The Arrow of Gold

The Arrow of Gold

By Joseph Conrad.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Epigraph
4. Dedication
5. Author’s Note
6. The Arrow of Gold
   1. First Note
   2. Part I
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
   3. Part II
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   4. Part III
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   5. Part IV
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
   6. Part V
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
   7. Second Note
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Celui qui n’a connu que des hommes polis et raisonnables, ou ne connait pas l’homme, ou ne le connait qu’a demi.

Caractères

To
Richard Curle

Author’s Note

Having named all the short prefaces written for my books, Author’s Notes, this one too must have the same heading for the sake of uniformity if at the risk of some confusion. The Arrow of Gold, as its subtitle states, is a story between two Notes. But these Notes are embodied in its very frame, belong to its texture, and their mission is to prepare and close the story. They are material to the comprehension of the experience related in the narrative and are meant to determine the time and place together with certain historical circumstances conditioning the existence of the people concerned in the transactions of the twelve months covered by the narrative. It was the shortest way of getting over the preliminaries of a piece of work which could not have been of the nature of a chronicle.

The Arrow of Gold is my first after-the-war publication. The writing of it was begun in the autumn of 1917 and finished in the summer of 1918. Its memory is associated with that of the darkest hour of the war, which, in accordance with the well known proverb, preceded the dawn⁠—the dawn of peace.

As I look at them now, these pages, written in the days of stress and dread, wear a look of strange serenity. They were written calmly, yet not in cold blood, and are perhaps the only kind of pages I could have written at that time full of menace, but also full of faith.

The subject of this book I have been carrying about with me for many years, not so much a possession of my memory as an inherent part of myself. It was ever present to my mind and ready to my hand, but I was loth to touch it from a feeling of what I imagined to be mere shyness but which in reality was a very comprehensible mistrust of myself.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the marketplace. This being the product of my private garden my reluctance can be easily understood; though some critics have expressed their regret that I had not written this book fifteen years earlier I do not share that opinion. If I took it up so late in life it is because the right moment had not arrived till then. I mean the positive feeling of it, which is a thing that cannot be discussed. Neither will I discuss here the regrets of those critics, which seem to me the most irrelevant thing that could have been said in connection with literary criticism.

I never tried to conceal the origins of the subject matter of this book which I have hesitated so long to write; but some reviewers indulged themselves with a sense of triumph in discovering in it my Dominic of The Mirror of the Sea under his own name (a truly wonderful discovery) and in recognizing the balancelle Tremolino in the unnamed little craft in which Mr. George plied his fantastic trade and sought to allay the pain of his incurable wound. I am not in the least disconcerted by this display of perspicacity. It is the same man and the same balancelle. But for the purposes of a book like The Mirror of the Sea all I could make use of was the personal history of the little Tremolino. The present work is not in any sense an attempt to develop a subject lightly touched upon in former years and in connection with quite another kind of love. What the story of the Tremolino in its anecdotic character has in common with the story of The Arrow of Gold is the quality of initiation (through an ordeal which required some resolution to face) into the life of passion. In the few pages at the end of The Mirror of the Sea and in the whole