The Arrow of Gold

was finished, I had nothing more to do of those things consecrated by usage and which leave you no option.  The exercise of any kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is reduced to the sensation that he is being killed by “that sort of thing” cannot be anything but mere trifling with death, an insincere pose before himself.  I wasn’t capable of it.  It was then that I discovered that being killed by “that sort of thing,” I mean the absolute conviction of it, was, so to speak, nothing in itself.  The horrible part was the waiting.  That was the cruelty, the tragedy, the bitterness of it.  “Why the devil don’t I drop dead now?” I asked myself peevishly, taking a clean handkerchief out of the drawer and stuffing it in my pocket.

This was absolutely the last thing, the last ceremony of an imperative rite.  I was abandoned to myself now and it was terrible.  Generally I used to go out, walk down to the port, take a look at the craft I loved with a sentiment that was extremely complex, being mixed up with the image of a woman; perhaps go on board, not because there was anything for me to do there but just for nothing, for happiness, simply as a man will sit contented in the companionship of the beloved object.  For lunch I had the choice of two places, one Bohemian, the other select, even aristocratic, where I had still my reserved table in the petit salon, up the white staircase.  In both places I had friends who treated my erratic appearances with discretion, in one case tinged with respect, in the other with a certain amused tolerance.  I owed this tolerance to the most careless, the most confirmed of those Bohemians (his beard had streaks of grey amongst its many other tints) who, once bringing his heavy hand down on my shoulder, took my defence against the charge of being disloyal and even foreign to that milieu of earnest visions taking beautiful and revolutionary shapes in the smoke of pipes, in the jingle of glasses.

“That fellow (ce garcon) is a primitive nature, but he may be an artist in a sense.  He has broken away from his conventions.  He is trying to put a special vibration and his own notion of colour into his life; and perhaps even to give it a modelling according to his own ideas.  And for all you know he may be on the track of a masterpiece; but observe: if it happens to be one nobody will see it.  It can be only for himself.  And even he won’t be able to see it in its completeness except on his death-bed.  There is something fine in that.”

I had blushed with pleasure; such fine ideas had never entered my head.  But there was something fine. . . . How far all this seemed!  How mute and how still!  What a phantom he was, that man with a beard of at least seven tones of brown.  And those shades of the other kind such as Baptiste with the shaven diplomatic face, the maitre d’hotel in charge of the petit salon, taking my hat and stick from me with a deferential remark: “Monsieur is not very often seen nowadays.”  And those other well- groomed heads raised and nodding at my passage—“Bonjour.”  “Bonjour”—following me with interested eyes; these young X.s and Z.s, low-toned, markedly discreet, lounging up to my table on their way out with murmurs: “Are you well?”—“Will one see you anywhere this evening?”—not from curiosity, God forbid, but just from friendliness; and passing on almost without waiting for an answer.  What had I to do with them, this elegant dust, these moulds of provincial fashion?

I also often lunched with Dona Rita without invitation.  But that was now unthinkable.  What had I to do with a woman who allowed somebody else to make her cry and then with an amazing lack of good feeling did her offensive weeping on my shoulder?  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.

CHAPTER II

The windows of that room gave out on the street of the Consuls which as usual was silent.  And the house itself below me and above me was soundless, perfectly still.  In general the house was quiet, dumbly quiet, without resonances of any sort, something like what one would imagine the interior of a convent would be.  I suppose it was very solidly built.  Yet that morning I missed in the stillness that feeling of security and peace which ought to have been associated with it.  It is, I believe, generally admitted that the dead are glad to be at rest.  But I wasn’t at rest.  What was wrong with that silence?  There was something incongruous in that peace.  What was it that had got into that stillness?  Suddenly I remembered: the mother of Captain Blunt.

Why had she come all the way from Paris?  And why should I bother my head about it?  H’m—the Blunt atmosphere, the reinforced Blunt vibration stealing through the walls, through the thick walls and the almost more solid stillness.  Nothing to me, of course—the movements of Mme. Blunt, mere.  It was maternal affection which had brought her south by either the evening or morning Rapide, to take anxious stock of the ravages of that insomnia.  Very good thing, insomnia, for a cavalry officer perpetually on outpost duty, a real godsend, so to speak; but on leave a truly devilish condition to be in.

The above sequence of thoughts was entirely unsympathetic and it was followed by a feeling of satisfaction that I, at any rate, was not suffering from insomnia.  I could always sleep in the end.  In the end.  Escape into a nightmare.  Wouldn’t he revel in that if he could!  But that wasn’t for him.  He had to toss about open-eyed all night and get up weary, weary.  But oh, wasn’t I weary, too, waiting for a sleep without dreams.

I heard the door behind me open.  I had been standing with my face to the window and, I declare, not knowing what I was looking at across the road—the Desert of Sahara or a wall of bricks, a landscape of rivers and forests or only the Consulate of Paraguay.  But I had been thinking, apparently, of Mr. Blunt with such intensity that when I saw him enter the room it didn’t really make much difference.  When I turned about the door behind him was already shut.  He advanced towards me, correct, supple, hollow-eyed, and smiling; and as to his costume ready to go out except for the old shooting jacket which he must have affectioned particularly, for he never lost any time in getting into it at every opportunity.  Its material was some tweed mixture; it had gone inconceivably shabby, it was shrunk from old age, it was ragged at the elbows; but any one could see at a glance that it had been made in London by a celebrated tailor, by a distinguished specialist.  Blunt came towards me in all the elegance of his slimness and affirming in every line of his face and body, in the correct set of his shoulders and the careless freedom of his movements, the superiority, the inexpressible superiority, the unconscious, the unmarked, the not- to-be-described, and even not-to-be-caught, superiority of the naturally born and the perfectly finished man of the world, over the simple young man.  He was smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill.

He had come to ask me, if I had no other engagement, to lunch with him and his mother in about an hour’s time.  He did it in a most degage tone.  His mother had given him a surprise.  The completest . . . The foundation of his mother’s psychology was her delightful unexpectedness.  She could never let things be (this in a peculiar tone which he checked at once) and he really would take it very kindly of me if I came to break the tete-a-tete for a while (that is if I had no other engagement.  Flash of teeth).  His mother was exquisitely and tenderly absurd.  She had taken it into her head that his health was endangered in some way.  And when she took anything into her head . . . Perhaps I might find something to say which would reassure her.  His mother had two long conversations with Mills on his passage through Paris and had heard of me (I knew how that thick man could speak of people, he interjected ambiguously) and his mother, with an insatiable curiosity for anything that was rare (filially humorous accent here and a softer flash of teeth), was very anxious to have me presented to her (courteous intonation, but no teeth).  He hoped I wouldn’t mind if she treated me a little as an “interesting young man.”  His mother had never got over her seventeenth year, and the manner of the spoilt beauty of at least three counties at the back of the Carolinas.  That again got overlaid by the sans- facon of a grande dame of the Second Empire.

I accepted the invitation with a worldly grin and a perfectly just intonation, because I really didn’t care what I did.  I only wondered vaguely why that fellow required all the air in the room for himself.  There did not seem enough left to go down my throat.  I didn’t say that I would come with pleasure or that I would be delighted, but I