Quotation from: The Arrow of Gold

Written by: Joseph Conrad


My real company was the dummy in the studio and I can't say it was
exactly satisfying. After taking possession of the studio I had
raised it tenderly, dusted its mangled limbs and insensible, hard-
wood bosom, and then had propped it up in a corner where it seemed
to take on, of itself, a shy attitude. I knew its history. It was
not an ordinary dummy. One day, talking with Dona Rita about her
sister, I had told her that I thought Therese used to knock it down
on purpose with a broom, and Dona Rita had laughed very much.
This, she had said, was an instance of dislike from mere instinct.
That dummy had been made to measure years before. It had to wear
for days and days the Imperial Byzantine robes in which Dona Rita
sat only once or twice herself; but of course the folds and bends
of the stuff had to be preserved as in the first sketch. Dona Rita
described amusingly how she had to stand in the middle of her room
while Rose walked around her with a tape measure noting the figures
down on a small piece of paper which was then sent to the maker,
who presently returned it with an angry letter stating that those
proportions were altogether impossible in any woman. Apparently
Rose had muddled them all up; and it was a long time before the
figure was finished and sent to the Pavilion in a long basket to
take on itself the robes and the hieratic pose of the Empress.
Later, it wore with the same patience the marvellous hat of the
"Girl in the Hat." But Dona Rita couldn't understand how the poor
thing ever found its way to Marseilles minus its turnip head.
Probably it came down with the robes and a quantity of precious
brocades which she herself had sent down from Paris. The knowledge
of its origin, the contempt of Captain Blunt's references to it,
with Therese's shocked dislike of the dummy, invested that summary
reproduction with a sort of charm, gave me a faint and miserable
illusion of the original, less artificial than a photograph, less
precise, too. . . . But it can't be explained. I felt positively
friendly to it as if it had been Rita's trusted personal attendant.
I even went so far as to discover that it had a sort of grace of
its own. But I never went so far as to address set speeches to it
where it lurked shyly in its corner, or drag it out from there for
contemplation. I left it in peace. I wasn't mad. I was only
convinced that I soon would be.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.