The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two NotesConrad, Joseph
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The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
Conrad, Joseph
Adventure stories; Illegal arms transfers -- Fiction; Marseille (France) -- Fiction; Sea stories; Young men -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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