Arrow of Gold

FIRST NOTE

The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript
which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only. She seems to
have been the writer's childhood friend. They had parted as children, or
very little more than children. Years passed. Then something recalled to
the woman the companion of her young days and she wrote to him: "I have
been hearing of you lately. I know where life has brought you. You
certainly selected your own road. But to us, left behind, it always
looked as if you had struck out into a pathless desert. We always
regarded you as a person that must be given up for lost. But you have
turned up again; and though we may never see each other, my memory
welcomes you and I confess to you I should like to know the incidents on
the road which has led you to where you are now."

And he answers her: "I believe you are the only one now alive who
remembers me as a child. I have heard of you from time to time, but I
wonder what sort of person you are now. Perhaps if I did know I wouldn't
dare put pen to paper. But I don't know. I only remember that we were
great chums. In fact, I chummed with you even more than with your
brothers. But I am like the pigeon that went away in the fable of the
Two Pigeons. If I once start to tell you I would want you to feel that
you have been there yourself. I may overtax your patience with the story
of my life so different from yours, not only in all the facts but
altogether in spirit. You may not understand. You may even be shocked. I
say all this to myself; but I know I shall succumb! I have a distinct
recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you
always could make me do whatever you liked."

He succumbed. He begins his story for her with the minute narration of
this adventure which took about twelve months to develop. In the form in
which it is presented here it has been pruned of all allusions to their
common past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explanations addressed
directly to the friend of his childhood. And even as it is the whole
thing is of considerable length. It seems that he had not only a memory
but that he also knew how to remember. But as to that opinions may
differ.

This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in Marseilles.
It ends there, too. Yet it might have happened anywhere. This does not
mean that the people concerned could have come together in pure space.
The locality had a definite importance. As to the time, it is easily
fixed by the events at about the middle years of the seventies, when Don
Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe
against the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for
the