The Arrow of Gold

This was absolutely true.  But though I looked for him on each succeeding day he was nowhere to be seen at the usual times.  The companions of my idle hours (and all my hours were idle just then) noticed my preoccupation and chaffed me about it in a rather obvious way.  They wanted to know whether she, whom I expected to see, was dark or fair; whether that fascination which kept me on tenterhooks of expectation was one of my aristocrats or one of my marine beauties: for they knew I had a footing in both these—shall we say circles?  As to themselves they were the bohemian circle, not very wide—half a dozen of us led by a sculptor whom we called Prax for short.  My own nick-name was “Young Ulysses.”

I liked it.

But chaff or no chaff they would have been surprised to see me leave them for the burly and sympathetic Mills.  I was ready to drop any easy company of equals to approach that interesting man with every mental deference.  It was not precisely because of that shipwreck.  He attracted and interested me the more because he was not to be seen.  The fear that he might have departed suddenly for England—(or for Spain)—caused me a sort of ridiculous depression as though I had missed a unique opportunity.  And it was a joyful reaction which emboldened me to signal to him with a raised arm across that cafe.

I was abashed immediately afterwards, when I saw him advance towards my table with his friend.  The latter was eminently elegant.  He was exactly like one of those figures one can see of a fine May evening in the neighbourhood of the Opera-house in Paris.  Very Parisian indeed.  And yet he struck me as not so perfectly French as he ought to have been, as if one’s nationality were an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence.  As to Mills, he was perfectly insular.  There could be no doubt about him.  They were both smiling faintly at me.  The burly Mills attended to the introduction: “Captain Blunt.”

We shook hands.  The name didn’t tell me much.  What surprised me was that Mills should have remembered mine so well.  I don’t want to boast of my modesty but it seemed to me that two or three days was more than enough for a man like Mills to forget my very existence.  As to the Captain, I was struck on closer view by the perfect correctness of his personality.  Clothes, slight figure, clear-cut, thin, sun-tanned face, pose, all this was so good that it was saved from the danger of banality only by the mobile black eyes of a keenness that one doesn’t meet every day in the south of France and still less in Italy.  Another thing was that, viewed as an officer in mufti, he did not look sufficiently professional.  That imperfection was interesting, too.

You may think that I am subtilizing my impressions on purpose, but you may take it from a man who has lived a rough, a very rough life, that it is the subtleties of personalities, and contacts, and events, that count for interest and memory—and pretty well nothing else.  This—you see—is the last evening of that part of my life in which I did not know that woman.  These are like the last hours of a previous existence.  It isn’t my fault that they are associated with nothing better at the decisive moment than the banal splendours of a gilded cafe and the bedlamite yells of carnival in the street.

We three, however (almost complete strangers to each other), had assumed attitudes of serious amiability round our table.  A waiter approached for orders and it was then, in relation to my order for coffee, that the absolutely first thing I learned of Captain Blunt was the fact that he was a sufferer from insomnia.  In his immovable way Mills began charging his pipe.  I felt extremely embarrassed all at once, but became positively annoyed when I saw our Prax enter the cafe in a sort of mediaeval costume very much like what Faust wears in the third act.  I have no doubt it was meant for a purely operatic Faust.  A light mantle floated from his shoulders.  He strode theatrically up to our table and addressing me as “Young Ulysses” proposed I should go outside on the fields of asphalt and help him gather a few marguerites to decorate a truly infernal supper which was being organized across the road at the Maison Doree—upstairs.  With expostulatory shakes of the head and indignant glances I called his attention to the fact that I was not alone.  He stepped back a pace as if astonished by the discovery, took off his plumed velvet toque with a low obeisance so that the feathers swept the floor, and swaggered off the stage with his left hand resting on the hilt of the property dagger at his belt.

Meantime the well-connected but rustic Mills had been busy lighting his briar and the distinguished Captain sat smiling to himself.  I was horribly vexed and apologized for that intrusion, saying that the fellow was a future great sculptor and perfectly harmless; but he had been swallowing lots of night air which had got into his head apparently.

Mills peered at me with his friendly but awfully searching blue eyes through the cloud of smoke he had wreathed about his big head.  The slim, dark Captain’s smile took on an amiable expression.  Might he know why I was addressed as “Young Ulysses” by my friend? and immediately he added the remark with urbane playfulness that Ulysses was an astute person.  Mills did not give me time for a reply.  He struck in: “That old Greek was famed as a wanderer—the first historical seaman.”  He waved his pipe vaguely at me.

“Ah!  Vraiment!”  The polite Captain seemed incredulous and as if weary.  “Are you a seaman?  In what sense, pray?”  We were talking French and he used the term homme de mer.

Again Mills interfered quietly.  “In the same sense in which you are a military man.”  (Homme de guerre.)

It was then that I heard Captain Blunt produce one of his striking declarations.  He had two of them, and this was the first.

“I live by my sword.”

It was said in an extraordinary dandified manner which in conjunction with the matter made me forget my tongue in my head.  I could only stare at him.  He added more naturally: “2nd Reg.  Castille, Cavalry.”  Then with marked stress in Spanish, “En las filas legitimas.”

Mills was heard, unmoved, like Jove in his cloud: “He’s on leave here.”

“Of course I don’t shout that fact on the housetops,” the Captain addressed me pointedly, “any more than our friend his shipwreck adventure.  We must not strain the toleration of the French authorities too much!  It wouldn’t be correct—and not very safe either.”

I became suddenly extremely delighted with my company.  A man who “lived by his sword,” before my eyes, close at my elbow!  So such people did exist in the world yet!  I had not been born too late!  And across the table with his air of watchful, unmoved benevolence, enough in itself to arouse one’s interest, there was the man with the story of a shipwreck that mustn’t be shouted on housetops.  Why?

I understood very well why, when he told me that he had joined in the Clyde a small steamer chartered by a relative of his, “a very wealthy man,” he observed (probably Lord X, I thought), to carry arms and other supplies to the Carlist army.  And it was not a shipwreck in the ordinary sense.  Everything went perfectly well to the last moment when suddenly the Numancia (a Republican ironclad) had appeared and chased them ashore on the French coast below Bayonne.  In a few words, but with evident appreciation of the adventure, Mills described to us how he swam to the beach clad simply in a money belt and a pair of trousers.  Shells were falling all round till a tiny French gunboat came out of Bayonne and shooed the Numancia away out of territorial waters.