us know the year in which a book is begun and ended. This, of course, applies only to writers whose work does show very marked signs of progression, development, and expansion. The others, that large band who will guarantee to produce the same thrill with variations for you once, twice, or thrice yearly, do not count. For their great aim is never to show a sign of change—to make their next novel as good as their last, but no better—to take their readers for an excursion, as it were, but always to put up at the same hotel, where they know the waiters' faces, and the way to the bathroom, and the shape of the biscuits that accompany the cheese.

But perhaps your real writer would retort that this was precisely the business of the critic—to be able to see, at a glance almost, what place this or that novel filled in the growing chain. Our reply would be that the spirit of the age is against us; it is an uneasy, disintegrating, experimental spirit, and there are moments, as, for instance, the moment after reading the ‘Arrow of Gold,’ when it page 58 shakes us into wishing that Mr. Conrad had just added those four figures, thereby putting out once and for all that tiny flicker of dismay.

But—away with it! It is impossible not to believe that he has had this particular novel in the cellar for a considerable time—this sweet, sparkling, heady mixture in the strange-shaped bottle with the fantastic label. How does it stand being held up to the light, tasted, sipped, and compared with those dark foreign beverages with which he has made us so familiar?

The tale is told by a young man who confesses to being, at the time, ‘inconceivably young—still beautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.’ Lonely and sober, at Carnival time in Marseilles he chums up with two remarkable gentlemen; one Captain Blunt, ‘eminently elegant,’ and the other a robust, fair little man in clothes too tight for him, a Mr. Mills. They are both connected with the plot to put Don Carlos on the throne of Spain—Blunt as a soldier, and Mills as a gun-runner; and the talk between these three comparative strangers is of the ship loaded with contraband which Mills brought from the Clyde, how it was chased by a republican gunboat and stranded, and whether it would be possible to escape the vigilance of the French Customs authorities and salve the cargo for the cause. The French Customs cannot be bribed, but a mere hint from high quarters … and here Captain Blunt ‘let fall casually the words, “She will manage it for you quite easily.”’ ‘She’ is the femme fatale, the woman of all times, the Old Enchantress, the idol before whom no man can do aught but worship, the Eternal Feminine, Donna Rita, woman.

During the night the two friends tell their young acquaintance her incredible story, and even arrange that he shall meet her next day at luncheon. This is her incredible story. When scarcely more than a child she was found in a robe à deux sous with a hole in her stocking, sitting with her feet in the damp grass, by an eccentric personality, a man of immense wealth and power, a page 59 collector of priceless possessions, and a painter. In something less than a year and a half he brought her to Paris, and the first morning he took her riding an old sculptor greeted her and asked if ‘I might finish my artist's life with your face; but I shall want a piece of those shoulders too…. I can see through the cloth they are divine…. Yes, I will do your head and then—nunc dimittis.’ ‘These,’ says Captain Blunt, ‘are the first words with which the world greeted her, or should I say civilization did….’ For four years she holds her court in the pavilion at Passy, treated, as she says, ‘as if I had been a precious object in a collection, an ivory carving, or a piece of Chinese embroidery,’ and all the great ones of the modern world pass in review before her. Then her protector dies, leaving her his fortune, his collections, his four houses, but not one ‘woman soul’ to whom she might turn, who would at least ‘have put her on her guard.’ There is a tragedy out of which she emerged, unspotted but more famous still, and a great, great power. Why is she, too, anxious that Don Carlos should have his crown? We are not told. The new young man, who takes the name of Monsieur George, joins the conspiracy, and lays his life at Donna Rita's feet. From the moment he sees her coming down the crimson staircase all is over with the young man. He cannot find words big enough, bright enough, strong enough with which to describe that vision—‘the delicate carnation of that face, which, after the first glance given to the whole person, drew irresistibly your gaze to itself by an indefinable quality of charm beyond all analysis, and made you think of remote races, of strange generations, of the faces of women sculptured on immemorial monuments….’

… She said to us, ‘I am sorry I kept you waiting.’ Her voice was low-pitched, penetrating, and of the most seductive gentleness….

… Next moment she caught sight of some envelopes lying on the round marble-topped table…. She page 60 seized one of them, with a wonderfully quick, almost feline movement.

… Her widened eyes stared at the paper. Mr. Blunt threw one of the doors open, but before we passed through we heard a petulant exclamation accompanied by childlike stamping with both feet, and ending in a laugh which had in it a note of contempt.

We have quoted this to show how complete a femme fatale Donna Rita was, how absolutely true to type. Where shall we look for a creature more richly equipped with all the allurements and fascinations?

The plot moves on. Blunt flashes his teeth, Mills disappears, Donna Rita's inscrutable maid grows in inscrutability, a group of preposterous creatures move within its circle—they are there—they are gone—Monsieur George succeeds in adventure and almost succeeds in love—until there is a crisis so fantastical that we cannot but fancy Mr. Conrad of to-day smiling at its stage horrors. Out of the murderous clutch of a little man who loved her in her wild childhood and has haunted her ever since, a little man with whiskers ‘black and cut somewhat in the shape of a shark's fin, and so very fine that the least breath of air animated them into a sort of playful restlessness,’ Monsieur George bears her away to a villa ‘embowered in roses,’ and to six months of happy love. But then Monsieur George is called upon to fight a duel with Captain Blunt, and when he recovers of his wound it is to find that the femme fatale, simply because she is a femme fatale, has forsaken him, leaving behind her for remembrance the arrow of gold.