To Vita Sakville-West
The cover of the first edition of the book with a portrait of Vita
Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so
illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write
without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne,
Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,
to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as
illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am
specially indebted to Mr C.P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of
real property this book could never have been written. Mr Sydney Turner's
wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders.
I have had the advantage - how great I alone can estimate - of Mr Arthur
Waley's knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs J.M. Keynes) has been at
hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr
Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess.
I have, I hope, profited in another department by the singularly
penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr Julian Bell. Miss M.K.
Snowdon's indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and
Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have
helped me in ways too various to specify. I must content myself with naming
Mr Angus Davidson; Mrs Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose
knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr Francis Birrell;
my brother, Dr Adrian Stephen; Mr F.L. Lucas; Mr and Mrs Desmond Maccarthy;
that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr Clive Bell; Mr G.H.
Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr J.M. Keynes; Mr Hugh Walpole;
Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville-West; Mr and Mrs St. John
Hutchinson; Mr Duncan Grant; Mr and Mrs Stephen Tomlin; Mr and Lady Ottoline
Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs Sydney Woolf; Mr Osbert Sitwell; Madame
Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr J.T. Sheppard;
Mr and Mrs T.S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr
Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr Raymond
Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil;
Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr E.M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my
sister, Vanessa Bell - but the list threatens to grow too long and is
already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the
pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which
the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking
the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted
courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she
could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has
invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to
which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally,
I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America,
who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany,
the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine
and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the
time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of
a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football,
and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand
or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando's father,
or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan
who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now
it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing
through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields,
and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many
colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters.
So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young
to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother
and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and
plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that
the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it
with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him
through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the
house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped
in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and
summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His
fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the
northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of
darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made
by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the
window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic
leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it
was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing. Thus,
those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might
observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set
shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light,
Orlando's face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun
itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the
mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such
a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or
poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must
go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that
is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely
for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the
down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The
lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an
exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its
short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely
to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end
without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born
devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the
window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that
the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like
the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which
were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we
rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a
thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to
ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady
in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind
her; sights exalted him - the birds and the trees; and made him in love with
death - the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral
stairway into his brain - which was a roomy one - all these sights, and the
garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot
and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer
detests. But to continue - Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the
table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day
of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled "Aethelbert: A
Tragedy in Five Acts", and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.
Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent,
evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of
his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid
plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a
word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a
fluency and sweetness which, considering his age - he was not yet seventeen
- and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run,
were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a halt. He was
describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order
to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more
audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush
growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more.
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and
letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear
each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme
and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out
of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting,
once think "how many more suns shall I see set?", etc. etc. (the thought is
too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one's
cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one's foot on a painted chest as
one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.
He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener,
coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let
himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He skirted all stables,
kennels, breweries, carpenters' shops, washhouses, places where they make
tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins - for the house
was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts - and gained the
ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a
kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer
should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated
with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally
loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and
ever alone.
So, after a long silence, "I am alone," he breathed at last, opening
his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly
uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to
a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that
nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty or
perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see the
English Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and
pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas
with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon firing; and
forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower;
and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of Orlando's
father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls. To the east there
were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and perhaps on the very
sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and
serrated edges of Snowdon herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a
moment Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognizing. That was his father's
house; that his uncle's. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the
trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer,
the fox, the badger, and the butterfly.
He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his
movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak
tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's
spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or,
for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was
riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as
it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his
floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed
filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he
walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the
flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer
stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground;
and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks
wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies
shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's
evening were woven web-like about his body.
After an hour or so - the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds had
turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black - a
trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill sound came from the
valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a spot compact and mapped out;
a maze; a town, yet girt about with walls; it came from the heart of his own
great house in the valley, which, dark before, even as he looked and the
single trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itself with other shriller
sounds, lost its darkness and became pierced with lights. Some were small
hurrying lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to answer summonses;
others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt in empty
banqueting-halls made ready to receive guests who had not come; and others
dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of
serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting
with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot.
Coaches turned and wheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed their plumes. The
Queen had come.
Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at a
wicket gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his room. He
tossed his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to the other. He
dipped his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his finger nails. With no
more than six inches of looking-glass and a pair of old candles to help him,
he had thrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and
shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias in less than ten
minutes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was flushed. He was excited.
But he was terribly late.
By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast
congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres distant
on the other side of the house. But half-way there, in the back quarters
where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs Stewkley's
sitting-room stood open - she was gone, doubtless, with all her keys to wait
upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the servant's dinner table with a
tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, shabby man,
whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He
held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of
rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered
shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some
green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did not see Orlando. For all
his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry?
"Tell me," he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had
the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how
speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the
depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his
pen in his fingers, this way and that way; and gazed and mused; and then,
very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. Whereupon Orlando,
overcome with shyness, darted off and reached the banqueting-hall only just
in time to sink upon his knees and, hanging his head in confusion, to offer
a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself.
Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed hands
in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long
fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed,
sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a hand that had only to raise itself for
a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like
a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was yet caparisoned
in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though
perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though strung together by
a thousand fears; and the Queen's eyes were light yellow. All this he felt
as the great rings flashed in the water and then something pressed his hair
- which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing nothing more likely to be of use
to a historian. And in truth, his mind was such a welter of opposites - of
the night and the blazing candles, of the shabby poet and the great Queen,
of silent fields and the clatter of serving men - that he could see nothing;
or only a hand.
By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a head. But
if it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the
attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and terror,
surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of state by a
lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted,
wide open. The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so
innocently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a young
nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold;
and loyalty and manly charm - all qualities which the old woman loved the
more the more they failed her. For she was growing old and worn and bent
before her time. The sound of cannon was always in her ears. She saw always
the glistening poison drop and the long stiletto. As she sat at table she
listened; she heard the guns in the Channel; she dreaded - was that a curse,
was that a whisper? Innocence, simplicity, were all the more dear to her for
the dark background she set them against. And it was that same night, so
tradition has it, when Orlando was sound asleep, that she made over
formally, putting her hand and seal finally to the parchment, the gift of
the great monastic house that had been the Archbishop's and then the King's
to Orlando's father.
Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a queen
without knowing it. And perhaps, for women's hearts are intricate, it was
his ignorance and the start he gave when her lips touched him that kept the
memory of her young cousin (for they had blood in common) green in her mind.
At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not passed, and
Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen
histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend
the Queen at Whitehall.
"Here," she said, watching him advance down the long gallery towards
her, "comes my innocent!" (There was a serenity about him always which had
the look of innocence when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.)
"Come!" she said. She was sitting bolt upright beside the fire. And she
held him a foot's pace from her and looked him up and down. Was she matching
her speculations the other night with the truth now visible? Did she find
her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips, hands - she ran them
over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but when she saw his legs she
laughed out loud. He was the very image of a noble gentleman. But inwardly?
She flashed her yellow hawk's eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul.
The young man withstood her gaze blushing only a damask rose as became him.
Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth - she read him like a page.
Instantly she plucked a ring from her finger (the joint was swollen rather)
and as she fitted it to his, named him her Treasurer and Steward; next hung
about him chains of office; and bidding him bend his knee, tied round it at
the slenderest part the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was
denied him. When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent
him to Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about to sail
for the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she bear to think
of that tender flesh torn and that curly head rolled in the dust? She kept
him with her. At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the
Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the
huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the
cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him
bury his face in that astonishing composition - she had not changed her
dress for a month - which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his
boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother's furs were
stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. "This," she breathed, "is
my victory!" - even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.
For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw
one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid
ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be
the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which she
leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange
domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in
her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it, never kept
her warm.
Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was
lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the
ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were
barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies
always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murderers always
open, a boy - could it be Orlando - kissing a girl? who in the Devil's name
was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck
violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was
lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and
groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man's treachery.
It was Orlando's fault perhaps; yet, after all, are we to blame
Orlando? The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their
poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was
different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was,
we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was
divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder
and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular
half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell
vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating
this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully
how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is
over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for using the artifices
of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks
and roses, that was not their way. The withered intricacies and ambiguities
of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and
went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers'. Plucked they
must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all. Thus,
if Orlando followed the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age
itself, and plucked his flower in the window-seat even with the snow on the
ground and the Queen vigilant in the corridor we can scarcely bring
ourselves to blame him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature
bade him do. As for the girl, we know no more than Queen Elizabeth herself
did what her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana, for
he made rhymes to them all in turn; equally, she may have been a court lady,
or some serving maid. For Orlando's taste was broad; he was no lover of
garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination
for him.
Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait
in him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain grandmother
of his had worn a smock and carried milk-pails. Some grains of the Kentish
or Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, fine fluid which came to him from
Normandy. He held that the mixture of brown earth and blue blood was a good
one. Certain it is that he had always a liking for low company, especially
for that of lettered people whose wits so often keep them under, as if there
were the sympathy of blood between them. At this season of his life, when
his head brimmed with rhymes and he never went to bed without striking off
some conceit, the cheek of an innkeeper's daughter seemed fresher and the
wit of a gamekeeper's niece seemed quicker than those of the ladies at
Court. Hence, he began going frequently to Wapping Old Stairs and the beer
gardens at night, wrapped in a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and
the garter at his knee. There, with a mug before him, among the sanded
alleys and bowling greens and all the simple architecture of such places, he
listened to sailors' stories of hardship and horror and cruelty on the
Spanish main; how some had lost their toes, others their noses - for the
spoken story was never so rounded or so finely coloured as the written.
Especially he loved to hear them volley forth their songs of the Azores,
while the parakeets, which they had brought from those parts, pecked at the
rings in their ears, tapped with their hard acquisitive beaks at the rubies
on their fingers, and swore as vilely as their masters. The women were
scarcely less bold in their speech and less free in their manner than the
birds. They perched on his knee, flung their arms round his neck and,
guessing that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak,
were quite as eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself.
Nor was opportunity lacking. The river was astir early and late with
barges, wherries, and craft of all description. Every day sailed to sea some
fine ship bound for the Indies; now and again another blackened and ragged
with hairy men on board crept painfully to anchor. No one missed a boy or
girl if they dallied a little on the water after sunset; or raised an
eyebrow if gossip had seen them sleeping soundly among the treasure sacks
safe in each other's arms. Such indeed was the adventure that befell
Orlando, Sukey, and the Earl of Cumberland. The day was hot; their loves had
been active; they had fallen asleep among the rubies. Late that night the
Earl, whose fortunes were much bound up in the Spanish ventures, came to
check the booty alone with a lantern. He flashed the light on a barrel. He
started back with an oath. Twined about the cask two spirits lay sleeping.
Superstitious by nature, and his conscience laden with many a crime, the
Earl took the couple - they were wrapped in a red cloak, and Sukey's bosom
was almost as white as the eternal snows of Orlando's poetry - for a phantom
sprung from the graves of drowned sailors to upbraid him. He crossed
himself. He vowed repentance. The row of alms houses still standing in the
Sheen Road is the visible fruit of that moment's panic. Twelve poor old
women of the parish today drink tea and tonight bless his Lordship for a
roof above their heads; so that illicit love in a treasure ship - but we
omit the moral.
Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of this
way of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, but of the
primitive manner of the people. For it has to be remembered that crime and
poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for
us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief
that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read
a virtue; no fancy that what we call "life" and "reality" are somehow
connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed, any equivalent for
these two words at all. It was not to seek "life" that Orlando went among
them; not in quest of "reality" that he left them. But when he had heard a
score of times how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey her honour - and they
told the stories admirably, it must be admitted - he began to be a little
weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be cut off in one way and
maidenhood lost in another - or so it seemed to him - whereas the arts and
the sciences had a diversity about them which stirred his curiosity
profoundly. So, always keeping them in happy memory, he left off frequenting
the beer gardens and the skittle alleys, hung his grey cloak in his
wardrobe, let his star shine at his neck and his garter twinkle at his knee,
and appeared once more at the Court of King James. He was young, he was
rich, he was handsome. No one could have been received with greater
acclamation than he was.
It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their
favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in
marriage - Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne - so he called them in his sonnets.
To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-mannered gentle lady
enough; indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months and a half;
but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood. A hare
brought up roasted at her father's table turned her faint. She was much
under the influence of the Priests too, and stinted her underlinen in order
to give to the poor. She took it on her to reform Orlando of his sins, which
sickened him, so that he drew back from the marriage, and did not much
regret it when she died soon after of the small-pox.
Favilla, who comes next, was of a different sort altogether. She was
the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer assiduity and
the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court, where her address in
horsemanship, her fine instep, and her grace in dancing won the admiration
of all. Once, however, she was so ill-advised as to whip a spaniel that had
torn one of her silk stockings (and it must be said in justice that Favilla
had few stockings and those for the most part of drugget) within an inch of
its life beneath Orlando's window. Orlando, who was a passionate lover of
animals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked, and the two front turned
inward, which, he said, is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel disposition
in women, and so broke the engagement that very night for ever.
The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his flames. She
was by birth one of the Irish Desmonds and had therefore a family tree of
her own as old and deeply rooted as Orlando's itself. She was fair, florid,
and a trifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, had a perfect set of teeth
in the upper jaw, though those on the lower were slightly discoloured. She
was never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee; fed them with white
bread from her own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals; and was never
dressed before mid-day owing to the extreme care she took of her person. In
short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Orlando,
and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both sides were busy with
covenants, jointures, settlements, messuages, tenements, and whatever is
needed before one great fortune can mate with another when, with the
suddenness and severity that then marked the English climate, came the Great
Frost.
The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever
visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the
ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her
usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder
and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at
the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous.
Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon
sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The
fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little
bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his
hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone
raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within
a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of
petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great
increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for
there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had
been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give
little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics
blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks,
scratching-posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking
troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part,
to this day.
But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the
trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the
utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the
opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with the citizens.
He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and
more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and
given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes,
alleys, drinking booths, etc. at his expense. For himself and the courtiers,
he reserved a certain space immediately opposite the Palace gates; which,
railed off from the public only by a silken rope, became at once the centre
of the most brilliant society in England. Great statesmen, in their beards
and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal
Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the
Turk in striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals
strode up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon
and telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers
dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when
the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless
in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood,
lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire.
But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice
which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So
clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of
several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay
motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely
of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the
philosophers. Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of
some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the
bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The
old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side,
sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for
all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain
blueness about the lips hinted the truth. 'Twas a sight King James specially
liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with
him. In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene
by day. But it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the
frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and
stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of
flute and trumpet the courtiers danced.
Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe
and lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absentminded. He much preferred the
plain dances of his own country, which he danced as a child to these
fantastic foreign measures. He had indeed just brought his feet together
about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some
such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the
Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose
tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled
him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was
about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in
oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur.
But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which
issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and
extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a
pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space
of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen
her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the
narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were
simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things
he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were
at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons
of things is out of the question.)...A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow
- so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be - no
woman could skate with such speed and vigour - swept almost on tiptoe past
him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of
his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater
came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever had a
mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as
if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a
stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was
shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came
to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando
stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through
the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arm with the
beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small
white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if
he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.
The stranger's name, he found, was the Princess Marousha Stanilovska
Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she had come in the train of the
Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father, to
attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their
great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent; drinking some black
liquid which they spat out now and then upon the ice. None spoke English,
and French with which some at least were familiar was then little spoken at
the English Court.
It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became
acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table spread
under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. The Princess was
placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis Vere and the other the
young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see the predicament she soon had
them in, for though both were fine lads in their way, the babe unborn had as
much knowledge of the French tongue as they had. When at the beginning of
dinner the Princess turned to the Earl and said, with a grace which ravished
his heart, "Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d'un gentilhomme qui vous
tait apparente en Pologne l' t dernier," or "La beaut des dames de la
cour d'Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus
gracieuse que votre reine, ni une coiffure plus belle que la sienne," both
Lord Francis and the Earl showed the highest embarrassment. The one helped
her largely to horse-radish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made
him beg for a marrow bone. At this the Princess could no longer contain her
laughter, and Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars' heads and stuffed
peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in
wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult
of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone.
Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten
cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had
meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it
tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through
with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted;
the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the
birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood
woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole
or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a
crevice; he stretched his hand - in fact he was rattling off one of his most
impassioned sonnets when the Princess addressed him, "Would you have the
goodness to pass the salt?"
He blushed deeply.
"With all the pleasure in the world, Madame," he replied, speaking
French with a perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, he spoke the tongue as
his own; his mother's maid had taught him. Yet perhaps it would have been
better for him had he never learnt that tongue; never answered that voice;
never followed the light of those eyes...
The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat
beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the nauseating mixture
they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the
men in England? Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her hair
rigged up like a Maypole (comme une grande perche mal fagot e) really the
Queen? And did the King always slobber like that? And which of those
popinjays was George Villiers? Though these questions rather discomposed
Orlando at first, they were put with such archness and drollery that he
could not help but laugh; and he saw from the blank faces of the company
that nobody understood a word, he answered her as freely as she asked him,
speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of
the Court.
Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more attention than
mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her side, and their
conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was carried on with such
animation, provoked such blushes and laughter, that the dullest could guess
the subject. Moreover, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary.
Nobody had ever seen him so animated. In one night he had thrown off his
boyish clumsiness; he was changed from a sulky stripling, who could not
enter a ladies' room without sweeping half the ornaments from the table, to
a nobleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. To see him hand the Muscovite
(as she was called) to her sledge, or offer her his hand for the dance, or
catch the spotted kerchief which she had let drop, or discharge any other of
those manifold duties which the supreme lady exacts and the lover hastens to
anticipate was a sight to kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make the quick
pulse of youth beat faster. Yet over it all hung a cloud. The old men
shrugged their shoulders. The young tittered between their fingers. All knew
that a Orlando was betrothed to another. The Lady Margaret O'Brien O'Dare
O'Reilly Tyrconnel (for that was the proper name of Euphrosyne of the
Sonnets) wore Orlando's splendid sapphire on the second finger of her left
hand. It was she who had the supreme right to his attentions. Yet she might
drop all the handkerchiefs in her wardrobe (of which she had many scores)
upon the ice and Orlando never stooped to pick them up. She might wait
twenty minutes for him to hand her to her sledge, and in the end have to be
content with the services of her Blackamoor. When she skated, which she did
rather clumsily, no one was at her elbow to encourage her, and, if she fell,
which she did rather heavily, no one raised her to her feet and dusted the
snow from her petticoats. Although she was naturally phlegmatic, slow to
take offence, and more reluctant than most people to believe that a mere
foreigner could oust her from Orlando's affections, still even the Lady
Margaret herself was brought at last to suspect that something was brewing
against her peace of mind.
Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando took less and less care to hide his
feelings. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company as soon as
they had dined, or steal away from the skaters, who were forming sets for a
quadrille. Next moment it would be seen that the Muscovite was missing too.
But what most outraged the Court, and stung it in its tenderest part, which
is its vanity, was that the couple was often seen to slip under the silken
rope, which railed off the Royal enclosure from the public part of the river
and to disappear among the crowd of common people. For suddenly the Princess
would stamp her foot and cry, "Take me away. I detest your English mob," by
which she meant the English Court itself. She could stand it no longer. It
was full of prying old women, she said, who stared in one's face, and of
bumptious young men who trod on one's toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran
between her legs. It was like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten
miles broad on which one could gallop six horses abreast all day long
without meeting a soul. Besides, she wanted to see the Tower, the
Beefeaters, the heads on Temple Bar, and the jewellers' shops in the city.
Thus, it came about that Orlando took her into the city, showed her the
Beefeaters and the rebels' heads, and bought her whatever took her fancy in
the Royal Exchange. But this was not enough. Each increasingly desired the
other's company in privacy all day long where there were none to marvel or
to stare. Instead of taking the road to London, therefore, they turned the
other way about and were soon beyond the crowd among the frozen reaches of
the Thames where, save for sea birds and some old country woman hacking at
the ice in a vain attempt to draw a pailful of water or gathering what
sticks or dead leaves she could find for firing, not a living soul ever came
their way. The poor kept closely to their cottages, and the better sort, who
could afford it, crowded for warmth and merriment to the city.
Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it
was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy - a creature soft as
snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had
it killed - hence, they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and
with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the
yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando
would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the
delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a
swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared
with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And laughing
at his vehemence, she would turn once more in his arms and give him for
love's sake, one more embrace. And then they would marvel that the ice did
not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such
natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold
steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything
under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man's beard
and that woman's skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the
arras that moved always in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather.
Nothing was too small for such converse, nothing was too great.
Then suddenly, Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy;
the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it,
or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into
the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says
that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from
melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other;
and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied
to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the
Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for
those tossed on this sea.
"All ends in death," Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face
clouded with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent
see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the
biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep
pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant
words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life
indulged.)
"All ends in death," Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice. But
Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where
the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left
unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them - Sasha stared at him,
perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said
nothing. But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked,
so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so
wisely (but unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its
flavour in translation) that he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or
the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her - plunging and
splashing among a thousand images which had gone as stale as the women who
inspired them - what she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster,
golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the
waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an
emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded - like nothing he
had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed
him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank,
too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however
open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did,
however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems
hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only
outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone
with the steady beam of an Englishwoman - here, however, remembering the
Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and
swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the
flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants
of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of
him by pain.
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she was a
fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the whole history
of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; how
they had come from Rome with the Caesars and had the right to walk down the
Corso (which is the chief street in Rome) under a tasselled palanquin, which
he said is a privilege reserved only for those of imperial blood (for there
was an orgulous credulity about him which was pleasant enough), he would
pause and ask her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had she
brothers? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she
answered readily enough, an awkwardness would come between them. He
suspected at first that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that
she was ashamed of the savage ways of her people, for he had heard that the
women in Muscovy wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist
down; that both sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear
meat with their fingers and live in huts where an English noble would
scruple to keep his cattle; so that he forbore to press her. But on
reflection, he concluded that her silence could not be for that reason; she
herself was entirely free from hair on the chin; she dressed in velvet and
pearls, and her manners were certainly not those of a woman bred in a
cattle-shed.
What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the tremendous
force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which shifts
suddenly and makes the whole pile shake. The agony would seize him suddenly.
Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how to quiet
him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her
and she provoked them purposely - such is the curious obliquity of the
Muscovitish temperament.
To continue the story - skating farther than their wont that day they
reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen
in midstream. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy flying its
double-headed black eagle from the main mast, which was hung with
many-coloured icicles several yards in length. Sasha had left some of her
clothing on board, and supposing the ship to be empty they climbed on deck
and went in search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own past,
Orlando would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this refuge
before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far when a fine
young man started up from some business of his own behind a coil of rope and
saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he was one of the crew and
would help the Princess to find what she wanted, lit a lump of candle and
disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought only of
the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means for making her
irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there were and hardships to
overcome. She was determined to live in Russia, where there were frozen
rivers and wild horses and men, she said, who gashed each other's throats
open. It is true that a landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and
slaughter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his pleasant
country ways of sport and tree-planting; relinquish his office; ruin his
career; shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka instead of
canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve - for what purpose, he knew not.
Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her sake. As for his
marriage to the Lady Margaret, fixed though it was for this day sennight,
the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave it a thought. Her
kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a great lady; his friends would deride
him for ruining the finest career in the world for a Cossack woman and a
waste of snow - it weighed not a straw in the balance compared with Sasha
herself. On the first dark night they would fly. They would take ship to
Russia. So he pondered; so he plotted as he walked up and down the deck.
He was recalled, turning westward, by the sight of the sun, slung like
an orange on the cross of St Paul's. It was blood-red and sinking rapidly.
It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this hour and more. Seized
instantly with those dark forebodings which shadowed even his most confident
thoughts of her, he plunged the way he had seen them go into the hold of the
ship; and, after stumbling among chests and barrels in the darkness, was
made aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they were seated there. For
one second, he had a vision of them; saw Sasha seated on the sailor's knee;
saw her bend towards him; saw them embrace before the light was blotted out
in a red cloud by his rage. He blazed into such a howl of anguish that the
whole ship echoed. Sasha threw herself between them, or the sailor would
have been stifled before he could draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sickness
came over Orlando, and they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy
to drink before he revived. And then, when he had recovered and was sat upon
a heap of sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before his dizzied
eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox that had bit him, now cajoling, now
denouncing, so that he came to doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle
guttered; had not the shadows moved? The box was heavy, she said; the man
was helping her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment - for who can be
sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to find? - the next
was the more violent with anger at her deceit. Then Sasha herself turned
white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go that night, and called
upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of
a common seaman. Indeed, looking at them together (which he could hardly
bring himself to do) Orlando was outraged by the foulness of his imagination
that could have painted so frail a creature in the paw of that hairy sea
brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his stockings, wore common
wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray horse upon which some wren or
robin has perched in its flight. So he yielded; believed her; and asked her
pardon. Yet when they were going down the ship's side, lovingly again, Sasha
paused with her hand on the ladder, and called back to this tawny
wide-cheeked monster a volley of Russian greetings, jests, or endearments,
not a word of which Orlando could understand. But there was something in her
tone (it might be the fault of the Russian consonants) that reminded Orlando
of a scene some nights since, when he had come upon her in secret gnawing a
candle-end in a corner, which she had picked from the floor. True, it was
pink; it was gilt; and it was from the King's table; but it was tallow, and
she gnawed it. Was there not, he thought, handing her on to the ice,
something rank in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant born?
And he fancied her at forty grown unwieldy though she was now slim as a
reed, and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again as they
skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast, and he felt as
if he had been hooked by a great fish through the nose and rushed through
the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent.
It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the
domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness
against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at
Charing; there the dome of St Paul's; there the massy square of the Tower
buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob at
the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows
were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando's
fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in
Orlando's fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually.
All the time they seemed to be skating in fathomless depths of air, so blue
the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they sped quicker and
quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about them, and cutting in
the air with their wings the very same sweeps that they cut on the ice with
their skates.
Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more
delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him
how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the
steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf. Upon which he told
her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the
great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket.
And then she praised him; for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his
legs. Ravished with her praises and shamed to think how he had maligned her
by fancying her on the knees of a common sailor and grown fat and lethargic
at forty, he told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet
instantly bethought him how she was like the spring and green grass and
rushing waters, and seizing her more tightly than ever, he swung her with
him half across the river so that the gulls and the cormorants swung too.
And halting at length, out of breath, she said, panting slightly, that he
was like a million-candled Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia) hung
with yellow globes; incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; (so one
might translate it) for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his
black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own
radiance, from a lamp lit within.
All the colour, save the red of Orlando's cheeks, soon faded. Night
came on. As the orange light of sunset vanished it was succeeded by an
astonishing white glare from the torches, bonfires, flaming cressets, and
other devices by which the river was lit up and the strangest transformation
took place. Various churches and noblemen's palaces, whose fronts were of
white stone showed in streaks and patches as if floating on the air. Of St
Paul's, in particular, nothing was left but a gilt cross. The Abbey appeared
like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything suffered emaciation and
transformation. As they approached the carnival, they heard a deep note like
that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed louder and louder until it became
an uproar. Every now and then a great shout followed a rocket into the air.
Gradually they could discern little figures breaking off from the vast crowd
and spinning hither and thither like gnats on the surface of a river. Above
and around this brilliant circle like a bowl of darkness pressed the deep
black of a winter's night. And then into this darkness there began to rise
with pauses, which kept the expectation alert and the mouth open, flowering
rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown. At one moment the woods and distant
hills showed green as on a summer's day; the next all was winter and
blackness again.
By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure
and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who were
pressing as near to the silken rope as they dared. Loth to end their privacy
and encounter the sharp eyes that were on the watch for them, the couple
lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse
dealers, cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their whimples;
orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little
ragamuffins such as always haunt the outskirts of a crowd, screaming and
scrambling among people's feet - all the riff-raff of the London streets
indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes,
shoving, tickling, pinching; here uproarious, there glum; some of them with
mouths gaping a yard wide; others as little reverent as daws on a house-top;
all as variously rigged out as their purse or stations allowed; here in fur
and broadcloth; there in tatters with their feet kept from the ice only by a
dishclout bound about them. The main press of people, it appeared, stood
opposite a booth or stage something like our Punch and Judy show upon which
some kind of theatrical performance was going forward. A black man was
waving his arms and vociferating. There was a woman in white laid upon a
bed. Rough though the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of
steps and sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and
whistling, or when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel on to the
ice which a dog would scramble for, still the astonishing, sinuous melody of
the words stirred Orlando like music. Spoken with extreme speed and a daring
agility of tongue which reminded him of the sailors singing in the beer
gardens at Wapping, the words even without meaning were as wine to him. But
now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if
torn from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his
own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha
he killed with his own hands.
At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down
his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too.
Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave.
Worms devour us.
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn?
Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The
night was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they
had waited for; it was on such a night as this that they had planned to fly.
He remembered everything. The time had come. With a burst of passion he
snatched Sasha to him, and hissed in her ear "Jour de ma vie!" It was their
signal. At midnight they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars. Horses
waited there. Everything was in readiness for their flight. So they parted,
she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hour of the time.
Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so inky a
blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen, which was all to
the good, but it was also of the most solemn stillness so that a horse's
hoof, or a child's cry, could be heard at a distance of half a mile. Many a
time did Orlando, pacing the little courtyard, hold his heart at the sound
of some nag's steady footfall on the cobbles, or at the rustle of a woman's
dress. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home belated; or
some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed,
and the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt
downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city lived
moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one, were extinguished. The
street lanterns in these purlieus were few at most; and the negligence of
the night watchman often suffered them to expire long before dawn. The
darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of
his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his
holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least till he could find
nothing more needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty
minutes to midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn
parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of
canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their
ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till
they toppled off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor. The
darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He
listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout
and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress
cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he
had no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would
come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her
footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a
blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation
was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated
a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that
it took him a minute to realize that these were raindrops falling; the blows
were the blows of the rain. At first, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by
one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then ran
themselves together in a steady spout of water. It was as if the hard and
consolidated sky poured itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space
of five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin.
Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath the
lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air was
thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the
downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it. The
roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and
perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight he
scarcely thought. All his senses were bent upon gazing along the cobbled
pathway - gleaming in the light of the lantern - for Sasha's coming.
Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain
strokes. But the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and ominous
voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish
in Orlando's soul, St Paul's struck the first stroke of midnight. Four times
more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had
made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth
stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his
apprehensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming
death and disaster. When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was
sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be
late; she might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate
and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling
one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her
deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him
rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes,
each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous
rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees.
The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge
noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were
also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Orlando stood there
immovable till Paul's clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful
irony, and all his teeth showing, "Jour de ma vie!" he dashed the lantern to
the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where.
Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to
take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the dawn broke,
which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and the
rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off
Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where,
for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that
it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had been stood on its
pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters. The river had gained
its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to which view many
philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst
the ice asunder with such vehemence that it swept the huge and massy
fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one
giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some
of these were as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no
bigger than a man's hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down
a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way.
Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to
be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank,
so that they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what
was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human
creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and
precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into
the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. Sometimes quite a
cluster of these poor creatures would come down together, some on their
knees, others suckling their babies. One old man seemed to be reading aloud
from a holy book. At other times, and his fate perhaps was the most
dreadful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrow tenement alone. As they
swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild
promises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and vowing altars and
wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so dazed with terror
that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before them. One crew
of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their liveries, roared and
shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado, and were dashed against
a tree and sunk with blasphemies on their lips. An old nobleman - for such
his furred gown and golden chain proclaimed him - went down not far from
where Orlando stood, calling vengeance upon the Irish rebels, who, he cried
with his last breath, had plotted this devilry. Many perished clasping some
silver pot or other treasure to their breasts; and at least a score of poor
wretches were drowned by their own cupidity, hurling themselves from the
bank into the flood rather than let a gold goblet escape them, or see before
their eyes the disappearance of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables,
possessions of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other
strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid
sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an
extraordinary number of cooking utensils.
Dazed and astounded, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch
the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming
to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard along
the river bank in the direction of the sea. Rounding a bend of the river, he
came opposite that reach where, not two days ago, the ships of the
Ambassadors had seemed immovably frozen. Hastily, he made count of them all;
the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still floated, though
the French had broken loose from her moorings, and the Turkish vessel had
taken a great rent in her side and was fast filling with water. But the
Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. For one moment Orlando thought it must
have foundered; but, raising himself in his stirrups and shading his eyes,
which had the sight of a hawk's, he could just make out the shape of a ship
on the horizon. The black eagles were flying from the mast head. The ship of
the Muscovite Embassy was standing out to sea.
Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would
breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless
woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless,
mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the
swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a
little straw.
The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better
perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story
of Orlando's life, documents, both private and historical, have made it
possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without
looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by
flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into
the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. But now we come
to an episode which lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring
it. Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no
explaining it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole
religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is
to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of
them what he may.
In the summer of that disastrous winter which saw the frost, the flood,
the deaths of many thousands, and the complete downfall of Orlando's hopes -
for he was exiled from Court; in deep disgrace with the most powerful nobles
of his time; the Irish house of Desmond was justly enraged; the King had
already trouble enough with the Irish not to relish this further addition -
in that summer Orlando retired to his great house in the country and there
lived in complete solitude. One June morning - it was Saturday the
18th - he failed to rise at his usual hour, and when his groom
went to call him he was found fast asleep. Nor could he be awakened. He lay
as if in a trance, without perceptible breathing; and though dogs were set
to bark under his window; cymbals, drums, bones beaten perpetually in his
room; a gorse bush put under his pillow; and mustard plasters applied to his
feet, still he did not wake, take food, or show any sign of life for seven
whole days. On the seventh day he woke at his usual time (a quarter before
eight, precisely) and turned the whole posse of caterwauling wives and
village soothsayers out of his room, which was natural enough; but what was
strange was that he showed no consciousness of any such trance, but dressed
himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a single night's
slumber. Yet some change, it was suspected, must have taken place in the
chambers of his brain, for though he was perfectly rational and seemed
graver and more sedate in his ways than before, he appeared to have an
imperfect recollection of his past life. He would listen when people spoke
of the great frost or the skating or the carnival, but he never gave any
sign, except by passing his hand across his brow as if to wipe away some
cloud, of having witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six
months were discussed, he seemed not so much distressed as puzzled, as if he
were troubled by confused memories of some time long gone or were trying to
recall stories told him by another. It was observed that if Russia was
mentioned or Princesses or ships, he would fall into a gloom of an uneasy
kind and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him,
or take a knife and carve a piece of cedar wood. But the doctors were hardly
wiser then than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise,
starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie in bed
all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, together with the
usual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as the fancy took them, with
possets of newt's slobber on rising, and draughts of peacock's gall on going
to bed, they left him to himself, and gave it as their opinion that he had
been asleep for a week.
But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from
asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures - trances in
which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for
ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds
them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the
finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it
rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses
daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what
strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our
most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by
the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life
again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having
waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none
coming, let us get on with the story.
Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace
at Court and the violence of his grief were partly the reason of it, but as
he made no effort to defend himself and seldom invited anyone to visit him
(though he had many friends who would willingly have done so) it appeared as
if to be alone in the great house of his fathers suited his temper. Solitude
was his choice. How he spent his time, nobody quite knew. The servants, of
whom he kept a full retinue, though much of their business was to dust empty
rooms and to smooth the coverlets of beds that were never slept in, watched,
in the dark of the evening, as they sat over their cakes and ale, a light
passing along the galleries, through the banqueting-halls, up the staircase,
into the bedrooms, and knew that their master was perambulating the house
alone. None dared follow him, for the house was haunted by a great variety
of ghosts, and the extent of it made it easy to lose one's way and either
fall down some hidden staircase or open a door which, should the wind blow
it to, would shut upon one for ever - accidents of no uncommon occurrence,
as the frequent discovery of the skeletons of men and animals in attitudes
of great agony made evident. Then the light would be lost altogether, and
Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr Dupper, the chaplain, how
she hoped his Lordship had not met with some bad accident. Mr Dupper would
opine that his Lordship was on his knees, no doubt, among the tombs of his
ancestors in the Chapel, which was in the Billiard Table Court, half a mile
away on the south side. For he had sins on his conscience, Mr Dupper was
afraid; upon which Mrs Grimsditch would retort, rather sharply, that so had
most of us; and Mrs Stewkley and Mrs Field and old Nurse Carpenter would all
raise their voices in his Lordship's praise; and the grooms and the stewards
would swear that it was a thousand pities to see so fine a nobleman moping
about the house when he might be hunting the fox or chasing the deer; and
even the little laundry maids and scullery maids, the Judys and the Faiths,
who were handing round the tankards and cakes, would pipe up their testimony
to his Lordship's gallantry; for never was there a kinder gentleman, or one
more free with those little pieces of silver which serve to buy a knot of
ribbon or put a posy in one's hair; until even the Blackamoor whom they
called Grace Robinson by way of making a Christian woman of her, understood
what they were at, and agreed that his Lordship was a handsome, pleasant,
darling gentleman in the only way she could, that is to say by showing all
her teeth at once in a broad grin. In short, all his serving men and women
held him in high respect, and cursed the foreign Princess (but they called
her by a coarser name than that) who had brought him to this pass.
But though it was probably cowardice, or love of hot ale, that led Mr
Dupper to imagine his Lordship safe among the tombs so that he need not go
in search of him, it may well have been that Mr Dupper was right. Orlando
now took a strange delight in thoughts of death and decay, and, after pacing
the long galleries and ballrooms with a taper in his hand, looking at
picture after picture as if he sought the likeness of somebody whom he could
not find, would mount into the family pew and sit for hours watching the
banners stir and the moonlight waver with a bat or death's head moth to keep
him company. Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend into the
crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations
together. The place was so seldom visited that the rats made free with the
lead work, and now a thigh bone would catch at his cloak as he passed, or he
would crack the skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot.
It was a ghastly sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as
if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the
Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how
the skeleton lies beneath the flesh: how we that dance and sing above must
lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring (here Orlando,
stooping his lantern, would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had
rolled into a corner) loses its ruby and the eye which was so lustrous
shines no more. "Nothing remains of all these Princes," Orlando would say,
indulging in some pardonable exaggeration of their rank, "except one digit,"
and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and
that. "Whose hand was it?" he went on to ask. "The right or the left? The
hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the war horse, or plied
the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold steel? Had it?" but
here either his invention failed him or, what is more likely, provided him
with so many instances of what a hand can do that he shrank, as his wont
was, from the cardinal labour of composition, which is excision, and he put
it with the other bones, thinking how there was a writer called Thomas
Browne, a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects took his fancy
amazingly.
So, taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order, for
though romantic, he was singularly methodical and detested nothing so much
as a ball of string on the floor, let alone the skull of an ancestor, he
returned to that curious, moody pacing down the galleries, looking for
something among the pictures, which was interrupted at length by a veritable
spasm of sobbing, at the sight of a Dutch snow scene by an unknown artist.
Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting
the bones of his ancestors and how life is founded on a grave, he stood
there shaken with sobs, all for the desire of a woman in Russian trousers,
with slanting eyes, a pouting mouth and pearls about her neck. She had gone.
She had left him. He was never to see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he
found his way back to his own rooms; and Mrs Grimsditch, seeing the light in
the window, put the tankard from her lips and said Praise be to God, his
Lordship was safe in his room again; for she had been thinking all this
while that he was foully murdered.
Orlando now drew his chair up to the table; opened the works of Sir
Thomas Browne and proceeded to investigate the delicate articulation of one
of the doctor's longest and most marvellously contorted cogitations.
For though these are not matters on which a biographer can profitably
enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a reader's part in making
up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and
circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living
voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked
like; know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought - and it
is for readers such as these that we write - it is plain then to such a
reader that Orlando was strangely compounded of many humours - of
melancholy, of indolence, of passion, of love of solitude, to say nothing of
all those contortions and subtleties of temper which were indicated on the
first page, when he slashed at a dead nigger's head; cut it down; hung it
chivalrously out of his reach again and then betook himself to the
windowseat with a book. The taste for books was an early one. As a child he
was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper
away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms
away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a
nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its
implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many
people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were
thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were
early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and
to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it
would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as it
sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was
the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so
that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift - plate, linen, houses,
men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion - had only to open a book for the
whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were
his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his
eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the
carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other
movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under
the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked
man.
The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He would read
often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about
the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away
his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This
was bad enough and wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the
groom, of Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr Dupper, the chaplain. A
fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave
books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For
once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that
it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and
festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad
enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath
a leaky roof - for he has not much to lose, after all - the plight of a rich
man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet
writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of
him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny
he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and
become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a
well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his
brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they
find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of
Hell.
Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for
reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has broken many of
his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when
he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag
and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and
all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and
unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner.
Within were some fifty drawers of cedar wood and upon each was a paper
neatly written in Orlando's hand. He paused, as if hesitating which to open.
One was inscribed "The Death of Ajax", another "The Birth of Pyramus",
another "Iphigenia in Aulis", another "The Death of Hippolytus", another
"Meleager", another "The Return of Odysseus", - in fact there was scarcely a
single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a
crisis of his career. In each drawer lay a document of considerable size all
written over in Orlando's hand. The truth was that Orlando had been
afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando
begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and
games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the
cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and
smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in
another, and on his knee a roll of paper. Thus had been written, before he
was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems;
some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic,
and all long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and
Coronet opposite St Paul's Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of it gave
him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his mother, since to
write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable
disgrace.
Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he chose
from this repository one thick document called "Xenophila a Tragedy" or some
such title, and one thin one, called simply "The Oak Tree" (this was the
only monosyllabic title among the lot), and then he approached the inkhorn,
fingered the quill, and made other such passes as those addicted to this
vice begin their rites with. But he paused.
As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so,
indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run
with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due
reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played
so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds,
of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most
incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's;
nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of
November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again,
our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea,
and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon;
Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer
"Yes"; if we are truthful we say "No"; nature, who has so much to answer for
besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further
complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a
perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us - a piece of a policeman's
trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil - but has
contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a
single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.
Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know
not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement
in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand
towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright,
now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen
of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a
single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed,
our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings,
a rising and falling of lights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in
the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a
million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was
she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover?
Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead? - all of
which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his agony somewhere,
he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted over the
table, which act, explain it how one may (and no explanation perhaps is
possible - Memory is inexplicable), at once substituted for the face of the
Princess a face of a very different sort. But whose was it, he asked
himself? And he had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new
picture which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen
through the next, before he could say to himself, "This is the face of that
rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett's room ever so many years ago
when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him," Orlando continued,
catching at another of those little coloured rags, "sitting at the table, as
I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes," said
Orlando, "that ever were, but who the devil was he?" Orlando asked, for here
Memory added to the forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained
ruffle, then a brown doublet, and finally a pair of thick boots such as
citizens wear in Cheapside. "Not a Nobleman; not one of us," said Orlando
(which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most courteous of
gentlemen; but it shows what an effect noble birth has upon the mind and
incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer), "a poet, I
dare say." By all the laws, Memory, having disturbed him sufficiently,
should now have blotted the whole thing out completely, or have fetched up
something so idiotic and out of keeping - like a dog chasing a cat or an old
woman blowing her nose into a red cotton handkerchief - that, in despair of
keeping pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in
earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the
hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house.) But Orlando
paused. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big,
bright eyes. Still he looked, still he paused. It is these pauses that are
our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops
rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid
rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the
shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the
damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt
Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the
strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground.
Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the
first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said
(reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought
and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir
Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and
Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that
drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating,
what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of
Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table - and again he paused. Like
an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and
the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they
should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead,
embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing - and
Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out
that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words
were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the
rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so
arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the
English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition
will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed
good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was
in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at
ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted
his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now
laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic
and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the
fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest
genius or the greatest fool in the world.
It was to settle this last question that he decided after many months
of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and communicate with
the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham, of Norfolk,
who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless
put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred,
fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory
about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all
the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the
bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured.
They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow
between their lips - which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr
Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit
behind a curtain and hear them talk. Even the imagination of that bold and
various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used
to talk about - a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards - seem brutish in
the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a
scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books. He had never
been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still, blush, and stride
like a grenadier in a ladies' drawing-room. He had twice fallen, in sheer
abstraction, from his horse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea's fan once while
making a rhyme. Eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness
for the life of society, an ineffable hope, that all the turbulence of his
youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the
country proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to
the noble - was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat - possessed
him. For the first time since the night of the great flood he was happy.
He now commissioned Mr Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr Nicholas
Greene of Clifford's Inn a document which set forth Orlando's admiration for
his works (for Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time) and his
desire to make his acquaintance; which he scarcely dared ask; for he had
nothing to offer in return; but if Mr Nicholas Greene would condescend to
visit him, a coach and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at
whatever hour Mr Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando's
house. One may fill up the phrases which then followed; and figure Orlando's
delight when, in no long time, Mr Greene signified his acceptance of the
Noble Lord's invitation; took his place in the coach and was set down in the
hall to the south of the main building punctually at seven o'clock on
Monday, April the twenty-first.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had
stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the land had come
there; and the sternest warriors. Banners hung there which had been at
Flodden and at Agincourt. There were displayed the painted coats of arms
with their lions and their leopards and their coronets. There were the long
tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast
fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with
its million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes.
Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his slouched
hat and black doublet, carrying in one hand a small bag.
That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly disappointed was
inevitable. The poet was not above middle height; was of a mean figure; was
lean and stooped somewhat, and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering, the
dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled
where to place him. There was something about him which belonged neither to
servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and beaked
nose was fine, but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant, but the lips
hung loose and slobbered. It was the expression of the face - as a whole,
however, that was disquieting. There was none of that stately composure
which makes the faces of the nobility so pleasing to look at; nor had it
anything of the dignified servility of a well-trained domestic's face; it
was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn together. Poet though he was, it
seemed as if he were more used to scold than to flatter; to quarrel than to
coo; to scramble than to ride; to struggle than to rest; to hate than to
love. This, too, was shown by the quickness of his movements; and by
something fiery and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken
aback. But they went to dinner.
Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for the
first time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the
splendour of his table. Stranger still, he bethought him with pride - for
the thought was generally distasteful - of that great grandmother Moll who
had milked the cows. He was about somehow to allude to this humble woman and
her milk-pails, when the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd,
seeing how common the name of Greene was, that the family had come over with
the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they
had come down in the world and done little more than leave their name to the
royal borough of Greenwich. Further talk of the same sort, about lost
castles, coats of arms, cousins who were baronets in the north,
intermarriage with noble families in the west, how some Greens spelt the
name with an e at the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was
on the table. Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll
and her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time the
wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey was passing
freely that Orlando dared mention what he could not help thinking a more
important matter than the Greens or the cows; that is to say the sacred
subject of poetry. At the first mention of the word, the poet's eyes flashed
fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airs he had worn; thumped his glass on
the table, and launched into one of the longest, most intricate, most
passionate, and bitterest stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the
lips of a jilted woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of
the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to
sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the
writing. So the talk went on with ramifications interminable, until Orlando
ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write - but here the
poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wainscot, he said.
The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a state where a mouse's
squeak upset them for a fortnight. Doubtless the house was full of vermin,
but Orlando had not heard them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of
his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could
only marvel that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague,
the dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he
had an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, above all,
he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which defied description.
There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire;
another about second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he
woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers
were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a
rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about
London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so
finely made and curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if
unconsciously, and indeed it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it
confounded him to think that he had only sold five hundred copies of his
poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All
he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the
art of poetry was dead in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne,
all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of
his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some
scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe.
Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he
was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose, and people
soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped
up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style
would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson - Ben Jonson
was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of
literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect
to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might
call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first
catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers
and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender
in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age,
he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - neither of
which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him
to say it - for he loved literature as he loved his life - he could see no
good in the present and had no hope for the future. Here he poured himself
out another glass of wine.
Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing
that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the
more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could
remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit
Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk,
which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him
now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, "Stap my
vitals, Bill" (this was to Shakespeare), "there's a great wave coming and
you're on the top of it," by which he meant, Greene explained, that they
were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that
Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was
killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how
this prediction turned out. "Poor foolish fellow," said Greene, "to go and
say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth - the Elizabethan a great age!"
"So, my dear Lord," he continued, settling himself comfortably in his
chair and rubbing the wine-glass between his fingers, "we must make the best
of it, cherish the past and honour those writers - there are still a few of
'em - who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for
Glawr." (Orlando could have wished him a better accent.) "Glawr," said
Greene, "is the spur of noble minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds
a year paid quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed
every morning reading Cicero. I would imitate his style so that you couldn't
tell the difference between us. That's what I call fine writing," said
Greene; "that's what I call Glawr. But it's necessary to have a pension to
do it."
By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of discussing his own work
with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now got upon the lives
and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene
had known intimately and about whom he had a thousand anecdotes of the most
amusing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These,
then, were his gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them
quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an intrigue
of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of
washing bills held to the heads of printer's devils at the street door. Thus
Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said,
that these plays show the faults they do. The rest of the time was spent in
carousings and junketings in taverns and in beer gardens, when things were
said that passed belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost
frolic of the courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this Greene told with a
spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power
of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of
books provided they were written three hundred years ago.
So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of
liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as something too
indefinite to be called by any one name, but had something of fear in it and
something of fascination. He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such
good company that one could listen to the story of his ague for ever. Then
he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he made so free with the
names of God and Woman; then he was so full of queer crafts and had such
strange lore in his head; could make salad in three hundred different ways;
knew all that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen
musical instruments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to
toast cheese in the great Italian fireplace. That he did not know a geranium
from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a
teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow; was ignorant of
the rotation of the crops; thought oranges grew underground and turnips on
trees; preferred any townscape to any landscape, - all this and much more
amazed Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the
maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants, who
loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never
been so lively as now that he was there - all of which gave Orlando a great
deal to think about, and caused him to compare this way of life with the
old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of
Spain's apoplexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day
passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the
Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He
bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and
timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable to strike a proper
balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a
plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.
At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite
conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between the
smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf which for
centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock weed, he thought that unless
he could somehow make his escape, he should be smothered alive. Getting up
and hearing the pigeons coo, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he
thought that unless he could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet
Street, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he
thought, hearing the footman mend the fire and spread the table with silver
dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious yawn)
sleeping die.
So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been
able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed, the house
was surrounded by a park fifteen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet
high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his
nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando's leave, that very morning.
Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go.
The house, he thought, would seem very dull without him. On parting (for he
had never yet liked to mention the subject), he had the temerity to press
his play upon the Death of Hercules upon the poet and ask his opinion of it.
The poet took it; muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando
cut short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene, with
many protestations of affection, jumped into the coach and was gone.
The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty as
the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have the heart to
make toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace again. He would never have the
wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch
as it should be mixed; a thousand good quips and cranks would be lost to
him. Yet what a relief to be out of the sound of that querulous voice, what
a luxury to be alone once more, so he could not help reflecting, as he
unloosed the mastiff which had been tied up these six weeks because it never
saw the poet without biting him.
Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same
afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs Greene,
that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was
drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner -
such as it was - was set on a dressing-table where the children had been
making mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing, here
he could write, and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord
at home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country - his new poem was to have
some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was
tickling the cat's ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for
inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then. It was so
done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted
was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and
follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of
rolling his r's, were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt
about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any
disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules,
which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid the
expenses of Mrs Greene's tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take
care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did
with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman;
delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop
it in the filthiest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when
the man was turning to go he stopped him, "Take the swiftest horse in the
stable," he said, "ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship
which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King's own kennels
the finest elk-hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back
without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to
his books, "I have done with men."
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and
disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efficiently that he was back that day
three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk-hounds, one of
whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner-table to a
litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando had them brought to his bedchamber.
"For," he said, "I have done with men."
Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.
Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not
only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the
worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all
equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit
to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven
poetical works, only retaining "The Oak Tree", which was his boyish dream
and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any
trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its
variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush
were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and
very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through
the Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half
forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he
reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of
Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his
favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or
woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of
speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what
years remained to him in tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns
unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw - but probably the
reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and
plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons
rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night
succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine
weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years
or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can
sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might
have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed"
(here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever
happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom
and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind
of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the
body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human
spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on
the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of
the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the
clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves
fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have
said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when
a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is
thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes
inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his
vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the
oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they
would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest
variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems
which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship?
What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which
seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second,
swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and
filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent
months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he
would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man
of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no
more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the
length of human life (of the animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our
capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it
is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces
which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment,
dominate our unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was
sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the
gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it
went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments
swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity,
there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those scored
parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his
heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree
had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the
process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by
Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled -
What is Love? - back it would come at the least provocation or none, and
hustle Books or Metaphors of What one lives for into the margin, there to
wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the
process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with
pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in
rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted
sword by her side, but with scents - she was strongly perfumed - and with
sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter's day. And so,
the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log
fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with
old King James' slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds
of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge
it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like
the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown
about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned
women.
"Another metaphor by Jupiter!" he would exclaim as he said this (which
will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and
explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any
conclusion about Love). "And what's the point of it?" he would ask himself.
"Why not say simply in so many words?" and then he would try to think for
half an hour, - or was it two years and a half? - how to say simply in so
many words what love is. "A figure like that is manifestly untruthful," he
argued, "for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances,
could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and
Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all," he cried, "why say
Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means
and leave it?"
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so
to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great
distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the
grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like
the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the
grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of
hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had
fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more
true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able
to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a
deep dejection.
And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd
it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to
reflect that this fine fellow with all his faculties about him and a healthy
body, witness cheeks and limbs - a man who never thought twice about heading
a charge or fighting a duel - should be so subject to the lethargy of
thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question
of poetry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl
behind her mother's cottage door. In our belief, Greene's ridicule of his
tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess' ridicule of his love. But to
return:
Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky
and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in
London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile (whose habits have already
been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as
if that sardonic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself,
were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So
Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain,
others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and
muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our
time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold)
Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound
him to a servitude than which none is stricter. "I'll be blasted," he said,
"if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick
Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day
forward, to please myself"; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole
budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering
loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at
him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted
for it - nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to
think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one rending,
the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own favour
in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints
Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age,
conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave
among laurels and the intangible banners of a people's reverence
perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the
dustbin. "Fame," he said. "is like" (and since there was no Nick Greene to
stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or
two of the quietest) "a braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of
silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,"
etc. etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and
constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark,
ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the
obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where
he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he
alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood,
under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground,
seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity,
and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to
the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of
envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of
generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks
offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he
supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out),
for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church
builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but
only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night? "What an
admirable life this is," he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak
tree. "And why not enjoy it this very moment?" The thought struck him like a
bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected
love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the
nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no
longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had
been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in
the hollow beneath him, his house.
There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather
than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this man wished
or that, but circumspectly, by a single architect with one idea in his head.
Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical;
the courts were some of them oblong and some square; in this was a fountain;
in that a statue; the buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here
was a chapel, there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between
and clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright flowers; all were clasped - yet
so well set out was it that it seemed that every part had room to spread
itself fittingly - by the roll of a massive wall; while smoke from
innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air. This vast, yet ordered
building, which could house a thousand men and perhaps two thousand horses,
was built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown. Here have
lived, for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my
own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths has
left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their
spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have
left this.
Never had the house looked more noble and humane.
Why, then, had he wished to raise himself above them? For it seemed
vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anonymous work of
creation; the labours of those vanished hands. Better was it to go unknown
and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen,
than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust. For after all, he said,
kindling as he looked at the great house on the greensward below, the
unknown lords and ladies who lived there never forgot to set aside something
for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that
will fall. There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the
kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their goblets were polished,
though they lay sick, and their windows were lit though they lay dying.
Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the
molecatcher and the stone-mason. Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders - thus
he apostrophized them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as
called him cold, indifferent, slothful (the truth being that a quality often
lies just on the other side of the wall from where we seek it) - thus he
apostrophized his house and race in terms of the most moving eloquence; but
when it came to the peroration - and what is eloquence that lacks a
peroration? - he fumbled. He would have liked to have ended with a flourish
to the effect that he would follow in their footsteps and add another stone
to their building. Since, however, the building already covered nine acres,
to add even a single stone seemed superfluous. Could one mention furniture
in a peroration? Could one speak of chairs and tables and mats to lie beside
people's beds? For whatever the peroration wanted, that was what the house
stood in need of. Leaving his speech unfinished for the moment, he strode
down hill again resolved henceforward to devote himself to the furnishing of
the mansion. The news - that she was to attend him instantly - brought tears
to the eyes of good old Mrs Grimsditch, now grown somewhat old. Together
they perambulated the house.
The towel horse in the King's bedroom ("and that was King Jamie, my
Lord," she said, hinting that it was many a day since a King had slept under
their roof; but the odious Parliament days were over and there was now a
Crown in England again) lacked a leg; there were no stands to the ewers in
the little closet leading into the waiting room of the Duchess's page; Mr
Greene had made a stain on the carpet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she
and Judy, for all their scrubbing, had never been able to wash out. Indeed,
when Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood chairs
and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian
carpets, every one of the three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms which the
house contained, he saw that it would be no light one; and if some thousands
of pounds of his estate remained over, these would do little more than hang
a few galleries with tapestry, set the dining hall with fine, carved chairs
and provide mirrors of solid silver and chairs of the same metal (for which
he had an inordinate passion) for the furnishing of the royal bedchambers.
He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove beyond a doubt if we
look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he bought at this
time, with the expenses totted up in the margin - but these we omit.
"To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and
white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson
and white silk...
"To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their
buckram covers to them all...
"To sixty seven walnut tree tables...
"To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice
glasses...
"To one hundred and two mats, each thirty yards long...
"To ninety seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchment
lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs suitable...
"To fifty branches for a dozen lights apiece..."
Already - it is an effect lists have upon us - we are beginning to
yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it
is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it and the total sum
disbursed ran into many thousands - that is to say millions of our money.
And if his day was spent like this, at night again, Lord Orlando might be
found reckoning out what it would cost to level a million molehills, if the
men were paid tenpence an hour; and again, how many hundredweight of nails
at fivepence halfpenny a gill were needed to repair the fence round the
park, which was fifteen miles in circumference. And so on and so on.
The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another,
and one molehill not much different from a million. Some pleasant journeys
it cost him; and some fine adventures. As, for instance, when he set a whole
city of blind women near Bruges to stitch hangings for a silver canopied
bed; and the story of his adventure with a Moor in Venice of whom he bought
(but only at the sword's point) his lacquered cabinet, might, in other
hands, prove worth the telling. Nor did the work lack variety; for here
would come, drawn by teams from Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across and
laid along the gallery for flooring; and then a chest from Persia, stuffed
with wool and sawdust. from which, at last, he would take a single plate, or
one topaz ring.
At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another
table; no room on te tables for another cabinet; no room in the cabinet for
another rose-bowl; no room in the bowl for another handful of potpourri;
there was no room for anything anywhere; in short the house was furnished.
In the garden snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses, lilies,
asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, pear trees and apple trees and
cherry trees and mulberry trees, with an enormous quantity of rare and
flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each
other's roots that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no
stretch of sward without its shade. In addition, he had imported wild fowl
with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose manners
concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts.
All now was ready; and when it was evening and the innumerable silver
sconces were lit and the light airs which for ever moved about the galleries
stirred the blue and green arras, so that it looked as if the huntsmen were
riding and Daphne flying; when the silver shone and lacquer glowed and wood
kindled; when the carved chairs held their arms out and dolphins swam upon
the walls with mermaids on their backs; when all this and much more than all
this was complete and to his liking, Orlando walked through the house with
his elk-hounds following and felt content. He had matter now, he thought, to
fill out his peroration. Perhaps it would be well to begin the speech all
over again. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt that still something
was lacking. Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas,
resting on lions' paws with swans' necks curving under them, beds even of
the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them,
people lying in them improve them amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now began a
series of very splendid entertainments to the nobility and gentry of the
neighbourhood. The three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms were full for a
month at a time. Guests jostled each other on the fifty-two staircases.
Three hundred servants bustled about the pantries. Banquets took place
almost nightly. Thus, in a very few years, Orlando had worn the nap off his
velvet, and spent the half of his fortune; but he had earned the good
opinion of his neighbours, held a score of offices in the county, and was
annually presented with perhaps a dozen volumes dedicated to his Lordship in
rather fulsome terms by grateful poets. For though he was careful not to
consort with writers at that time and kept himself always aloof from ladies
of foreign blood, still, he was excessively generous both to women and to
poets, and both adored him.
But when the feasting was at its height and his guests were at their
revels, he was apt to take himself off to his private room alone. There when
the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he would have out an old
writing book, stitched together with silk stolen from his mother's workbox,
and labelled in a round schoolboy hand, "The Oak Tree, A Poem". In this he
would write till midnight chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as
many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the
year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process
of writing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the
historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His
floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was
congealing those warm fountains. The very landscape outside was less stuck
about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and
intricate. Perhaps the senses were a little duller and honey and cream less
seductive to the palate. Also that the streets were better drained and the
houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.
One day he was adding a line or two with enormous labour to "The Oak
Tree, A Poem", when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was no shadow,
he soon saw, but the figure of a very tall lady in riding hood and mantle
crossing the quadrangle on which his room looked out. As this was the most
private of the courts, and the lady was a stranger to him, Orlando marvelled
how she had got there. Three days later the same apparition appeared again;
and on Wednesday noon appeared once more. This time, Orlando was determined
to follow her, nor apparently was she afraid to be found, for she slackened
her steps as he came up and looked him full in the face. Any other woman
thus caught in a Lord's private grounds would have been afraid; any other
woman with that face, head-dress, and aspect would have thrown her mantilla
across her shoulders to hide it. For this lady resembled nothing so much as
a hare; a hare startled, but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is overcome by
an immense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers at its
pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering, with nose
pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was six feet high and wore a
head-dress into the bargain of some antiquated kind which made her look
still taller. Thus confronted, she stared at Orlando with a stare in which
timidity and audacity were most strangely combined.
First, she asked him, with a proper, but somewhat clumsy curtsey, to
forgive her her intrusion. Then, rising to her full height again, which must
have been something over six feet two, she went on to say - but with such a
cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando
thought she must have escaped from a lunatic asylum - that she was the
Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the
Roumanian territory. She desired above all things to make his acquaintance,
she said. She had taken lodging over a baker's shop at the Park Gates. She
had seen his picture and it was the image of a sister of hers who was - here
she guffawed - long since dead. She was visiting the English court. The
Queen was her Cousin. The King was a very good fellow but seldom went to bed
sober. Here she tee-heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing
for it but to ask her in and give her a glass of wine.
Indoors, her manners regained the hauteur natural to a Roumanian
Archduchess; and had she not shown a knowledge of wines rare in a lady, and
made some observations upon firearms and the customs of sportsmen in her
country, which were sensible enough, the talk would have lacked spontaneity.
Jumping to her feet at last, she announced that she would call the following
day, swept another prodigious curtsey and departed. The following day,
Orlando rode out. The next, he turned his back; on the third he drew his
curtain. On the fourth it rained, and as he could not keep a lady in the
wet, nor was altogether averse to company, he invited her in and asked her
opinion whether a suit of armour, which belonged to an ancestor of his, was
the work of Jacobi or of Topp. He inclined to Topp. She held another opinion
- it matters very little which. But it is of some importance to the course
of our story that, in illustrating her argument, which had to do with the
working of the tie pieces, the Archduchess Harriet took the golden shin case
and fitted it to Orlando's leg.
That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever
stood upright upon has already been said.
Perhaps something in the way she fastened the ankle buckle; or her
stooping posture; or Orlando's long seclusion; or the natural sympathy which
is between the sexes; or the Burgundy; or the fire - any of these causes may
have been to blame; for certainly blame there is on one side or another,
when a Nobleman of Orlando's breeding, entertaining a lady in his house, and
she his elder by many years, with a face a yard long and staring eyes,
dressed somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the
season was warm - blame there is when such a Nobleman is so suddenly and
violently overcome by passion of some sort that he has to leave the room.
But what sort of passion, it may well be asked, could this be? And the
answer is double faced as Love herself. For Love - but leaving Love out of
the argument for a moment, the actual event was this:
When the Archduchess Harriet Griselda stooped to fasten the buckle,
Orlando heard, suddenly and unaccountably, far off the beating of Love's
wings. The distant stir of that soft plumage roused in him a thousand
memories of rushing waters, of loveliness in the snow and faithlessness in
the flood; and the sound came nearer; and he blushed and trembled; and he
was moved as he had thought never to be moved again; and he was ready to
raise his hands and let the bird of beauty alight upon his shoulders, when -
horror! - a creaking sound like that the crows make tumbling over the trees
began to reverberate; the air seemed dark with coarse black wings; voices
croaked; bits of straw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and there pitched down
upon his shoulders the heaviest and foulest of the birds; which is the
vulture. Thus he rushed from the room and sent the footman to see the
Archduchess Harriet to her carriage.
For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the
other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two
feet, two nails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact
opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you
cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando's love began her flight towards
him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards.
Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a
sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about,
turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was
Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise, that flopped, foully and
disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the
footman.
But the harpy is not so easily banished as all that. Not only did the
Archduchess continue to lodge at the Baker's, but Orlando was haunted every
day and night by phantoms of the foulest kind. Vainly, it seemed, had he
furnished his house with silver and hung the walls with arras, when at any
moment a dung-bedraggled fowl could settle upon his writing table. There she
was, flopping about among the chairs; he saw her waddling ungracefully
across the galleries. Now, she perched, top heavy upon a fire screen. When
he chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke it.
Thus realizing that his home was uninhabitable, and that steps must be
taken to end the matter instantly, he did what any other young man would
have done in his place, and asked King Charles to send him as Ambassador
Extraordinary to Constantinople. The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell
Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. 'Twas a thousand
pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the
country.
Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss
over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.
It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at
this stage of Orlando's career, when he played a most important part in the
public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. We know
that he discharged his duties to admiration - witness his Bath and his
Dukedom. We know that he had a finger in some of the most delicate
negotiations between King Charles and the Turks - to that, treaties in the
vault of the Record Office bear testimony. But the revolution which broke
out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so
damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record
could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the
paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important
sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled
historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big
enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a
meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been
necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination.
Orlando's day was passed, it would seem, somewhat in this fashion.
About seven, he would rise, wrap himself in a long Turkish cloak, light a
cheroot, and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he would stand, gazing at
the city beneath him, apparently entranced. At this hour the mist would lie
so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat;
gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be
firmly fixed; there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge; there the
green-turbaned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the
pariah dogs picking up offal; there the shawled women; there the innumerable
donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles. Soon, the whole town would
be astir with the cracking of whips, the beating of gongs, cryings to
prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of brass-bound wheels, while sour
odours, made from bread fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the
heights of Pera itself and seemed the very breath of the strident
multi-coloured and barbaric population.
Nothing, he reflected, gazing at the view which was now sparkling in
the sun, could well be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the
towns of London and Tunbridge Wells. To the right and left rose in bald and
stony prominence the inhospitable Asian mountains, to which the arid castle
of a robber chief or two might hang; but parsonage there was none, nor manor
house, nor cottage, nor oak, elm, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine. There were
no hedges for ferns to grow on, and no fields for sheep to graze. The houses
were white as egg-shells and as bald. That he, who was English root and
fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama,
and gaze and gaze at those passes and far heights planning journeys there
alone on foot where only the goat and shepherd had gone before; should feel
a passion of affection for the bright, unseasonable flowers, love the
unkempt pariah dogs beyond even his elk hounds at home, and snuff the acrid,
sharp smell of the streets eagerly into his nostrils, surprised him. He
wondered if, in the season of the Crusades, one of his ancestors had taken
up with a Circassian peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain
darkness in his complexion; and, going indoors again, withdrew to his bath.
An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed, he would receive
visits from secretaries and other high officials carrying, one after
another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key. Within were
papers of the highest importance, of which only fragments, here a flourish,
there a seal firmly attached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain. Of their
contents then, we cannot speak, but can only testify that Orlando was kept
busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to
be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes
round capital letters, till luncheon came - a splendid meal of perhaps
thirty courses.
After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the
door, and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries running on foot and waving
great ostrich feather fans above their heads, to call upon the other
ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony was always the same. On
reaching the courtyard, the Janissaries struck with their fans upon the main
portal, which immediately flew open revealing a large chamber, splendidly
furnished. Here were seated two figures, generally of the opposite sexes.
Profound bows and curtseys were exchanged. In the first room, it was
permissible only to mention the weather. Having said that it was fine or
wet, hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber, where
again, two figures rose to greet him. Here it was only permissible to
compare Constantinople as a place of residence with London; and the
Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constantinople, and his hosts
naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London. In
the next chamber, King Charles's and the Sultan's healths had to be
discussed at some length. In the next were discussed the Ambassador's health
and that of his host's wife, but more briefly. In the next the Ambassador
complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host complimented the
Ambassador upon his dress. In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host
deploring their badness, the Ambassador extolling their goodness. The
ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drinking of a
glass of coffee; but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone
through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in
the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would
have sunk beneath the surfeit. For, no sooner had the Ambassador despatched
one such visit, than another had to be undertaken. The same ceremonies were
gone through in precisely the same order six or seven times over at the
houses of the other great officials, so that it was often late at night
before the Ambassador reached home. Though Orlando performed these tasks to
admiration and never denied that they are, perhaps, the most important part
of a diplomatist's duties, he was undoubtedly fatigued by them, and often
depressed to such a pitch of gloom that he preferred to take his dinner
alone with his dogs. To them, indeed, he might be heard talking in his own
tongue. And sometimes, it is said, he would pass out of his own gates late
at night so disguised that the sentries did not know him. Then he would
mingle with the crowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll through the bazaars;
or throw aside his shoes and join the worshippers in the Mosques. Once, when
it was given out that he was ill of a fever, shepherds, bringing their goats
to market, reported that they had met an English Lord on the mountain top
and heard him praying to his God. This was thought to be Orlando himself,
and his prayer was, no doubt, a poem said aloud, for it was known that he
still carried about with him, in the bosom of his cloak, a much scored
manuscript; and servants, listening at the door, heard the Ambassador
chanting something in an odd, sing-song voice when he was alone.
It is with fragments such as these that we must do our best to make up
a picture of Orlando's life and character at this time. There exist, even to
this day, rumours, legends, anecdotes of a floating and unauthenticated kind
about Orlando's life in Constantinople (we have quoted but a few of them)
which go to prove that he possessed, now that he was in the prime of life,
the power to stir the fancy and rivet the eye which will keep a memory green
long after all that more durable qualities can do to preserve it is
forgotten. The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and
some rarer gift, which we may call glamour and have done with it. "A million
candles", as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his being at the trouble
of lighting a single one. He moved like a stag, without any need to think
about his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong.
Hence rumours gathered round him. He became the adored of many women and
some men. It was not necessary that they should speak to him or even that
they should see him; they conjured up before them especially when the
scenery was romantic, or the sun was setting, the figure of a noble
gentleman in silk stockings. Upon the poor and uneducated, he had the same
power as upon the rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing songs
about the English Lord "who dropped his emeralds in the well", which
undoubtedly refer to Orlando, who once, it seems, tore his jewels from him
in a moment of rage or intoxication and flung them in a fountain; whence
they were fished by a page boy. But this romantic power, it is well known,
is often associated with a nature of extreme reserve. Orlando seems to have
made no friends. As far as is known, he formed no attachments. A certain
great lady came all the way from England in order to be near him, and
pestered him with her attentions, but he continued to discharge his duties
so indefatigably that he had not been Ambassador at the Horn for more than
two years and a half before King Charles signified his intention of raising
him to the highest rank in the peerage. The envious said that this was Nell
Gwyn's tribute to the memory of a leg. But, as she had seen him once only,
and was then busily engaged in pelting her royal master with nutshells, it
is likely that it was his merits that won him his Dukedom, not his calves.
Here we must pause, for we have reached a moment of great significance
in his career. For the conferring of the Dukedom was the occasion of a very
famous, and indeed, much disputed incident, which we must now describe,
picking our way among burnt papers and little bits of tape as best we may.
It was at the end of the great fast of Ramadan that the Order of the Bath
and the patent of nobility arrived in a frigate commanded by Sir Adrian
Scrope; and Orlando made this the occasion for an entertainment more
splendid than any that has been known before or since in Constantinople. The
night was fine; the crowd immense, and the windows of the Embassy
brilliantly illuminated. Again, details are lacking, for the fire had its
way with all such records, and has left only tantalizing fragments which
leave the most important points obscure. From the diary of John Fenner
Brigge, however, an English naval officer, who was among the guests, we
gather that people of all nationalities "were packed like herrings in a
barrel" in the courtyard. The crowd pressed so unpleasantly close that
Brigge soon climbed into a Judas tree, the better to observe the
proceedings. The rumour had got about among the natives (and here is
additional proof of Orlando's mysterious power over the imagination) that
some kind of miracle was to be performed. "Thus," writes Brigge (but his
manuscript is full of burns and holes, some sentences being quite
illegible), "when the rockets began to soar into the air, there was
considerable uneasiness among us lest the native population should be
seized...fraught with unpleasant consequences to all...English ladies in the
company, I own that my hand went to my cutlass. Happily," he continues in
his somewhat long-winded style, "these fears seemed, for the moment,
groundless and, observing the demeanour of the natives...I came to the
conclusion that this demonstration of our skill in the art of pyrotechny was
valuable, if only because it impressed upon them...the superiority of the
British...Indeed, the sight was one of indescribable magnificence. I found
myself alternately praising the Lord that he had permitted...and wishing
that my poor, dear mother...By the Ambassador's orders, the long windows,
which are so imposing a feature of Eastern architecture, for though ignorant
in many ways...were thrown wide; and within, we could see a tableau vivant
or theatrical display in which English ladies and gentlemen...represented a
masque the work of one...The words were inaudible, but the sight of so many
of our countrymen and women, dressed with the highest elegance and
distinction...moved me to emotions of which I am certainly not ashamed,
though unable...I was intent upon observing the astonishing conduct of Lady
- which was of a nature to fasten the eyes of all upon her, and to bring
discredit upon her sex and country, when" - unfortunately a branch of the
Judas tree broke, Lieutenant Brigge fell to the ground, and the rest of the
entry records only his gratitude to Providence (who plays a very large part
in the diary) and the exact nature of his injuries.
Happily, Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that name,
saw the scene from inside and carries on the tale in a letter, much defaced
too, which ultimately reached a female friend at Tunbridge Wells. Miss
Penelope was no less lavish in her enthusiasm than the gallant officer.
"Ravishing," she exclaims ten times on one page, "wondrous...utterly beyond
description...gold plate...candelabras...negroes in plush breeches...
pyramids of ice...fountains of negus...jellies made to represent His
Majesty's ships...swans made to represent water lilies...birds in golden
cages...gentlemen in slashed crimson velvet...Ladies' headdresses AT LEAST
six foot high...musical boxes....Mr Peregrine said I looked QUITE lovely
which I only repeat to you, my dearest, because I know...Oh! how I longed
for you all!...surpassing anything we have seen at the Pantiles...oceans to
drink...some gentlemen overcome...Lady Betty ravishing....Poor Lady Bonham
made the unfortunate mistake of sitting down without a chair beneath
her...Gentlemen all very gallant...wished a thousand times for you and
dearest Betsy...But the sight of all others, the cynosure of all eyes...as
all admitted, for none could be so vile as to deny it, was the Ambassador
himself. Such a leg! Such a countenance!! Such princely manners!!! To see
him come into the room! To see him go out again! And something INTERESTING
in the expression, which makes one feel, one scarcely knows why, that he has
SUFFERED! They say a lady was the cause of it. The heartless monster!!! How
can one of our REPUTED TENDER SEX have had the effrontery!!! He is
unmarried, and half the ladies in the place are wild for love of him...A
thousand, thousand kisses to Tom, Gerry, Peter, and dearest Mew" [presumably
her cat].
From the Gazette of the time, we gather that "as the clock struck
twelve, the Ambassador appeared on the centre Balcony which was hung with
priceless rugs. Six Turks of the Imperial Body Guard, each over six foot in
height, held torches to his right and left. Rockets rose into the air at his
appearance, and a great shout went up from the people, which the Ambassador
acknowledged, bowing deeply, and speaking a few words of thanks in the
Turkish language, which it was one of his accomplishments to speak with
fluency. Next, Sir Adrian Scrope, in the full dress of a British Admiral,
advanced; the Ambassador knelt on one knee; the Admiral placed the Collar of
the Most Noble Order of the Bath round his neck, then pinned the Star to his
breast; after which another gentleman of the diplomatic corps advancing in a
stately manner placed on his shoulders the ducal robes, and handed him on a
crimson cushion, the ducal coronet."
At length, with a gesture of extraordinary majesty and grace, first
bowing profoundly, then raising himself proudly erect, Orlando took the
golden circlet of strawberry leaves and placed it, with a gesture which none
that saw it ever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this point that the first
disturbance began. Either the people had expected a miracle - some say a
shower of gold was prophesied to fall from the skies - which did not happen,
or this was the signal chosen for the attack to begin; nobody seems to know;
but as the coronet settled on Orlando's brows a great uproar rose. Bells
began ringing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard above the shouts
of the people; many Turks fell flat to the ground and touched the earth with
their foreheads. A door burst open. The natives pressed into the banqueting
rooms. Women shrieked. A certain lady, who was said to be dying for love of
Orlando, seized a candelabra and dashed it to the ground. What might not
have happened, had it not been for the presence of Sir Adrian Scrope and a
squad of British blue-jackets, nobody can say. But the Admiral ordered the
bugles to be sounded; a hundred blue-jackets stood instantly at attention;
the disorder was quelled, and quiet, at least for the time being, fell upon
the scene.
So far, we are on the firm, if rather narrow, ground of ascertained
truth. But nobody has ever known exactly what took place later that night.
The testimony of the sentries and others seems, however, to prove that the
Embassy was empty of company, and shut up for the night in the usual way by
two A.M. The Ambassador was seen to go to his room, still wearing the
insignia of his rank, and shut the door. Some say he locked it, which was
against his custom. Others maintain that they heard music of a rustic kind,
such as shepherds play, later that night in the courtyard under the
Ambassador's window. A washer-woman, who was kept awake by toothache, said
that she saw a man's figure, wrapped in a cloak or dressing gown, come out
upon the balcony. Then, she said, a woman, much muffled, but apparently of
the peasant class, was drawn up by means of a rope which the man let down to
her on to the balcony. There, the washer-woman said, they embraced
passionately "like lovers", and went into the room together, drawing the
curtains so that no more could be seen.
Next morning, the Duke, as we must now call him, was found by his
secretaries sunk in profound slumber amid bed clothes that were much
tumbled. The room was in some disorder, his coronet having rolled on the
floor, and his cloak and garter being flung all of a heap on a chair. The
table was littered with papers. No suspicion was felt at first, as the
fatigues of the night had been great. But when afternoon came and he still
slept, a doctor was summoned. He applied remedies which had been used on the
previous occasion, plasters, nettles, emetics, etc., but without success.
Orlando slept on. His secretaries then thought it their duty to examine the
papers on the table. Many were scribbled over with poetry, in which frequent
mention was made of an oak tree. There were also various state papers and
others of a private nature concerning the management of his estates in
England. But at length they came upon a document of far greater
significance. It was nothing less, indeed, than a deed of marriage, drawn
up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knight of the
Garter, etc., etc., etc., and Rosina Pepita, a dancer, father unknown, but
reputed a gipsy, mother also unknown but reputed a seller of old iron in the
market-place over against the Galata Bridge. The secretaries looked at each
other in dismay. And still Orlando slept. Morning and evening they watched
him, but, save that his breathing was regular and his cheeks still flushed
their habitual deep rose, he gave no sign of life. Whatever science or
ingenuity could do to waken him they did. But still he slept.
On the seventh day of his trance (Thursday, May the 10th) the first
shot was fired of that terrible and bloody insurrection of which Lieutenant
Brigge had detected the first symptoms. The Turks rose against the Sultan,
set fire to the town, and put every foreigner they could find, either to the
sword or to the bastinado. A few English managed to escape; but, as might
have been expected, the gentlemen of the British Embassy preferred to die in
defence of their red boxes, or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunches of keys
rather than let them fall into the hands of the Infidel. The rioters broke
into Orlando's room, but seeing him stretched to all appearances dead they
left him untouched, and only robbed him of his coronet and the robes of the
Garter.
And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were deeper!
Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it were so deep that
we could see nothing whatever through its opacity! Would that we might here
take the pen and write Finis to our work! Would that we might spare the
reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was
buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who
keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their
silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again
they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth,
The Truth and nothing but the Truth!
At which - Heaven be praised! for it affords us a breathing space - the
doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had
wafted them apart, and three figures enter. First, comes our Lady of Purity;
whose brows are bound with fillets of the whitest lamb's wool; whose hair is
as an avalanche of the driven snow; and in whose hand reposes the white
quill of a virgin goose. Following her, but with a statelier step, comes our
Lady of Chastity; on whose brow is set like a turret of burning but
unwasting fire a diadem of icicles; her eyes are pure stars, and her
fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone. Close behind her,
sheltering indeed in the shadow of her more stately sisters, comes our Lady
of Modesty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose face is only shown as
the young moon shows when it is thin and sickle shaped and half hidden among
clouds. Each advances towards the centre of the room where Orlando still
lies sleeping; and with gestures at once appealing and commanding, OUR LADY
OF PURITY speaks first:
"I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; the snow is dear to me; and
the moon rising; and the silver sea. With my robes I cover the speckled
hen's eggs and the brindled sea shell; I cover vice and poverty. On all
things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not,
reveal not. Spare, O spare!"
Here the trumpets peal forth.
"Purity Avaunt! Begone Purity!"
Then OUR LADY OF CHASTITY speaks:
"I am she whose touch freezes and whose glance turns to stone. I have
stayed the star in its dancing, and the wave as it falls. The highest Alps
are my dwelling place; and when I walk, the lightnings flash in my hair;
where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze
him to the bone. Spare, O spare!"
Here the trumpets peal forth.
"Chastity Avaunt! Begone Chastity!"
Then OUR LADY OF MODESTY speaks, so low that one can hardly hear:
"I am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am and ever shall be. Not for
me the fruitful fields and the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious to me;
and when the apples burgeon or the flocks breed, I run, I run; I let my
mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes. I do not see. Spare, O spare!"
Again the trumpets peal forth:
"Modesty Avaunt! Begone Modesty!?"
With gestures of grief and lamentation the three sisters now join hands
and dance slowly, tossing their veils and singing as they go:
"Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth.
For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown
and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide!
Hide!"
Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The
trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth,
"The Truth and nothing but the Truth."
At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over the mouths of the
trumpets so as to muffle them, but in vain, for now all the trumpets blare
forth together,
"Horrid Sisters, go!"
The sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and
flinging their veils up and down.
"It has not always been so! But men want us no longer; the women detest
us. We go; we go. I (PURITY SAYS THIS) to the hen roost. I (CHASTITY SAYS
THIS) to the still unravished heights of Surrey. I (MODESTY SAYS THIS) to
any cosy nook where there are ivy and curtains in plenty."
"For there, not here (all speak together joining hands and making
gestures of farewell and despair towards the bed where Orlando lies
sleeping) dwell still in nest and boudoir, office and lawcourt those who
love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers and doctors;
those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why;
those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be
praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know
not; love the darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have
given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. To them we go, you we leave.
Come, Sisters, come! This is no place for us here."
They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if to
shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the door behind
them.
We are, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the
sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging themselves side
by side in order, blow one terrific blast:
"THE TRUTH!"
at which Orlando woke.
He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness
before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no
choice left but confess - he was a woman.
The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No
human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form
combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace. As he stood
there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave
the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity,
and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and
threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell
short by several inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long
looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went,
presumably, to his bath.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain
statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in
every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change
of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their
identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the
same. His memory - but in future we must, for convention's sake, say "her"
for "his", and "she" for "he" - her memory then, went back through all the
events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight
haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the
clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that
was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and
completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.
Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex
is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had
always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let
biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the
simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a
woman and has remained so ever since.
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious
subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed herself in
those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either
sex; and was forced to consider her position. That it was precarious and
embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who
has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken
to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate
for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung the
bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of
perturbation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and might
indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation. First, she
carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as seemed to be
written in poetry, and secreted them in her bosom; next she called her
Seleuchi hound, which had never left her bed all these days, though half
famished with hunger, fed and combed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in
her belt; finally wound about her person several strings of emeralds and
pearls of the finest orient which had formed part of her Ambassadorial
wardrobe. This done, she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and
descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the
litter of waste-paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax,
etc., and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant fig
tree, waited an old gipsy on a donkey. He led another by the bridle. Orlando
swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in
company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the
Sultan left Constantinople.
They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of
adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature, in all of
which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a week they reached the
high ground outside Broussa, which was then the chief camping ground of the
gipsy tribe to which Orlando had allied herself. Often she had looked at
those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be
there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a
reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too
well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of having
no documents to seal or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay, was
enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they
moved again. She washed in streams if she washed at all; no boxes, red,
blue, or green, were presented to her; there was not a key, let alone a
golden key, in the whole camp; as for "visiting", the word was unknown. She
milked the goats; she collected brushwood; she stole a hen's egg now and
then, but always put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle;
she stripped vines; she trod the grape; she filled the goat-skin and drank
from it; and when she remembered how, at about this time of day, she should
have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over an empty
coffee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed aloud, cut herself
another hunch of bread, and begged for a puff from old Rustum's pipe, filled
though it was with cow dung.
The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret
communication before the revolution, seem to have looked upon her as one of
themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay), and
her dark hair and dark complexion bore out the belief that she was, by
birth, one of them and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree
when she was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in
houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air. Thus,
though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing to help her to
become more like them; taught her their arts of cheese-making and
basket-weaving, their science of stealing and bird-snaring, and were even
prepared to consider letting her marry among them.
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases
(whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled.
One evening, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset
was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:
"How good to eat!"
(The gipsies have no word for "beautiful". This is the nearest.)
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky
good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners
than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for
whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they
would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no
matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect
that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women
thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and
cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The
English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature
was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its
hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has
been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very
briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She
climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams.
She likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks
of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn
thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in
fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost
threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when,
from the mountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Sea of Marmara, the
plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with
a white streak or two, which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul
expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the majesty
of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such
believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought
her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her
eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made
them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each
watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung
herself upon her mat in the gipsies' tent, she could not help bursting out
again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that
though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they
can only say "good to eat" when they mean "beautiful" and the other way
about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep
any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies laughed. But Rustum el
Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando out of Constantinople on his
donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed
as if from the age-long descent of iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed,
and as he sat tugging at his hookah he observed Orlando narrowly. He had the
deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day he found her in tears.
Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her that he
was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by
the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen.
This, he said, was what her God did to men. When she said, "But so
beautiful", using the English word, he shook his head; and when she repeated
it he was angry. He saw that she did not believe what he believed, and that
was enough, wise and ancient as he was, to enrage him.
This difference of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been perfectly
happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then
she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things themselves,
or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her
to truth, which in its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days
on the high mound at home); which meditations, since she could impart no
word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and
ink.
"Oh! if only I could write!" she cried (for she had the odd conceit of
those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but
little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few
margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of "The Oak Tree", managed by
writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the scenery in a long, blank
version poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and
Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But
the gipsies became suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept
than before at milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before
replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling
her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would be felt by the whole
tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the
sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their
vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their
hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be
singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into
the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need
not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we
make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone
who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking's
sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but
sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a
vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the
old woman. They broke their withys; they cut their fingers. A great rage
filled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent and never come near
them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned;
and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa.
Slowly, she began to feel that there was some difference between her
and the gipsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down
among them for ever. At first she tried to account for it by saying that she
came of an ancient and civilized race, whereas these gipsies were an
ignorant people, not much better than savages. One night when they were
questioning her about England she could not help with some pride describing
the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the
possession of her family for four or five hundred years. Her ancestors were
earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the gipsies
were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised the beauty of
nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as people of fine breeding
are when a stranger has been made to reveal his low birth or poverty. Rustum
followed her out of the tent alone and said that she need not mind if her
father were a Duke, and possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she
described. They would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she
was seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that
Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years
only the meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or
three thousand years. To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids
centuries before Christ was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets
was no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both
were negligible. Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such
antiquity, there was nothing specially memorable or desirable in ancient
birth; vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then, though he was too
courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that there
was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they
were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around
them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view,
a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who
snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth,
and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and
sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one.
She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field;
house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or
heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the
argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she
understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or
four hundred years ago would be denounced - and by her own family most
loudly - for a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.
She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique method
of finding the gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a short
time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such differences of
opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked
for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield
an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the
breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing
so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense
that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party
and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is
not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter
and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and
subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue -
but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they
are as dull as ditch water.
"Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them," sighed
Orlando.
"She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats," said the gipsies.
What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and
become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally
impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper,
neither reverence for the Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of
bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount
Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either
played her a trick or worked a miracle - again, opinions differ too much for
it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at
the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must
compare the landscape to anything, it would have been to a dry bone; to a
sheep's skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures.
The heat was intense, and the little fig tree under which Orlando lay only
served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.
Suddenly a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared
on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green
hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the
hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank
of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could
see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping
among the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade to
shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle sighs and
shivers of a summer's day in England. After she had gazed entranced for some
time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked
with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts
coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she
knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then appeared the roofs and belfries and
towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and
she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the
roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All
was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the
snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts
and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there
was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was
only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked
bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and striding back to the
gipsies' camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day.
It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had plotted
her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not think as they
did. Yet they would have been sorry to cut her throat; and welcomed the news
of her departure. An English merchant ship, as luck would have it, was
already under sail in the harbour about to return to England; and Orlando,
by breaking off another pearl from her necklace, not only paid her passage
but had some banknotes left over in her wallet. These she would have liked
to present to the gipsies. But they despised wealth she knew; and she had to
content herself with embraces, which on her part were sincere.
With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl on her
string, Orlando bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women
then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she
now sat on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". It is a strange fact, but a
true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought.
Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had done something
to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two
important particulars, differ very little from the gipsy men. At any rate,
it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain
offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on
deck, that she realized with a start the penalties and the privileges of her
position. But that start was not of the kind that might have been expected.
It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought of
her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal circumstances a lovely
young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of
female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their
jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die when
ravished of. But if one has been a man for thirty years or so, and an
Ambassador into the bargain, if one has held a Queen in one's arms and one
or two other ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one has
married a Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a very
great start about that. Orlando's start was of a very complicated kind, and
not to be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed, ever accused her of being
one of those quick wits who run to the end of things in a minute. It took
her the entire length of the voyage to moralize out the meaning of her
start, and so, at her own pace, we will follow her.
"Lord," she thought, when she had recovered from her start, stretching
herself out at length under her awning, "this is a pleasant, lazy way of
life, to be sure. But," she thought, giving her legs a kick, "these skirts
are plaguey things to have about one's heels. Yet the stuff (flowered
paduasoy) is the loveliest in the world. Never have I seen my own skin (here
she laid her hand on her knee) look to such advantage as now. Could I,
however, leap overboard and swim in clothes like these? No! Therefore, I
should have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to
that? Now do I?" she wondered, here encountering the first knot in the
smooth skein of her argument.
Dinner came before she had untied it, and then it was the Captain
himself - Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain of distinguished
aspect, who did it for her as he helped her to a slice of corned beef.
"A little of the fat, Ma'm?" he asked. "Let me cut you just the tiniest
little slice the size of your fingernail." At those words a delicious tremor
ran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrents rushed. It recalled the
feeling of indescribable pleasure with which she had first seen Sasha,
hundreds of years ago. Then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the
greater ecstasy? The man's or the woman's? And are they not perhaps the
same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but
refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it,
have the very thinnest, smallest shiver in the world. This was the most
delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. "For nothing," she thought,
regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the argument, "is more heavenly
than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the
spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can. So that I'm not sure," she
continued, "that I won't throw myself overboard, for the mere pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket after all."
(It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into
possession of a pleasaunce or toy cupboard; her arguments would not commend
themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)
"But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the "Marie Rose" to
say about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of being
rescued by a blue-jacket?" she said. "We had a word for them. Ah! I have
it..." (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and
passing strange on a lady's lips.) "Lord! Lord!" she cried again at the
conclusion of her thoughts, "must I then begin to respect the opinion of the
other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can't swim,
if I have to be rescued by a blue-jacket, by God!" she cried, "I must!" Upon
which a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of
equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of
going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered paduasoy - the pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket - if these were only to be obtained by
roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She remembered how,
as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste,
scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own
person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my
own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely
apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they
may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline.
There's the hairdressing," she thought, "that alone will take an hour of my
morning, there's looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there's staying
and lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to
lace and from lace to paduasoy; there's being chaste year in year out..."
Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A
sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so
violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of
his teeth. "If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who,
no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep
them covered," Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest
beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all
a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a
mast-head. "A pox on them!" she said, realizing for the first time what, in
other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say,
the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.
"And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear," she thought;
"once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man
over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run
him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in
procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down
Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast.
All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my
lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream?" And mincing out
the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming
of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.
"To fall from a mast-head," she thought, "because you see a woman's ankles;
to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may
praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the
slave of the frailest chit in petticoats. and yet to go about as if you were
the Lords of creation. Heavens!" she thought, "what fools they make of us -
what fools we are!" And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms
that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither;
and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she
was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a
most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of
ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.
Thus it is no great wonder, as she pitted one sex against the other, and
found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not
sure to which she belonged - it was no great wonder that she was about to
cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again when the
anchor fell with a great splash into the sea; the sails came tumbling on
deck, and she perceived (so sunk had she been in thought that she had seen
nothing for several days) that the ship was anchored off the coast of Italy.
The Captain at once sent to ask the honour of her company ashore with him in
the longboat.
When she returned the next morning, she stretched herself on her couch
under the awning and arranged her draperies with the greatest decorum about
her ankles.
"Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex," she thought,
continuing the sentence which she had left unfinished the other day,
"armoured with every weapon as they are, while they debar us even from a
knowledge of the alphabet" (and from these opening words it is plain that
something had happened during the night to give her a push towards the
female sex, for she was speaking more as a woman speaks than as a man, yet
with a sort of content after all), "still - they fall from the mast-head."
Here she gave a great yawn and fell asleep. When she woke, the ship was
sailing before a fair breeze so near the shore that towns on the cliffs'
edge seemed only kept from slipping into the water by the interposition of
some great rock or the twisted roots of some ancient olive tree. The scent
of oranges wafted from a million trees, heavy with the fruit, reached her on
deck. A score of blue dolphins, twisting their tails, leapt high now and
again into the air. Stretching her arms out (arms, she had learnt already,
have no such fatal effects as legs), she thanked Heaven that she was not
prancing down Whitehall on a warhorse, nor even sentencing a man to death.
"Better is it," she thought, "to be clothed with poverty and ignorance,
which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and
discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the
love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully
enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are," she
said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, "contemplation, solitude,
love."
"Praise God that I'm a woman!" she cried, and was about to run into
extreme folly - than which none is more distressing in woman or man either -
of being proud of her sex, when she paused over the singular word, which,
for all we can do to put it in its place, has crept in at the end of the
last sentence: Love. "Love," said Orlando. Instantly - such is its
impetuosity - love took a human shape - such is its pride. For where other
thoughts are content to remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this one but
to put on flesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and jerkin. And as
all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of
the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a
woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of
the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those
feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries
became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides
the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed,
and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this
affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she
knew Sasha as she was, and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the
pursuit of all those treasures which were now revealed, she was so rapt and
enchanted that it was as if a cannon ball had exploded at her ear when a
man's voice said, "Permit me, Madam," a man's hand raised her to her feet;
and the fingers of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the
middle finger pointed to the horizon.
"The cliffs of England, Ma'am," said the Captain, and he raised the
hand which had pointed at the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave a second
start, even more violent than the first.
"Christ Jesus!" she cried.
Happily, the sight of her native land after long absence excused both
start and exclamation, or she would have been hard put to it to explain to
Captain Bartolus the raging and conflicting emotions which now boiled within
her. How tell him that she, who now trembled on his arm, had been a Duke and
an Ambassador? How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily
in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among
treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on summer nights when the tulips
were abloom and the bees buzzing off Wapping Old Stairs? Not even to herself
could she explain the giant start she gave, as the resolute right hand of
the sea-captain indicated the cliffs of the British Islands.
"To refuse and to yield," she murmured, "how delightful; to pursue and
conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how sublime." Not one of
these words so coupled together seemed to her wrong; nevertheless, as the
chalky cliffs loomed nearer, she felt culpable; dishonoured; unchaste,
which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange. Closer
and closer they drew, till the samphire gatherers, hanging half-way down the
cliff, were plain to the naked eye. And watching them, she felt, scampering
up and down within her, like some derisive ghost who in another instant will
pick up her skirts and flaunt out of sight, Sasha the lost, Sasha the
memory, whose reality she had proved just now so surprisingly - Sasha, she
felt, mopping and mowing and making all sorts of disrespectful gestures
towards the cliffs and the samphire gatherers; and when the sailors began
chanting, "So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain", the words echoed
in Orlando's sad heart, and she felt that however much landing there meant
comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would
doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort, over half
Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit,
meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and
restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail
once more for the gipsies.
Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome
of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so
impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has
seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon
the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable. The form of it, by the
hazard of fancy, recalled that earliest, most persistent memory - the man
with the big forehead in Twitchett's sitting-room, the man who sat writing,
or rather looking, but certainly not at her, for he never seemed to see her
poised there in all her finery, lovely boy though she must have been, she
could not deny it - and whenever she thought of him, the thought spread
round it, like the risen moon on turbulent waters, a sheet of silver calm.
Now her hand went to her bosom (the other was still in the Captain's
keeping), where the pages of her poem were hidden safe. It might have been a
talisman that she kept there. The distraction of sex, which hers was, and
what it meant, subsided; she thought now only of the glory of poetry, and
the great lines of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton began booming
and reverberating, as if a golden clapper beat against a golden bell in the
cathedral tower which was her mind. The truth was that the image of the
marble dome which her eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested
a poet's forehead and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no
figment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a
favouring gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth,
and revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast
cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.
"St Paul's," said Captain Bartolus, who stood by her side. "The Tower
of London," he continued. "Greenwich Hospital, erected in memory of Queen
Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William the Third. Westminster Abbey.
The Houses of Parliament." As he spoke, each of these famous buildings rose
to view. It was a fine September morning. A myriad of little water-craft
plied from bank to bank. Rarely has a gayer, or more interesting, spectacle
presented itself to the gaze of a returned traveller. Orlando hung over the
prow, absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had been used too long to savages and
nature not to be entranced by these urban glories. That, then, was the dome
of St Paul's which Mr Wren had built during her absence. Near by, a shock of
golden hair burst from a pillar - Captain Bartolus was at her side to inform
her that that was the Monument; there had been a plague and a fire during
her absence, he said. Do what she could to restrain them, the tears came to
her eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep, she let
them flow. Here, she thought, had been the great carnival. Here, where the
waves slapped briskly, had stood the Royal Pavilion. Here she had first met
Sasha. About here (she looked down into the sparkling waters) one had been
used to see the frozen bumboat woman with her apples on her lap. All that
splendour and corruption was gone. Gone, too, was the dark night, the
monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood. Here, where yellow
icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken wretches on top,
a covey of swans floated, orgulous, undulant, superb. London itself had
completely changed since she had last seen it. Then, she remembered, it had
been a huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses. The heads of rebels had
grinned on pikes at Temple Bar. The cobbled pavements had reeked of garbage
and ordure. Now, as the ship sailed past Wapping, she caught glimpses of
broad and orderly thoroughfares. Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-fed
horses stood at the doors of houses whose bow windows, whose plate glass,
whose polished knockers, testified to the wealth and modest dignity of the
dwellers within. Ladies in flowered silk (she put the Captain's glass to her
eye) walked on raised footpaths. Citizens in broidered coats took snuff at
street corners under lamp-posts. She caught sight of a variety of painted
signs swinging in the breeze and could form a rapid notion from what was
painted on them of the tobacco, of the stuff, of the silk, of the gold, of
the silver ware, of the gloves, of the perfumes, and of a thousand other
articles which were sold within. Nor could she do more as the ship sailed to
its anchorage by London Bridge than glance at coffee-house windows where, on
balconies, since the weather was fine, a great number of decent citizens sat
at ease, with china dishes in front of them, clay pipes by their sides,
while one among them read from a news sheet, and was frequently interrupted
by the laughter or the comments of the others. Were these taverns, were
these wits, were these poets? she asked of Captain Bartolus, who obligingly
informed her that even now - if she turned her head a little to the left and
looked along the line of his first finger - so - they were passing the Cocoa
Tree, where, - yes, there he was - one might see Mr Addison taking his
coffee; the other two gentlemen - "there, Ma'am, a little to the right of
the lamp-post, one of 'em humped, t'other much the same as you or me" - were
Mr Dryden and Mr Pope. "Sad dogs," said the Captain, by which he meant that
they were Papists, "but men of parts, none the less," he added, hurrying aft
to superintend the arrangements for landing. (The Captain must have been
mistaken, as a reference to any textbook of literature will show; but the
mistake was a kindly one, and so we let it stand.)
"Addison, Dryden, Pope," Orlando repeated as if the words were an
incantation. For one moment she saw the high mountains above Broussa, the
next, she had set her foot upon her native shore.
But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous flutter of
excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law; how harder than
the stones of London Bridge it is, and than the lips of a cannon more
severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was
made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries
from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been
preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor
litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief
charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold
any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the
same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina
Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring
that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to
them. Such grave charges as these would, of course, take time and money to
dispose of. All her estates were put in Chancery and her titles pronounced
in abeyance while the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly
ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman,
Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending
the legal judgment, she had the Law's permission to reside in a state of
incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be.
It was a fine evening in December when she arrived and the snow was
falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had seen them from
the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a house,
brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimneys smoking
busily as if inspired with a life of their own. She could not restrain a cry
as she saw it there tranquil and massive, couched upon the meadows. As the
yellow coach entered the park and came bowling along the drive between the
trees, the red deer raised their heads as if expectantly, and it was
observed that instead of showing the timidity natural to their kind, they
followed the coach and stood about the courtyard when it drew up. Some
tossed their antlers, others pawed the ground as the step was let down and
Orlando alighted. One, it is said, actually knelt in the snow before her.
She had not time to reach her hand towards the knocker before both wings of
the great door were flung open, and there, with lights and torches held
above their heads, were Mrs Grimsditch, Mr Dupper, and a whole retinue of
servants come to greet her. But the orderly procession was interrupted first
by the impetuosity of Canute, the elk-hound, who threw himself with such
ardour upon his mistress that he almost knocked her to the ground; next, by
the agitation of Mrs Grimsditch, who, making as if to curtsey, was overcome
with emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!
until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kiss upon both her cheeks. After
that, Mr Dupper began to read from a parchment, but the dogs barking, the
huntsmen winding their horns, and the stags, who had come into the courtyard
in the confusion, baying the moon, not much progress was made, and the
company dispersed within after crowding about their Mistress, and testifying
in every way to their great joy at her return.
No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando
they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of the
deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb
creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and
character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs Grimsditch, over her dish of china
tea, to Mr Dupper that night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen
a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was
as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two peaches on one
branch; which, said Mrs Grimsditch, becoming confidential, she had always
had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very mysteriously), which it
was no surprise to her (here she nodded her head very knowingly), and for
her part, a very great comfort; for what with the towels wanting mending and
the curtains in the chaplain's parlour being moth-eaten round the fringes,
it was time they had a Mistress among them.
"And some little masters and mistresses to come after her," Mr Dupper
added, being privileged by virtue of his holy office to speak his mind on
such delicate matters as these.
So, while the old servants gossiped in the servants' hall, Orlando took
a silver candle in her hand and roamed once more through the halls, the
galleries, the courts, the bedrooms; saw loom down at her again the dark
visage of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain, among her ancestors; sat
now in this chair of state, now reclined on that canopy of delight; observed
the arras, how it swayed; watched the huntsmen riding and Daphne flying;
bathed her hand, as she had loved to do as a child, in the yellow pool of
light which the moonlight made falling through the heraldic Leopard in the
window; slid along the polished planks of the gallery, the other side of
which was rough timber; touched this silk, that satin; fancied the carved
dolphins swam; brushed her hair with King James' silver brush; buried her
face in the potpourri, which was made as the Conqueror had taught them many
hundred years ago and from the same roses; looked at the garden and imagined
the sleeping crocuses, the dormant dahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming
white in the snow and the great yew hedges, thick as a house, black behind
them; saw the orangeries and the giant medlars; all this she saw, and each
sight and sound, rudely as we write it down, filled her heart with such a
lust and balm of joy, that at length, tired out, she entered the Chapel and
sank into the old red arm-chair in which her ancestors used to hear service.
There she lit a cheroot ('twas a habit she had brought back from the East)
and opened the Prayer Book.
It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had
been held by Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye of faith could
detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the Royal blood. But
what pious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what evil passions it soothed
asleep, who dare say, seeing that of all communions this with the deity is
the most inscrutable? Novelist, poet, historian all falter with their hand
on that door; nor does the believer himself enlighten us, for is he more
ready to die than other people, or more eager to share his goods? Does he
not keep as many maids and carriage horses as the rest? and yet with it all,
holds a faith he says which should make goods a vanity and death desirable.
In the Queen's prayer book, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of
hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of
tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them
all - the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco - to such a mood of
contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances,
though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however,
can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods
there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's. Orlando, it
seemed, had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world,
she now reflected upon her sins and the imperfections that had crept into
her spiritual state. The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the
poet's Eden. Do what she would there were still too many of these sinful
reptiles in the first stanzas of "The Oak Tree". But "S" was nothing, in her
opinion, compared with the termination "ing". The present participle is the
Devil himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in
Devils. To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she
concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can
adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then,
is the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others
fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the
wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No time, no
devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our
message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest
integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine, etc. Thus it is obvious
that she was back in the confines of her own religion which time had only
strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of
belief.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper at last. "I am losing
some illusions," she said, shutting Queen Mary's book, "perhaps to acquire
others," and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her ancestors
lay.
But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and the
rest, had lost something of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi had waved
his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the fact that only three
or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their way to
make in the world like any modern upstart, and that they had made it by
acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other upstart
does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred
the quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the penalty by
extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or herded sheep
in the fields, filled her with remorse. She thought of the Egyptian pyramids
and what bones lie beneath them as she stood in the crypt; and the vast,
empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmara seemed, for the moment, a
finer dwelling-place than this many-roomed mansion in which no bed lacked
its quilt and no silver dish its silver cover.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper. "I am losing my
illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones," and she paced down the long gallery
to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was
interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire
(for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of
great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.
How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of
tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then - it was
the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps - into this high frenzy
was let fall some black drop, which turned her rhapsody into sluggishness.
Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered,
which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she
remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne,
whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude after her
affair with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows these growths are
agelong in coming, a spirit capable of resistance. "I will write," she had
said, "what I enjoy writing"; and so had scratched out twenty-six volumes.
Yet still, for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and
turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the
future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change
perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had
seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind
and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it. Here she went to the
window, and in spite of the cold could not help unlatching it. She leant out
into the damp night air. She heard a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter
of a pheasant trailing through the branches. She heard the snow slither and
flop from the roof to the ground. "By my life," she exclaimed, "this is a
thousand times better than Turkey. Rustum," she cried, as if she were
arguing with the gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind
and continuing it with someone who was not there to contradict she showed
again the development of her soul), "you were wrong. This is better than
Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco - of what odds and ends are we compounded,"
she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). "What a phantasmagoria the
mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our
birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are
overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes
sing." And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for
explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as to their
meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed.
Next morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had out her pen and
paper and started afresh upon "The Oak Tree", for to have ink and paper in
plenty when one has made do with berries and margins is a delight not to be
conceived. Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of despair,
now in the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when a shadow darkened the
page. She hastily hid her manuscript.
As her window gave on to the most central of the courts, as she had
given orders that she would see no one, as she knew no one and was herself
legally unknown, she was first surprised at the shadow, then indignant at
it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused it) overcome with
merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadow of
no less a personage than the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn
and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She was loping across the
court in her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of her
head was changed. This then was the woman who had chased her from England!
This was the eyrie of that obscene vulture - this the fatal fowl herself! At
the thought that she had fled all the way to Turkey to avoid her seductions
(now become excessively flat), Orlando laughed aloud. There was something
inexpressibly comic in the sight. She resembled, as Orlando had thought
before, nothing so much as a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes, the
lank cheeks, the high headdress of that animal. She stopped now, much as a
hare sits erect in the corn when thinking itself unobserved, and stared at
Orlando, who stared back at her from the window. After they had stared like
this for a certain time, there was nothing for it but to ask her in, and
soon the two ladies were exchanging compliments while the Archduchess struck
the snow from her mantle.
"A plague on women," said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to
fetch a glass of wine, "they never leave one a moment's peace. A more
ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying set of people don't exist. It was to
escape this Maypole that I left England, and now" - here she turned to
present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold - in her place stood a
tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone
with a man.
Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had
completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally
upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.
"La!" she cried, putting her hand to her side, "how you frighten me!"
"Gentle creature," cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at
the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando's lips, "forgive me for the
deceit I have practised on you!"
Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.
In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with
great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The Archduchess (but she
must in future be known as the Archduke) told his story - that he was a man
and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen
hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a
woman and lodged at the Baker's shop; that he was desolated when he fled to
Turkey; that he had heard of her change and hastened to offer his services
(here he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said the Archduke Harry,
she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex.
The three p's would have been more persuasive if they had not been
interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind. "If this is
love," said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of
the fender, and now from the woman's point of view, "there is something
highly ridiculous about it."
Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate
declaration of his suit. He told her that he had something like twenty
million ducats in a strong box at his castle. He had more acres than any
nobleman in England. The shooting was excellent: he could promise her a
mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no English moor, or Scotch either,
could rival. True, the pheasants had suffered from the gape in his absence,
and the does had slipped their young, but that could be put right, and would
be with her help when they lived in Roumania together.
As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran
down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.
That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew
from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that
women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so,
shocked she was.
The Archduke apologized. He commanded himself sufficiently to say that
he would leave her now, but would return on the following day for his
answer.
That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednesday; he came on Thursday; he came
on Friday; and he came on Saturday. It is true that each visit began,
continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there was
much room for silence. They sat on either side of the fireplace and
sometimes the Archduke knocked over the fire-irons and Orlando picked them
up again. Then the Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk in
Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke would
say that it was not as big as the reindeer which he shot in Norway; and
Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would say he
had shot an albatross, and Orlando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an
albatross as big as an elephant, and the Archduke would say - something very
sensible, no doubt, but Orlando heard it not, for she was looking at her
writing-table, out of the window, at the door. Upon which the Archduke would
say, "I adore you", at the very same moment that Orlando said "Look, it's
beginning to rain", at which they were both much embarrassed, and blushed
scarlet, and could neither of them think what to say next. Indeed, Orlando
was at her wit's end what to talk about and had she not bethought her of a
game called Fly Loo, at which great sums of money can be lost with very
little expense of spirit, she would have had to marry him, she supposed; for
how else to get rid of him she knew not. By this device, however, and it was
a simple one, needing only three lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies,
the embarrassment of conversation was overcome and the necessity of marriage
avoided. For now, the Archduke would bet her five hundred pounds to a tester
that a fly would settle on this lump and not on that. Thus, they would have
occupation for a whole morning watching the flies (who were naturally
sluggish at this season and often spent an hour or so circling round the
ceiling) until at length some fine blue-bottle made his choice and the match
was won. Many hundreds of pounds changed hands between them at this game,
which the Archduke, who was a born gambler, swore was every bit as good as
horse racing, and vowed he could play at for ever. But Orlando soon began to
weary.
"What's the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life," she
asked, "if I have to pass all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an
Archduke?"
She began to detest the sight of sugar; flies made her dizzy. Some way
out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward
in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head
or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think of no better
method than this. She caught a blue-bottle, gently pressed the life out of
it (it was half dead already; or her kindness for the dumb creatures would
not have permitted it) and secured it by a drop of gum arabic to a lump of
sugar. While the Archduke was gazing at the ceiling, she deftly substituted
this lump for the one she had laid her money on, and crying "Loo Loo!"
declared that she had won her bet. Her reckoning was that the Archduke, with
all his knowledge of sport and horseracing, would detect the fraud and, as
to cheat at Loo is the most heinous of crimes, and men have been banished
from the society of mankind to that of apes in the tropics for ever because
of it, she calculated that he would be manly enough to refuse to have
anything further to do with her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the
amiable nobleman. He was no nice judge of flies. A dead fly looked to him
much the same as a living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and
he paid her over 17,250 pounds (which is about 40,885 pounds 6 shillings and
8 pence of our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he
could be deceived no longer. When he realized the truth at last, a painful
scene ensued. The Archduke rose to his full height. He coloured scarlet.
Tears rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won a fortune from him
was nothing - she was welcome to it; that she had deceived him was something
- it hurt him to think her capable of it; but that she had cheated at Loo
was everything. To love a woman who cheated at play was, he said,
impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said, recovering
slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, after all, only a woman, he
said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her
and had bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his language, when she
cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a small toad
between his skin and his shirt.
In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have
preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one's person a
whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden; one must have recourse to
toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel
cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed.
She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.
"Heaven be praised!" cried Orlando still laughing. She heard the sound
of chariot wheels driven at a furious pace down the courtyard. She heard
them rattle along the road. Fainter and fainter the sound became. Now it
faded away altogether.
"I am alone," said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.
That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation
of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been
made love to, many women would take their oath. As the sound of the
Archduke's chariot wheels died away, Orlando felt drawing further from her
and further from her an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune (she did
not mind that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and circumstance
of married life (she did not mind that), but life she heard going from her,
and a lover. "Life and a lover," she murmured; and going to her
writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:
"Life and a lover" - a line which did not scan and made no sense with
what went before - something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid
the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,
"Life and a lover." Then laying her pen aside she went into her
bedroom, stood in front of her mirror, and arranged her pearls about her
neck. Then since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown of
sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of peach
bloom; thence to a wine-coloured brocade. Perhaps a dash of powder was
needed, and if her hair were disposed - so - about her brow, it might become
her. Then she slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and drew an emerald
ring upon her finger. "Now," she said when all was ready and lit the silver
sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to
see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow - for all about the
looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and
the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was
green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave,
singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to
embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly
seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put
it in plain English, and say outright, "Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness
incarnate," which was the truth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her
person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when
their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a
fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass - this smile
she smiled and then she listened for a moment and heard only the leaves
blowing and the sparrows twittering, and then she sighed, "Life, a lover,"
and then she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity; whipped her
pearls from her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect in the
neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman, and rang the bell.
When the servant came, she told him to order a coach and six to be in
readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent affairs to London. Within an
hour of the Archduke's departure, off she drove.
And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was
of a simple English kind which needs no description, to draw the reader's
attention more particularly than we could at the moment to one or two
remarks which have slipped in here and there in the course of the narrative.
For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when
interrupted. Next, that she looked long and intently in the glass; and now,
as she drove to London, one might notice her starting and suppressing a cry
when the horses galloped faster than she liked. Her modesty as to her
writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seems to
hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in
Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true.
She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a
little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were
asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes
had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they
seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us
warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For
example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning
stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef,
and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments
would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing,
been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid
compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she
complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done
had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's
satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes
that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was
visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at above,
even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of
Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the
same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize
his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her
shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for
his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at
it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same
clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.
That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole,
we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of
great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It
was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress
and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather
more openly than usual - openness indeed was the soul of her nature -
something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.
For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they
intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes
place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female
likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had
experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd
effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost
and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The
curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how
did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes
chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they
would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of
power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a
donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested
household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before
the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She
could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove
six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active
as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the
most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation.
She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some
caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to
travel south is to travel downhill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man or
woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. For her coach was
now rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in the city. The steps
were being let down; the iron gates were being opened. She was entering her
father's house at Blackfriars, which though fashion was fast deserting that
end of the town, was still a pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens running
down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.
Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her for
what she had come in search of - that is to say, life and a lover. About the
first there might be some doubt; the second she found without the least
difficulty two days after her arrival. It was a Tuesday that she came to
town. On Thursday she went for a walk in the Mall, as was then the habit of
persons of quality. She had not made more than a turn or two of the avenue
before she was observed by a little knot of vulgar people who go there to
spy upon their betters. As she came past them, a common woman carrying a
child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly into Orlando's face,
and cried out, "Lawk upon us, if it ain't the Lady Orlando!" Her companions
came crowding round, and Orlando found herself in a moment the centre of a
mob of staring citizens and tradesmen's wives, all eager to gaze upon the
heroine of the celebrated lawsuit. Such was the interest that the case
excited in the minds of the common people. She might, indeed, have found
herself gravely discommoded by the pressure of the crowd - she had forgotten
that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone - had not a tall
gentleman at once stepped forward and offered her the protection of his arm.
It was the Archduke. She was overcome with distress and yet with some
amusement at the sight. Not only had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her,
but in order to show that he took her levity with the toad in good part, he
had procured a jewel made in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon
her with a repetition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.
What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove
home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to go for a
walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad set in emeralds,
and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She took a kinder view of the case
next day when she found on her breakfast table half a dozen billets from
some of the greatest ladies in the land - Lady Suffolk, Lady Salisbury, Lady
Chesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her in the politest
manner of old alliances between their families and her own, and desired the
honour of her acquaintance. Next day, which was a Saturday, many of these
great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday, about noon, their footmen
brought cards of invitation to various routs, dinners, and assemblies in the
near future; so that Orlando was launched without delay, and with some
splash and foam at that, upon the waters of London society.
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any
other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only
those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets
and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases
where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma
- a mirage. To make our meaning plain - Orlando could come home from one of
these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas
tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of
times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun
would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself
to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and
sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all
this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a
reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack
her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word
to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A.
polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to
recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted,
she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a
thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the
excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that
society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about
Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of
a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid.
Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is
nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most
intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this
intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and
the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing.
Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no
existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can
deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to
prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content
to leave it.
Following the example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only say
that society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. To
have the entry there was the aim of every well-bred person. The graces were
supreme. Fathers instructed their sons, mothers their daughters. No
education was complete for either sex which did not include the science of
deportment, the art of bowing and curtseying, the management of the sword
and the fan, the care of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the flexibility
of the knee, the proper methods of entering and leaving the room, with a
thousand etceteras, such as will immediately suggest themselves to anybody
who has himself been in society. Since Orlando had won the praise of Queen
Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl of rose water as a boy, it must be
supposed that she was sufficiently expert to pass muster. Yet it is true
that there was an absentmindedness about her which sometimes made her
clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of
taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps,
and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Whether this slight disability was enough to counterbalance the
splendour of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop too much of that
black humour which ran in the veins of all her race, certain it is that she
had not been in the world more than a score of times before she might have
been heard to ask herself, had there been anybody but her spaniel Pippin to
hear her, "What the devil is the matter with me?" The occasion was Tuesday,
the 16th of June 1712; she had just returned from a great ball at Arlington
House; the dawn was in the sky, and she was pulling off her stockings. "I
don't care if I never meet another soul as long as I live," cried Orlando,
bursting into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is, after
all, of some importance in its way, escaped her. "Is this," she asked - but
there was none to answer, "is this," she finished her sentence all the same,
"what people call life?" The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of
sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the
spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips. In short,
there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its
mistress, and yet it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a
great impediment to the refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails;
they bow the front part of the body and elevate the hind; they roll, they
jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber, they have all sorts of
ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail,
since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog
gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlington House. They, too,
wag their tails, bow, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot.
"All these months that I've been out in the world," said Orlando, pitching
one stocking across the room, "I've heard nothing but what Pippin might have
said. I'm cold. I'm happy. I'm hungry. I've caught a mouse. I've buried a
bone. Please kiss my nose." And it was not enough.
How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we
will only seek to explain by supposing that this mysterious composition
which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself, but has
a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which either makes you drunk when you
think it, as Orlando thought it, delightful, or gives you a headache when
you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive. That the faculty of speech
has much to do with it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour
is the most ravishing of all; brilliant wit can be tedious beyond
description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.
Orlando threw the second stocking after the first and went to bed
dismally enough, determined that she would forswear society for ever. But
again as it turned out, she was too hasty in coming to her conclusions. For
the very next morning she woke to find, among the usual cards of invitation
upon her table, one from a certain great Lady, the Countess of R. Having
determined overnight that she would never go into society again, we can only
explain Orlando's behaviour - she sent a messenger hot-foot to R. House to
say that she would attend her Ladyship with all the pleasure in the world -
by the fact that she was still suffering from the effect of three honeyed
words dropped into her ear on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady" by Captain
Nicholas Benedict Bartolus as they sailed down the Thames. Addison, Dryden,
Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had
chimed in her head like an incantation ever since. Who can credit such
folly? but so it was. All her experience with Nick Greene had taught her
nothing. Such names still exercised over her the most powerful fascination.
Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no
belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men -
yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all.
But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief
that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one.
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. The little
glimpse she had of these great men from the deck of the ship was of the
nature of a vision. That the cup was china, or the gazette paper, she
doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he had dined with Dryden the night
before, she flatly disbelieved him. Now, the Lady R.'s reception room had
the reputation of being the antechamber to the presence room of genius; it
was the place where men and women met to swing censers and chant hymns to
the bust of genius in a niche in the wall. Sometimes the God himself
vouchsafed his presence for a moment. Intellect alone admitted the
suppliant, and nothing (so the report ran) was said inside that was not
witty.
It was thus with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room. She
found a company already assembled in a semicircle round the fire. Lady R.,
an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace mantilla on her head,
was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre. Thus being somewhat deaf, she
could control the conversation on both sides of her. On both sides of her
sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had
been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the
mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were
famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence...After three
hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.
But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in
between. In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the
profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem
indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious
characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that
the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty
years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty
sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said,
or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings
lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave
a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
The truth would seem to be - if we dare use such a word in such a
connection - that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment. The
hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a
spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third
profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions
are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create
one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that
illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no
real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This
serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no more than three witty things
in the course of fifty years. Had she said more, her circle would have been
destroyed. The witticism, as it left her lips, bowled over the current
conversation as a cannon ball lays low the violets and the daisies. When she
made her famous "mot de Saint Denis" the very grass was singed.
Disillusionment and desolation followed. Not a word was uttered. "Spare us
another such, for Heaven's sake, Madame!" her friends cried with one accord.
And she obeyed. For almost seventeen years she said nothing memorable and
all went well. The beautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbroken on her
circle as it lay unbroken on the circle of Lady R. The guests thought that
they were happy, thought that they were witty, thought that they were
profound, and, as they thought this, other people thought it still more
strongly; and so it got about that nothing was more delightful than one of
Lady R.'s assemblies; everyone envied those who were admitted; those who
were admitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and so
there seemed no end to it - except that which we have now to relate.
For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident
occurred. She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the
most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old
General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left
leg and gone to his right, while Mr L. interrupted when any proper name was
mentioned, "R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest
friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire" - which, such is the
force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the most searching
comment upon human life, and kept the company in a roar; when the door
opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon
a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their faces,
the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was a draught.
The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be under the sofa. It was as if
their eyes were being slowly opened after a pleasant dream and nothing met
them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It was as if the fumes
of some delicious wine were slowly leaving them. Still the General talked
and still Mr L. remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the
General's neck was, how bald Mr L.'s head was. As for what they said -
nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted and
those who had fans yawned behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon
the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.
Then the little gentleman said, He said next, He said finally (These
sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all
to be found in his published works.),
Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity.
The company was thrown into complete dismay. One such saying was bad enough;
but three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive
it.
"Mr Pope," said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic fury,
"you are pleased to be witty." Mr Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke a word.
They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose
and slunk from the room. That they would ever come back after such an
experience was doubtful. Link-boys could be heard calling their coaches all
down South Audley Street. Doors were slammed and carriages drove off.
Orlando found herself near Mr Pope on the staircase. His lean and misshapen
frame was shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, triumph,
wit, and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his eyes. He looked
like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead. At the
same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon the luckless
Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago
leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more
bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger
for the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In
such moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their
throats with carving knives. Orlando would have done all willingly, but
there was a rasher thing still for her to do, and this she did. She invited
Mr Pope to come home with her.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate
the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St
Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is
Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we
survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions
is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the
earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The
earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles
scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking
that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life - (and so on
for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be
dropped).
On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by
the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars. That she was still
flesh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due to a fact to
which we drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see the more
we believe. Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at
that time very imperfectly lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement
upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the benighted traveller had to trust
to the stars or the red flame of some night watchman to save him from the
gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak woods where swine rootled in the
Tottenham Court Road. But even so it wanted much of our modern efficiency.
Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or so, but
between lay a considerable stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes
Orlando and Mr Pope would be in blackness; and then for about half a minute
again in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando.
As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most delicious
balm. "This is indeed a very great honour for a young woman to be driving
with Mr Pope," she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. "I am
the most blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me - indeed, I feel the knot
of his knee ribbons pressing against my thigh - is the greatest wit in Her
Majesty's dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me
with fury." Here came the lamp-post again. "What a foolish wretch I am!" she
thought. "There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never
cast a thought on me or on Mr Pope either. What's an `age', indeed? What are
`we'?" and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two
blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in
common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was
darkness. Her illusion revived. "How noble his brow is," she thought
(mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr Pope's forehead in the darkness).
"What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth - what a
wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter
their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the
human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness"; (here the coach gave
a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) "without genius we should
be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams," - thus she was
apostrophizing the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the
street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realized her mistake. Mr Pope had a
forehead no bigger than another man's. "Wretched man," she thought, "how you
have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you
plain, how ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and weakly, there is
nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise."
Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she
could see nothing but the poet's knees.
"But it is I that am a wretch," she reflected, once they were in
complete obscurity again, "for base as you may be, am I not still baser? It
is you who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten
the savage, make me clothes of the silkworm's wool, and carpets of the
sheep's. If I want to worship, have you not provided me with an image of
yourself and set it in the sky? Are not evidences of your care everywhere?
How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be
all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you."
Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now
Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides some
degraded creatures of her own sex, two wretched pigmies on a stark desert
land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The one was powerless to
help the other. Each had enough to do to look after itself. Looking Mr Pope
full in the face, "It is equally vain," she thought, "for you to think you
can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth
beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming
to us both."
All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of
birth and education use, about the Queen's temper and the Prime Minister's
gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket, along
the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her house in
Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had been
becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright - that is to say, the
sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a summer's
morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they
alighted, Mr Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando curtseying
Mr Pope to precede her into her mansion with the most scrupulous attention
to the rites of the Graces.
From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that
genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late
Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is
constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps
should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the
lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time;
save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash
six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that night) and then
lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is
therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are,
it is said, much like other people.
It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this
should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of
genius. Nor were they so different from the rest of us as one might have
supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They
liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored
grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore
plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr Swift had a fine malacca
cane. Mr Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered with his head.
A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their
jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that came to Orlando
higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such
trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but
the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits revived, and she took to
tearing up her cards of invitation to great parties; kept her evenings free;
began to look forward to Mr Pope's visit, to Mr Addison's, to Mr Swift's -
and so on and so on. If the reader will here refer to the "Rape of the
Lock", to the "Spectator", to "Gulliver's Travels", he will understand
precisely what these mysterious words may mean. Indeed, biographers and
critics might save themselves all their labours if readers would only take
this advice. For when we read:
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Pray'rs or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball
- we know as if we heard him how Mr Pope's tongue flickered like a
lizard's, how his eyes flashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved, how he
lied, how he suffered. In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every
experience of his life; every quality of his mind is written large in his
works; yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound
the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation
of the monstrous growth.
So, now that we have read a page or two of the "Rape of the Lock", we
know exactly why Orlando was so much amused and so much frightened and so
very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that afternoon.
Mrs Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr Addison waited on her
Ladyship. At this, Mr Pope got up with a wry smile, made his congee, and
limped off. In came Mr Addison. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the
following passage from the "Spectator":
"I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall
cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the peacock, parrot and swan
shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells,
and the rocks for gems, and every part of nature furnish out its share
towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of
it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I have been
speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it."
We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all, in the hollow, of our
hands. Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrinkle
in his stocking? Does not every ripple and curve of his wit lie exposed
before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his urbanity and the fact
that he would marry a Countess and die very respectably in the end? All is
clear. And when Mr Addison has said his say, there is a terrific rap at the
door, and Mr Swift, who had these arbitrary ways with him, walks in
unannounced. One moment, where is "Gulliver's Travels"? Here it is! Let us
read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
"I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tranquillity of Mind; I did not
find the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of a secret
or open Enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering or pimping, to
procure the Favour of any great Man or of his Minion. I wanted no Fence
against Fraud or Oppression; Here was neither Physician to destroy my Body,
nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No Informer to watch my Words, and Actions,
or forge Accusations against me for Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers,
Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, Housebreakers, Attorneys, Bawds,
Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers..."
But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and
yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He is so coarse
and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole world, yet talks
baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a madhouse.
So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the weather
was fine, she carried them down to the country with her, and feasted them
royally in the Round Parlour, which she had hung with their pictures all in
a circle, so that Mr Pope could not say that Mr Addison came before him, or
the other way about. They were very witty, too (but their wit is all in
their books) and taught her the most important part of style, which is the
natural run of the voice in speaking - a quality which none that has not
heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of
the air, and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away,
and is never to be recaptured, least of all by those who prick up their
ears, half a century later, and try. They taught her this, merely by the
cadence of their voices in speech; so that her style changed somewhat, and
she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose. And so
she lavished her wine on them and put bank-notes, which they took very
kindly, beneath their plates at dinner, and accepted their dedications, and
thought herself highly honoured by the exchange.
Thus time ran on, and Orlando could often be heard saying to herself
with an emphasis which might, perhaps, make the hearer a little suspicious,
"Upon my soul, what a life this is!" (For she was still in search of that
commodity.) But circumstances soon forced her to consider the matter more
narrowly.
One day she was pouring out tea for Mr Pope while, as anyone can tell
from the verses quoted above, he sat very bright-eyed, observant, and all
crumpled up in a chair by her side.
"Lord," she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, "how women in ages
to come will envy me! And yet" - she paused; for Mr Pope needed her
attention. And yet - let us finish her thought for her - when anybody says
"How future ages will envy me", it is safe to say that they are extremely
uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so
flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has done
his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for
another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of
lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal
among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the
Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest
of them scarcely have room to breathe. Then the high opinion poets have of
themselves; then the low one they have of others; then the enmities,
injuries, envies, and repartees in which they are constantly engaged; then
the volubility with which they impart them; then the rapacity with which
they demand sympathy for them; all this, one may whisper, lest the wits may
overhear us, makes pouring out tea a more precarious and, indeed, arduous
occupation than is generally allowed. Added to which (we whisper again lest
the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among
them; Lord Chesterfield whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to
secrecy, "Women are but children of a larger growth...A man of sense only
trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them", which, since
children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow
up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out
tea is a curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her
his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea,
this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her
understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her
through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as we
can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended
and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little, look out of
the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with a great
plop - as Orlando did now - into Mr Pope's tea. Never was any mortal so
ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr Pope. He turned
to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain
famous line in the "Characters of Women". Much polish was afterwards
bestowed on it, but even in the original it was striking enough. Orlando
received it with a curtsey. Mr Pope left her with a bow. Orlando, to cool
her cheeks, for really she felt as if the little man had struck her,
strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the garden. Soon the cool breezes
did their work. To her amazement she found that she was hugely relieved to
find herself alone. She watched the merry boatloads rowing up the river. No
doubt the sight put her in mind of one or two incidents in her past life.
She sat herself down in profound meditation beneath a fine willow tree.
There she sat till the stars were in the sky. Then she rose, turned, and
went into the house, where she sought her bedroom and locked the door. Now
she opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn
as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit
richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed,
but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure
of a noble Lord. She took a turn or two before the mirror to make sure that
her petticoats had not lost her the freedom of her legs, and then let
herself secretly out of doors.
It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the
light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a
light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the architecture
of Mr Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it
seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to
animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in
foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that
love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human
intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a
waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we
begin the search again.
She entered Leicester Square as she made these observations. The
buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day. The canopy of
the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to fill up the outline of roof and
chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly with one arm drooping by her side,
the other reposing in her lap, on a seat beneath a plane tree in the middle
of the square seemed the very figure of grace, simplicity, and desolation.
Orlando swept her hat off to her in the manner of a gallant paying his
addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place. The young woman raised her
head. It was of the most exquisite shapeliness. The young woman raised her
eyes. Orlando saw them to be of a lustre such as is sometimes seen on
teapots but rarely in a human face. Through this silver glaze the young
woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her) appealing, hoping,
trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted his arm. For - need we stress the
point? - she was of the tribe which nightly burnishes their wares, and sets
them in order on the common counter to wait the highest bidder. She led
Orlando to the room in Gerrard Street which was her lodging. To feel her
hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the
feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet,
having been so lately a woman herself, she suspected that the girl's
timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in
the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put
on to gratify her masculinity. Upstairs they went, and the pains which the
poor creature had been at to decorate her room and hide the fact that she
had no other deceived Orlando not a moment. The deception roused her scorn;
the truth roused her pity. One thing showing through the other bred the
oddest assortment of feeling, so that she did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girl called herself, unbuttoned her gloves;
carefully concealed the left-hand thumb, which wanted mending; then drew
behind a screen, where, perhaps, she rouged her cheeks, arranged her
clothes, fixed a new kerchief round her neck - all the time prattling as
women do, to amuse her lover, though Orlando could have sworn, from the tone
of her voice, that her thoughts were elsewhere. When all was ready, out she
came, prepared - but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the strangest
torment of anger, merriment, and pity she flung off all disguise and
admitted herself a woman.
At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laughter as might have been
heard across the way.
"Well, my dear," she said, when she had somewhat recovered, "I'm by no
means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter is" (and it
was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the same sex, her
manner changed and she dropped her plaintive, appealing ways), "the plain
Dunstable of the matter is, that I'm not in the mood for the society of the
other sex to-night. Indeed, I'm in the devil of a fix." Whereupon, drawing
up the fire and stirring a bowl of punch, she told Orlando the whole story
of her life. Since it is Orlando's life that engages us at present, we need
not relate the adventures of the other lady, but it is certain that Orlando
had never known the hours speed faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell
had not a particle of wit about her, and when the name of Mr Pope came up in
talk asked innocently if he were connected with the perruque maker of that
name in Jermyn Street. Yet, to Orlando, such is the charm of ease and the
seduction of beauty, this poor girl's talk, larded though it was with the
commonest expressions of the street corners, tasted like wine after the fine
phrases she had been used to, and she was forced to the conclusion that
there was something in the sneer of Mr Pope, in the condescension of Mr
Addison, and in the secret of Lord Chesterfield which took away her relish
for the society of wits, deeply though she must continue to respect their
works.
These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and Prue
Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they now elected
her a member. Each would tell the story of the adventures which had landed
her in her present way of life. Several were the natural daughters of earls
and one was a good deal nearer than she should have been to the King's
person. None was too wretched or too poor but to have some ring or
handkerchief in her pocket which stood her in lieu of pedigree. So they
would draw round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it her business to
furnish generously, and many were the fine tales they told and many the
amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied that when women get
together - but hist - they are always careful to see that the doors are shut
and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is - but hist
again - is that not a man's step on the stair? All they desire, we were
about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women
have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell's parlour; only
affectations. Without desires (she has served him and he is gone) their
conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. "It is well
known," says Mr S. W., "that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex,
women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do
not talk, they scratch." And since they cannot talk together and scratching
cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr T. R. has
proved it) "that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their
own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion", what can we suppose
that women do when they seek out each other's society?
As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible
man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from
any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed
great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen
to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.
But to give an exact and particular account of Orlando's life at this
time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and grope in the
ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about Gerrard Street
and Drury Lane at that time, we seem now to catch sight of her and then
again to lose it. The task is made still more difficult by the fact that she
found it convenient at this time to change frequently from one set of
clothes to another. Thus she often occurs in contemporary memoirs as "Lord"
So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed to him, and it
is he who is said to have written the poems that were really hers. She had,
it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex
changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of
clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold
harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its
experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she exchanged the
seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of
ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or two (for she
had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a
turn in the garden and clip the nut trees - for which knee-breeches were
convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited
a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and
so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a
lawyer's and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing, - for her
fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation than
they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she
would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and
walk the streets in search of adventure.
Returning from some of these junketings - of which there were many
stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the
King's ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled
with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady's husband followed
them - but of the truth or otherwise of these stories, we express no opinion
- returning from whatever her occupation may have been, she made a point
sometimes of passing beneath the windows of a coffee house, where she could
see the wits without being seen, and thus could fancy from their gestures
what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying without hearing a word
of them; which was perhaps an advantage; and once she stood half an hour
watching three shadows on the blind drinking tea together in a house in Bolt
Court.
Never was any play so absorbing. She wanted to cry out, Bravo! Bravo!
For, to be sure, what a fine drama it was - what a page torn from the
thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow with the pouting
lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair, uneasy, petulant, officious;
there was the bent female shadow, crooking a finger in the cup to feel how
deep the tea was, for she was blind; and there was the Roman-looking rolling
shadow in the big armchair - he who twisted his fingers so oddly and jerked
his head from side to side and swallowed down the tea in such vast gulps. Dr
Johnson, Mr Boswell, and Mrs Williams, - those were the shadows' names. So
absorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot to think how other ages would
have envied her, though it seems probable that on this occasion they would.
She was content to gaze and gaze. At length Mr Boswell rose. He saluted the
old woman with tart asperity. But with what humility did he not abase
himself before the great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full height and
rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent phrases
that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though she never heard a
word that any of the three shadows said as they sat there drinking tea.
At length she came home one night after one of these saunterings and
mounted to her bedroom. She took off her laced coat and stood there in shirt
and breeches looking out of the window. There was something stirring in the
air which forbade her to go to bed. A white haze lay over the town, for it
was a frosty night in midwinter and a magnificent vista lay all round her.
She could see St Paul's, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires
and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent
and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the
smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets and squares
of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and orderly
prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless
sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every roof, the
cowl of every chimney, was perceptible; even the cobbles in the streets
showed distinct one from another, and Orlando could not help comparing this
orderly scene with the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the
city of London in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the
city, if such one could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and
conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars
reflected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle
of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where the wine shop used to
stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man. She could
remember the cries of many a one wounded in such night brawlings, when she
was a little boy, held to the diamond-paned window in her nurse's arms.
Troops of ruffians, men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the
streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and
knives gleaming in their fists. On such a night as this the impermeable
tangle of the forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined, writhing
in contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on one of the hills
which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed to
rot or parch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence,
poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed
and stank - Orlando could remember even now the smell of them on a hot night
- in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. Now - she leant out
of her window - all was light, order, and serenity. There was the faint
rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night
watchman - "Just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning". No sooner had the
words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then
for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St
Paul's. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken
and spread with extraordinary speed. At the same time a light breeze rose
and by the time the sixth stroke of midnight had struck the whole of the
eastern sky was covered with an irregular moving darkness, though the sky to
the west and north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloud spread north. Height
upon height above the city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, with all its
lights shining, burnt more brilliantly than ever by contrast. With the
eighth stroke, some hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled over Piccadilly. They
seemed to mass themselves and to advance with extraordinary rapidity towards
the west end. As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge
blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of
midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the
city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth
century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.
The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of
the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or
rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering
gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived
beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of
England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no
sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so
girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its
beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took
the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under
this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense,
and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to
make its way into every house - damp, which is the most insidious of all
enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted
by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible,
ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the
stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest
of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our
hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour
of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.
Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat
down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the
brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards
were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which
he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house;
furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare.
Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the
crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a
drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and
glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces,
and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads,
and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little
dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home - which had become extremely
important - was completely altered.
Outside the house - it was another effect of the damp - ivy grew in
unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in
greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery,
a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children
were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the
drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown
and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp
struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds.
In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one
subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled
in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No
open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously
practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the
damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life
of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at
nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty;
for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus -
for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the
woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics,
and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now
encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our
witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who
could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his
memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one
morning - all about nothing - he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went for
a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery.
Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He seemed to
himself "to crush the mould of a million more under his feet". Thick smoke
exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He reflected that no
fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance.
Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers "came scrolloping
across the grass to his feet". Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck
till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves.
Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh
his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth
confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He
looked upwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great
frontispiece of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the
instigation of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in
year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or
elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed
upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide
above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the
undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was
copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head
in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.
While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well for
Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the
climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear
knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even she, at length, was
forced to acknowledge that times were changed. One afternoon in the early
part of the century she was driving through St James's Park in her old
panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not
often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with
strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was sufficiently
strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause
her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and flamingo clouds
made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves that she was
insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins dying in Ionian
seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck the earth, the sunbeam
seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy (for it
had something of a banquet-table air) - a conglomeration at any rate of the
most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a
vast mound where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a
vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow's weeds and bridal
veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes,
military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes,
cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps,
elephants, and mathematical instruments - the whole supported like a
gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in
flowing white; on the left by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and
sponge-bag trousers. The incongruity of the objects, the association of the
fully clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours
and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with the most profound
dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent,
so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it must be, the effect
of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the first breeze
that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past, as if it were
destined to endure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking back into the corner
of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that
garish erection. Only the noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust;
but there they would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north,
eternally. She looked back as her coach swept up Constitution Hill. Yes,
there it was, still beaming placidly in a light which - she pulled her watch
out of her fob - was, of course, the light of twelve o'clock mid-day. None
other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of
dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever. She was determined
not to look again. Already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly.
But what was more peculiar a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her
cheeks as she passed Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a
superior power down upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she
was wearing black breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached
her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot
thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.
Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of
her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which
she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew (who had
succeeded good old Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.
"So do we all, m'lady," said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. "The
walls is sweating," she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and
sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the
finger-prints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that many
windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely
tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals
and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were already wearing three or
four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was August.
"But is it true, m'lady," the good woman asked, hugging herself, while
the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, "that the Queen, bless her, is
wearing a what d'you call it, a?," the good woman hesitated and blushed.
"A crinoline," Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached
Blackfriars). Mrs Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down
her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were
they not all of them weak women - wearing crinolines the better to conceal
the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable
fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was
impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child - to bear fifteen or
twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman's life was spent,
after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made
obvious.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot," said Mrs Bartholomew, mopping up her
tears, "in the liberry."
And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins Orlando now sat
down.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot in the liberry" - Orlando minced out the
horrid cockney phrase in Mrs Bartholomew's refined cockney accents as she
drank - but no, she detested the mild fluid - her tea. It was in this very
room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace
with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on the table
when Lord Burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of the
subjunctive. "Little man, little man," - Orlando could hear her say - "is
`must' a word to be addressed to princes?" And down came the flagon on the
table: there was the mark of it still.
But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great
Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her
arm-chair with a curse. Tomorrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more
of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. And then (here she
blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a
bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on...The blushes came and
went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. One
might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her cheeks.
And if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the crinoline being
blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous position must excuse her (even
her sex was still in dispute) and the irregular life she had lived before.
At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed
as if the spirit of the age - if such indeed it were - lay dormant for a
time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or
relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper,
sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained - the manuscript of her poem,
"The Oak Tree". She had carried this about with her for so many years now,
and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained,
some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when
with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the
lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most
conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the
date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for
close three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she
began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read,
how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy,
in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid;
and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried
prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she
had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same
brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same
passion for the country and the seasons.
"After all," she thought, getting up and going to the window, "nothing
has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a chair
has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the same
lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the same
carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth,
but what difference..."
No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the
door was flung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed by
Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just
dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the
eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which
spread and meandered round her pen. It was some infirmity of the quill, she
supposed; it was split or dirty. She dipped it again. The blot increased.
She tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came. Next she began
to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed
monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry
with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had
she said "Impossible" than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to
curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written
in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever
read in her life:
I am myself but a vile link
Amid life's weary chain,
But I have spoken hallow'd words,
Oh, do not say in vain!
Will the young maiden, when her tears,
Alone in moonlight shine,
Tears for the absent and the loved,
Murmur?
she wrote without a stop as Bartholomew and Basket grunted and groaned
about the room, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.
Again she dipped her pen and off it went:
She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve
Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
Had faded into paleness, broken by
Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,
but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page and
blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all
of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink
flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. What had happened to
her? Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she
demanded. But the room was empty. No one answered her, unless the dripping
of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an
extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a
thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales.
Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about
the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and
twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years
or so. But all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands;
and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally
to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the
second finger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see what caused
this agitation, she saw nothing - nothing but the vast solitary emerald
which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It
was of the finest water. It was worth ten thousand pounds at least. The
vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some
of the darkest manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not
enough; and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were
asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight - till poor
Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand
without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask
which dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were
much quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly
perceived what she had never noticed before - a thick ring of rather
jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.
"Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew," she said, stretching her hand
to take it.
At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a
rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it away
from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. "No," she said, with
resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but as for taking
off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor Queen Victoria on
her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had put it on her finger
twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked
in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact,
Orlando understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with emotion;
that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her
station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she
let it out of her keeping for a second.
"Heaven help us," said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the
pigeons at their pranks, "what a world we live in! What a world to be sure!"
Its complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole world was
ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to
church. Wedding rings were everywhere. She drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck,
thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. Rings filled
the jewellers' shops, not the flashing pastes and diamonds of Orlando's
recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. At the same time,
she began to notice a new habit among the town people. In the old days, one
would meet a boy trifling with a girl under a hawthorn hedge frequently
enough. Orlando had flicked many a couple with the tip of her whip and
laughed and passed on. Now, all that was changed. Couples trudged and
plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman's
right hand was invariably passed through the man's left and her fingers were
firmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the horses' noses were on them
that they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one piece,
heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only suppose that some new
discovery had been made about the race; that they were somehow stuck
together, couple after couple, but who had made it and when, she could not
guess. It did not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits
and the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or
mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no indissoluble
alliance among the brutes that she could see. Could it be Queen Victoria
then, or Lord Melbourne? Was it from them that the great discovery of
marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of
dogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. It
was strange - it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this
indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and
sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were accompanied by such a tingling
and twanging of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas
in order. They were languishing and ogling like a housemaid's fancies. They
made her blush. There was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands
and wear it like the rest. This she did, slipping it, overcome with shame,
upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. The tingling
persisted more violently, more indignantly than ever. She did not sleep a
wink that night. Next morning when she took up the pen to write, either she
could think of nothing, and the pen made one large lachrymose blot after
another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies
about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the
fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds
itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel
herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider
the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and
submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.
That this was much against her natural temperament has been
sufficiently made plain. When the sound of the Archduke's chariot wheels
died away, the cry that rose to her lips was "Life! A Lover!" not "Life! A
Husband!" and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and
run about the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. Such is the
indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down
anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those
who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the
Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the
eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change
from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and
she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For
it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it;
some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a
woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were
fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so
christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which
she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress
she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could
she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high
mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp
leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were
quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became
nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the
first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things
inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen
Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has another allotted
to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them
do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie
down; never, never, never to get up again. Thus did the spirit work upon
her, for all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of
emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those twangings and
tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the
sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if angels were plucking harp-strings
with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the wild
autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he
had married a very great lady and had hunted hares in Roumania these many
years now; nor Mr M.; he was become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he
made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for fishes.
One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the
Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean
upon.
"Whom," she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping
her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of
appealing womanhood as she did so, "can I lean upon?" Her words formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had
written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of
the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling
pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had stopped at last
and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her
plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
"Everyone is mated except myself," she mused, as she trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and Pippin
even - transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to
have a partner. "Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all," Orlando thought,
glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned windows of the hall,
"am single, am mateless, am alone."
Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down
unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved
hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One must lean on someone, she
thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and help
him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid to ask
it. So she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and
apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys
to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.
At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be
hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss
her. But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume
from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers. She
had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.
The air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. As the rooks went
whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming
through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind
her, over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so far for years. Six
feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn between her fingers and
pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw,
gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, mysterious as the lake into which
Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur. A single feather quivered in the air
and fell into the middle of it. Then, some strange ecstasy came over her.
Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and
flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while
the rooks' hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she
ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle
was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the
bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks' hoarse
laughter was in her ears. "I have found my mate," she murmured. "It is the
moor. I am nature's bride," she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the
cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by
the pool. "Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a
greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild
birds' feathers - the owl's, the nightjar's. I shall dream wild dreams. My
hands shall wear no wedding ring," she continued, slipping it from her
finger. "The roots shall twine about them. Ah!" she sighed, pressing her
head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, "I have sought happiness through many
ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life - and
behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women," she
continued; "none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace
here with only the sky above me - as the gipsy told me years ago. That was
in Turkey." And she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into
which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it,
and camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of
red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only mountains,
very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she
heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields of
irises and gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered
themselves down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw
the great hump of the South Downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and
where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with ships passing; and
she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and thought at first, "That's
the Armada," and then thought "No, it's Nelson," and then remembered how
those wars were over and the ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails
on the winding river were those of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle
sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming
here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle
as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out
and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. Indeed, she was
falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the
ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a
heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil,
or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought
it changed to the trot of a horse's hoofs; one, two, three, four, she
counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she
could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The
horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the
yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him,
she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
"Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!"
"I'm dead, sir!" she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It
was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous,
passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild,
dark-plumed name - a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of
rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting
descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things
which will be described presently.
"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship
in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the
Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he
explained.
In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed,
as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each
other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such
unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether
they were beggars or people of substance. He had a castle in the Hebrides,
but it was ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting hall. He
had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the East. He was on his
way now to join his brig at Falmouth, but the wind had fallen and it was
only when the gale blew from the South-west that he could put out to sea.
Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on
the weather vane. Mercifully its tail pointed due east and was steady as a
rock. "Oh! Shel, don't leave me!" she cried. "I'm passionately in love with
you," she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful
suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
"You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then
took place since the world began. When it was over and they were seated
again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west gale? Where was he
bound for?
"For the Horn," he said briefly, and blushed. (For a man had to blush
as a woman had, only at rather different things.) It was only by dint of
great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she gathered
that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures -
which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale. Masts had been
snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him).
Sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a
raft with a biscuit.
"It's about all a fellow can do nowadays," he said sheepishly, and
helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision which she
had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for
which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he
roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the
tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than any she had
cried before: "I am a woman," she thought, "a real woman, at last." She
thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare
and unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left foot, she would
have sat upon his knee.
"Shel, my darling," she began again, "tell me..." and so they talked
two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would
profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well
that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or
saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy
the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their
setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come
about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost
dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions
do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the
most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which
reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that
the space is filled to repletion.
After some days more of this kind of talk,
"Orlando, my dearest," Shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling
outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there was a
couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.
"Show 'em up," said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck,
taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the
fireplace. Two officers in bottlegreen uniforms with truncheons at their
hips then entered the room and stood at attention. Formalities being over,
they gave into Orlando's own hands, as their commission was, a legal
document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs of sealing wax,
the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest
importance.
Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her
right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to
the matter.
"The lawsuits are settled," she read out..."some in my favour, as for
example...others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in
Constantinople, Shel," she explained) "Children pronounced illegitimate,
(they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don't
inherit, which is all to the good...Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex," she
read out with some solemnity, "is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The
estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed
and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage" -
but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, "but there
won't be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be
taken as read." Whereupon she appended her own signature beneath Lord
Palmerston's and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of
her titles, her house, and her estate - which was now so much shrunk, for
the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was
infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much
quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was
filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken
out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street
incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the
Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass
cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded.
Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were
burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys
with the label "I am a base Pretender", lolling from their mouths. The
Queen's cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a
command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night.
Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from
the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs
W.E. Gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding
her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] - all of
which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason
that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando's life. She
skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bonfires were blazing in
the marketplace, she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine
was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above
them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one
could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest
at last, on Orlando's foot.
"Tell me, Mar," she would say (and here it must be explained, that when
she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy,
amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs
were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet
perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might
be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant
farms, a cock crowing - all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)
- "Tell me, Mar," she would say, "about Cape Horn." Then Shelmerdine would
make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and
an empty snail shell or two.
"Here's the north," he would say. "There's the south. The wind's coming
from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we've just lowered the
top-boom mizzen: and so you see - here, where this bit of grass is, she
enters the current which you'll find marked - where's my map and compasses,
Bo'sun? Ah! thanks, that'll do, where the snail shell is. The current
catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall
be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf is, - for you
must understand my dear" - and so he would go on, and she would listen to
every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without
his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles
clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there
reflected on the destiny of man; came down again; had a whisky and soda;
went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read
Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true
end of life; decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a
thousand other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied,
Yes, negresses are seductive, aren't they? he having told her that the
supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how
well she had taken his meaning.
"Are you positive you aren't a man?" he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,
"Can it be possible you're not a woman?" and then they must put it to
the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of
the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman
could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and
subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.
And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has
become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so
scanty in comparison with ideas that "the biscuits ran out" has to stand for
kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's
philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most
profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple
one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the
poor man is lying.)
So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with
spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart of
the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there among the snail
shells, making models of Cape Horn. "Bonthrop," she would say, "I'm off,"
and when she called him by his second name, "Bonthrop", it should signify to
the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks on a
desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily,
die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and
with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby asking her out
every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so
saying "Bonthrop", she said in effect, "I'm dead", and pushed her way as a
spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep
into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and movement were over and
she were free now to take her way - all of which the reader should hear in
her voice when she said "Bonthrop", and should also add, the better to
illumine the word, that for him too the same word signified, mystically,
separation and isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in
unfathomable seas.
After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked "Shelmerdine", and
stooping, she picked up one of those autumn crocuses which to some people
signify that very word, and put it with the jay's feather that came tumbling
blue through the beech woods, in her breast. Then she called "Shelmerdine"
and the word went shooting this way and that way through the woods and
struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells in the grass. He
saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay's feather
in her breast, and cried "Orlando", which meant (and it must be remembered
that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes,
some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken
as if something were breaking through; which proved to be a ship in full
sail, heaving and tossing a little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole
year of summer days to make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down,
heaving this way, heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the
crest of this wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly
stands over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at
her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap
on deck - as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the
26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine recited
Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which had started
to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across Orlando's foot.
A second leaf followed and then a third. Orlando shivered and turned pale.
It was the wind. Shelmerdine - but it would be more proper now to call him
Bonthrop - leapt to his feet.
"The wind!" he cried.
Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with
leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts,
frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after
till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as
fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that
taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr Dupper
catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book.
And they thrust Queen Mary's prayer book in his hands and he searched,
hastily fluttering the pages, and said, "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and
Lady Orlando, kneel down"; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and
now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter
through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and
a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud
and faint alternately, and Mr Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried
now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all
was quiet for a moment, and one word - it might be "the jaws of death" -
rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes
and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang loud and others
prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap
of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a
golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. All was movement and
confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing
and the rain pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger,
went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for
the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for
her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt
forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out "Marmaduke Bonthrop
Shelmerdine!" and he answered her "Orlando!" and the words went dashing and
circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher,
further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and
fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent.
There was the ink pot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her
poem, broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about
to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing
changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had
changed - she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.
There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that
she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had proved
worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with
superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of
her finger.
"The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand,"
she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, "for it to be of any
use at all."
She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as
if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her.
Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able to collect her
thoughts, the effect that her behaviour would have had upon the spirit of
the age. She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had
taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met
with its approval. She was certainly feeling more herself. Her finger had
not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet,
she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but if
one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one
liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And
finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to
write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at
the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could not.
What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt better
in her life.
"Hang it all!" she cried, with a touch of her old spirit. "Here goes!"
And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise,
there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping.
She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did. Ah!
but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over her lest the pen
might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again. She read,
And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls:
As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with the most
obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder, and
when she had written "Egyptian girls", the power told her to stop. Grass,
the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as governesses use to
the beginning, is all right; the hanging cups of fritillaries - admirable;
the snaky flower - a thought, strong from a lady's pen, perhaps, but
Wordsworth no doubt, sanctions it; but - girls? Are girls necessary? You
have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that'll do.
And so the spirit passed on.
Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a
deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as - to compare great things
with small - a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the
corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obligingly
made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful
whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it
would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have
had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She
had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by
putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no
satirist, cynic, or psychologist - any one of which goods would have been
discovered at once - to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a
deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between
a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a
nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends.
Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she
need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained
herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She
wrote. She wrote.
It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January,
February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August
follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at
November again, with a whole year accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little
bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may complain that he
could recite the calendar for himself and so save his pocket whatever sum
the Hogarth Press may think proper to charge for this book. But what can the
biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into which
Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion
is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer;
life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with
sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles
asunder. Therefore - since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what
Orlando is doing now - there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar,
tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window,
until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin
drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a
kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her
chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a
wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would
be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is
life. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a
man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere
wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with
a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects,
we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration
for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on
whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp
altogether and indulging - witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her
palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns - what is more
humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone
through before our eyes when we know that what causes it - thought and
imagination - are of no importance whatsoever?
But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when
we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand
for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's
whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her
table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that
calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in
the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and
thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she
thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will
write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody
objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk
and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window
- all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible
subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things?
Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be
admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love?
She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen
starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists
define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority - has nothing
whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is
slipping off one's petticoat and - But we all know what love is. Did Orlando
do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of
one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine,
we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were
sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two
rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a snail.
One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf. Then a
servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is
engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no
visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best
and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the
colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers the hour in its usual
cryptic way. One's mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,
about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a
hob. Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of the
under-footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring
the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the
starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on
the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of
scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we
meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and
out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they
don't know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me
what life is; Life, Life, Life!
We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue
purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see
there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he
says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life's
labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant
agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when
they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will
breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in
snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men
tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them
speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is- having asked them
all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once
in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it
was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who
waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is - alas, we don't know.
At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction,
Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to
the window, and exclaimed, "Done!"
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which
now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going
on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
"And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that
she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually attacked
her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent spectacle with
staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way. The manuscript
which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a
living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was
between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was
that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in
her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned
with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes were about her in
profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can none of them read. It is a
lamentable oversight on the part of Providence which had never struck her
before. Human beings alone are thus gifted. Human beings had become
necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London
at once.
"There's just time to catch the eleven forty five, M'Lady," said
Basket. Orlando had not yet realized the invention of the steam engine, but
such was her absorption in the sufferings of a being, who, though not
herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for the
first time, took her seat in a railway carriage, and had the rug arranged
about her knees without giving a thought to"that stupendous invention, which
had (the historians say) completely changed the face of Europe in the past
twenty years" (as, indeed, happens much more frequently than historians
suppose). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty; rattled horribly;
and the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled up to London in
something less than an hour and stood on the platform at Charing Cross, not
knowing where to go.
The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days
in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part to
an umbrella factory. She had bought another in Mayfair which was sanitary,
convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair
that her poem would be relieved of its desire? Pray God, she thought,
remembering the brightness of their ladyships' eyes and the symmetry of
their lordship's legs, they haven't taken to reading there. For that would
be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.'s. The same sort of talk would
be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might have shifted from
the General's left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr L. might have stayed ten
days with R. instead of T. Then Mr Pope would come in. Oh! but Mr Pope was
dead. Who were the wits now, she wondered - but that was not a question one
could put to a porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by
the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets
of the strangest little boxes on wheels were drawn up by the pavement. She
walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all
sizes, drawn by blood horses and by dray horses, conveying one solitary
dowager or crowded to the top by whiskered men in silk hats, were
inextricably mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so
long used to the look of a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at
loggerheads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the
street sounded violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the
pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their
own bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility,
poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood men,
holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside great
baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses'
noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster!
Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of
national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She
looked anxiously at people's faces. But that confused her still more. Here
would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as if he knew some
terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering
his way along as if it were a festival for all the world. Indeed, she came
to the conclusion that there was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each
man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?
She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast
windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing gowns, and flowers,
and fishing rods, and luncheon baskets; while stuff of every hue and
pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and festooned and ballooned
across and across. Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate mansions,
soberly numbered "one", "two", "three", and so on right up to two or three
hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and six steps and a
pair of curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid on tables, and a
parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out of another, until her
mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open squares with
black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle, and war
horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons
fluttering. So she walked and walked along pavements between houses until
she felt very hungry, and something fluttering above her heart rebuked her
with having forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript. "The Oak Tree".
She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where she
stood. No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and handsome, was
singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was approaching. There was
something vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she felt
certain that she had met him at some time or other. But where? Could it be
that this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane in his
hand and a flower in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed
white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was! - her old, her very old
friend, Nick Greene!
At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognized her. "The
Lady Orlando!" he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.
"Sir Nicholas!" she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively by
something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who had
lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen
in the world and become certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine
things into the bargain.
With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was correct; he
was a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was the author of a
score of volumes. He was, in short, the most influential critic of the
Victorian age.
A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who had
caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy, restless
fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the Italian
fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest that they had
seen the sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now sprucely dressed in a
grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his button-hole, and grey suede
gloves to match. But even as she marvelled, he made another bow, and asked
her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow was a thought
overdone perhaps, but the imitation of fine breeding was creditable. She
followed him, wondering, into a superb restaurant, all red plush, white
table-cloths, and silver cruets, as unlike as could be the old tavern or
coffee house with its sanded floor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch
and chocolate, and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly
on the table beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same
man. His nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin was
shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links; where
his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he had
ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her of his taste in
Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same man. "Ah!" he said,
heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, "ah! my dear lady,
the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson -
those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison - those were the heroes. All,
all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!"
- he threw an immense amount of scorn into his voice. "The truth of it is,"
he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, "that all our young writers are in
the pay of the booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their
tailor's bills. It is an age," he said, helping himself to hors-d'oeuvres,
"marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - none of which the
Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant."
"No, my dear lady," he continued, passing with approval the turbot au
gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, "the great days are
over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the past; honour those
writers - there are still a few left of 'em - who take antiquity for their
model and write, not for pay but - " Here Orlando almost shouted "Glawr!"
Indeed she could have sworn that she had heard him say the very same things
three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but the spirit
was the same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,
some change there was. For while he ran on about taking Addison as one's
model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and lying in bed of a morning
(which she was proud to think her pension paid quarterly enabled him to do)
rolling the best works of the best authors round and round on one's tongue
for an hour, at least, before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of
the present time and the deplorable condition of our native tongue (he had
lived long in America, she believed) might be purified - while he ran on in
much the same way that Greene had run on three hundred years ago, she had
time to ask herself, how was it then that he had changed? He had grown
plump; but he was a man verging on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature
had been a prosperous pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless,
uneasy vivacity had gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no
longer quite so free and easy. He mentioned, it is true, "my dear friend
Pope" or "my illustrious friend Addison" every other second, but he had an
air of respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it
seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own blood
relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the poets.
Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature
all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as
something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something
errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly
gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her
disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper part
of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell "The Oak Tree", a poem.
"A manuscript!" said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez. "How
interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it." And once
more, after an interval of some three hundred years, Nicholas Greene took
Orlando's poem and, laying it down among the coffee cups and the liqueur
glasses, began to read it. But now his verdict was very different from what
it had been then. It reminded him, he said as he turned over the pages, of
Addison's "Cato". It compared favourably with Thomson's "Seasons". There was
no trace in it, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit. It was
composed with a regard to truth, to nature, to the dictates of the human
heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It
must, of course, be published instantly.
Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her
manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress. The idea tickled Sir
Nicholas considerably.
"But what about royalties?" he asked.
Orlando's mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who
happened to be staying there.
Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to
the fact that Messrs - (here he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers)
would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book on their list.
He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten per cent on all copies up to
two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would
himself write a line to Mr -, who was the most influential; then a
compliment - say a little puff of her own poems - addressed to the wife of
the editor of the - never did any harm. He would call -. So he ran on.
Orlando understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not
altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit
to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So
Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it
into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with
many compliments on both sides, they parted.
Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone, - and she
felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it - she
had nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked - the extraordinary
chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St James's Street; a
married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee
house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in the
afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier
dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought
popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow
the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable,
as the reader chooses to consider it upon her relations with her husband
(who was at the Horn), that whenever anything popped violently into her
head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired to him.
There was one, as it happened, close at hand. "My God Shel," she wired;
"life literature Greene toady" - here she dropped into a cypher language
which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the
utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph
clerk being any wiser, and added the words "Rattigan Glumphoboo", which
summed it up precisely. For not only had the events of the morning made a
deep impression on her, but it cannot have escaped the reader's attention
that Orlando was growing up - which is not necessarily growing better - and
"Rattigan Glumphoboo" described a very complicated spiritual state - which
if the reader puts all his intelligence at our service he may discover for
himself.
There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was
probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper clouds raced
swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that her husband would
be at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cutting away some tattered spar,
or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving the post office, she
turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which was a shop so common in
our day that it needs no description, yet, to her eyes, strange in the
extreme; a shop where they sold books. All her life long Orlando had known
manuscripts; she had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which
Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare's
script and Milton's. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios,
often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But
these innumerable little volumes, bright, identical, ephemeral, for they
seemed bound in cardboard and printed on tissue paper, surprised her
infinitely. The whole works of Shakespeare cost half a crown, and could be
put in your pocket. One could hardly read them, indeed, the print was so
small, but it was a marvel, none the less. "Works" - the works of every
writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of
the long shelves. On tables and chairs, more "works" were piled and tumbled,
and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often works about other works
by Sir Nicholas and a score of others whom, in her ignorance, she supposed,
since they were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave
an astounding order to the bookseller to send her everything of any
importance in the shop and left.
She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath that
cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through the body
by Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often to blame in the matter, began
framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life literature
Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her
with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity
by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She had carried off a sheaf
of papers and critical journals from the book shop, and at length, flinging
herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she spread these pages round her and
did her best to fathom the noble art of prose composition as these masters
practised it. For still the old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred
type of a weekly newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying
on her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she
had once known - John Donne. But she had pitched herself, without knowing
it, not far from the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in
her ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed
overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers
crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball
bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through
the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She
read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked up at the sky and
looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to be made into the
other? But how monstrously difficult! For - here came by a pair of tight
scarlet trousers - how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs
dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading
Sir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in the intervals of looking about
her), she somehow got the impression - here she rose and walked - they made
one feel - it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling - one must never, never
say what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a
bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made
one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody
else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought,
pushing a little boat off with her toe, I don't think I could (here the
whole of Sir Nicholas' article came before her as articles do, ten minutes
after they are read, with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his
writing-table, and the time of the day thrown in), I don't think I could,
she continued, considering the article from this point of view, sit in a
study, no, it's not a study, it's a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day
long, and talk to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which
they mustn't repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she
continued, weeping bitterly, they're all so manly; and then, I do detest
Duchesses; and I don't like cake; and though I'm spiteful enough, I could
never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and
write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed,
launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost
sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses
call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much
more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the
Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the
waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean
liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and the wave
she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she
watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop's ship
climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a
thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it
went and disappeared. "It's sunk!" she cried out in an agony - and then,
behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on
the other side of the Atlantic.
"Ecstasy!" she cried. "Ecstasy! Where's the post office?" she wondered.
"For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him..." And repeating "A toy boat
on the Serpentine", and "Ecstasy", alternately, for the thoughts were
interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing, she hurried towards Park
Lane.
"A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat," she repeated, thus enforcing upon
herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor
eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's something
useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a
spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them);
free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind;
something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop:
that's what it is -a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy - it's ecstasy that
matters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope
Gate, for the consequence of not living with one's husband, except when the
wind is sunk, is that one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would no
doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen
Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in a
flash. She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did
not care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it
might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene's article had plunged her in the
depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she
repeated: "Ecstasy, ecstasy", as she stood waiting to cross.
But the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her standing
there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine, while
the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in
four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a golden river had
coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies
held card-cases between their fingers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted
canes between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One
thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great
elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is: how do these
leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant,
propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando thought, looking at the stately,
still faces, their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is
the consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and
splendid there they sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the
stream became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved,
dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.
So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street, where,
when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember curlew calling and one
very old man with a gun.
She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of her
house, how Lord Chesterfield had said - but her memory was checked. Her
discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see Lord Chesterfield
putting his hat down here and his coat down there with an elegance of
deportment which it was a pleasure to watch, was now completely littered
with parcels. While she had been sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had
delivered her order, and the house was crammed - there were parcels slipping
down the staircase - with the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey
paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of these packets as
she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the others, and, rapidly
cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by innumerable volumes.
Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order.
For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not
merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and
embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles,
Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons - all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and
requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's reverence for print
had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the
benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she
tried to come to a conclusion.
And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a
conclusion upon Victorian literature - one is to write it out in sixty
volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of
this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to
choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion
(opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a
single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile
of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as
her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound
note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next
(here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that
literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent;
next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon
that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the
same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures
must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a
peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing
very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at
Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very
delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the
highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit
of six lines, we must omit.
Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the
window for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes to a
conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and must wait
for the unseen antagonist to return it to them. What would be sent her next
from the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her
hands clasped, she stood for a considerable space of time wondering.
Suddenly she started - and here we could only wish that, as on a former
occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and
provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up
what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no! Having
thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen it fall short by
several inches, these ladies had given up all intercourse with her these
many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen
this pale March morning to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to
shroud this undeniable event whatever it may be? For after giving that
sudden, violent start, Orlando - but Heaven be praised, at this very moment
there struck up outside one of these frail, reedy, fluty, jerky,
old-fashioned barrel-organs which are still sometimes played by Italian
organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the intervention, humble
though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with all
its gasps and groans, to fill this page with sound until the moment comes
when it is impossible to deny its coming; which the footman has seen coming
and the maid-servant; and the reader will have to see too; for Orlando
herself is clearly unable to ignore it any longer - let the barrel-organ
sound and transport us on thought, which is no more than a little boat, when
music sounds, tossing on the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers,
the most clumsy, the most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens
where washing is hanging to - what is this place? Do you recognize the Green
and in the middle the steeple, and the gate with a lion couchant on either
side? Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here we are at Kew, and I
will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape
hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk
there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in
October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said,
and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging
a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the
kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from
bank to bank.
Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.
Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys and their smoke; behold the
city clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her
dog for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time
not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though Heaven has mercifully
decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on
for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist; still through
our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid fulfilment of
natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw
blazing - such silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this
all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays - saw blazing a fire in a
field against minarets near Constantinople.
Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure
of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates;
and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark
chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and
confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of
links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows
on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink
and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from
bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether it is what the
male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it
comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream
- would it were true, as the rhyme hints "like a dream" - but duller and
worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent,
habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the
wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.
Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which
bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn
parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us
and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so
deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of
dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth,
prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.
But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind
land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he
flies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods
back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling,
dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us
safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on - (here the
barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).
"It's a very fine boy, M'Lady," said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting
her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In other words Orlando was safely
delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the
morning.
Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage;
nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by any
means, the same day. No - for if we look out of the window, as Orlando was
doing at the moment, we shall see that Park Lane itself has considerably
changed. Indeed one might stand there ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood
now, without seeing a single barouche landau. "Look at that!" she exclaimed,
some days later when an absurd truncated carriage without any horses began
to glide about of its own accord. A carriage without any horses indeed! She
was called away just as she said that, but came back again after a time and
had another look out of the window. It was odd sort of weather nowadays. The
sky itself, she could not help thinking, had changed. It was no longer so
thick, so watery, so prismatic now that King Edward - see, there he was,
stepping out of his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady opposite -
had succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky
seemed made of metal, which in hot weather tarnished verdigris, copper
colour or orange as metal does in a fog. It was a little alarming- this
shrinkage. Everything seemed to have shrunk. Driving past Buckingham Palace
last night, there was not a trace of that vast erection which she had
thought everlasting; top hats, widows' weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths,
all had vanished and left not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement.
But it was now - after another interval she had come back again to her
favourite station in the window - now, in the evening, that the change was
most remarkable. Look at the lights in the houses! At a touch, a whole room
was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was precisely the same as the
other. One could see everything in the little square-shaped boxes; there was
no privacy; none of those lingering shadows and odd corners that there used
to be; none of those women in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put
down carefully on this table and on that. At a touch, the whole room was
bright. And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavements were
bright; everything was bright. She came back again at mid-day. How narrow
women have grown lately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight, shining,
identical. And men's faces were as bare as the palm of one's hand. The
dryness of the atmosphere brought out the colour in everything and seemed to
stiffen the muscles of the cheeks. It was harder to cry now. Water was hot
in two seconds. Ivy had perished or been scraped off houses. Vegetables were
less fertile; families were much smaller. Curtains and covers had been
frizzled up and the walls were bare so that new brilliantly coloured
pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas, apples, were hung in
frames, or painted upon the wood. There was something definite and distinct
about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that
there was a distraction, a desperation - as she was thinking this, the
immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for
hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became
mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in
her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing
quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the
clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds
the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything
more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was
a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been
violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten
o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was
the present moment.
No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart,
and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that
it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible
because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we
have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already. She ran
downstairs, she jumped into her motorcar, she pressed the self-starter and
was off. Vast blue blocks of building rose into the air; the red cowls of
chimneys were spotted irregularly across the sky; the road shone like
silver-headed nails; omnibuses bore down upon her with sculptured
white-faced drivers; she noticed sponges, bird-cages, boxes of green
American cloth. But she did not allow these sights to sink into her mind
even the fraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow plank of the present,
lest she should fall into the raging torrent beneath. "Why don't you look
where you're going to?...Put your hand out, can't you?" - that was all she
said sharply, as if the words were jerked out of her. For the streets were
immensely crowded; people crossed without looking where they were going.
People buzzed and hummed round the plate-glass windows within which one
could see a glow of red, a blaze of yellow, as if they were bees, Orlando
thought - but her thought that they were bees was violently snipped off and
she saw, regaining perspective with one flick of her eye, that they were
bodies. "Why don't you look where you're going?" she snapped out.
At last, however, she drew up at Marshall & Snelgrove's and went
into the shop. Shade and scent enveloped her. The present fell from her like
drops of scalding water. Light swayed up and down like thin stuffs puffed
out by a summer breeze. She took a list from her bag and began reading in a
curious stiff voice at first, as if she were holding the words - boy's
boots, bath salts, sardines - under a tap of many-coloured water. She
watched them change as the light fell on them. Bath and boots became blunt,
obtuse; sardines serrated itself like a saw. So she stood in the
ground-floor department of Messrs Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way
and that; snuffed this smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then she
got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was
shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose,
is magic. In the eighteenth century we knew how everything was done; but
here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying
- but how it's done I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic
returns. Now the lift gave a little jerk as it stopped at the first floor;
and she had a vision of innumerable coloured stuffs flaunting in a breeze
from which came distinct, strange smells; and each time the lift stopped and
flung its doors open, there was another slice of the world displayed with
all the smells of that world clinging to it. She was reminded of the river
off Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where the treasure ships and the
merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and curiously they had smelt! How
well she remembered the feel of rough rubies running through her fingers
when she dabbled them in a treasure sack! And then lying with Sukey - or
whatever her name was - and having Cumberland's lantern flashed on them! The
Cumberlands had a house in Portland Place now and she had lunched with them
the other day and ventured a little joke with the old man about alms-houses
in the Sheen Road. He had winked. But here as the lift could go no higher,
she must get out - Heaven knows into what "department" as they called it.
She stood still to consult her shopping list, but was blessed if she could
see, as the list bade her, bath salts, or boy's boots anywhere about. And
indeed, she was about to descend again, without buying anything, but was
saved from that outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her
list; which happened to be "sheets for a double bed".
"Sheets for a double bed," she said to a man at a counter and, by a
dispensation of Providence, it was sheets that the man at that particular
counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch, no, Grimsditch was dead;
Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was dead; Louise then - Louise had come to her
in a great taking the other day, for she had found a hole in the bottom of
the sheet in the royal bed. Many kings and queens had slept there -
Elizabeth; James; Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the sheet had
a hole in it. But Louise was positive she knew who had done it. It was the
Prince Consort.
"Sale bosch!" she said (for there had been another war; this time
against the Germans).
"Sheets for a double bed," Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double bed
with a silver counterpane in a room fitted in a taste which she now thought
perhaps a little vulgar - all in silver; but she had furnished it when she
had a passion for that metal. While the man went to get sheets for a double
bed, she took out a little looking-glass and a powder puff. Women were not
nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering herself with the
greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself first turned woman and
lay on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". She gave her nose the right tint
deliberately. She never touched her cheeks. Honestly, though she was now
thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. She looked just as pouting, as
sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha
had said) as she had done that day on the ice, when the Thames was frozen
and they had gone skating -
"The best Irish linen, Ma'am," said the shopman, spreading the sheets
on the counter, - and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here, as
she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between the
departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-goods department,
a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles, and the scent
curved like a shell round a figure - was it a boy's or was it a girl's -
young, slender, seductive - a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in Russian
trousers; but faithless, faithless!
"Faithless!" cried Orlando (the man had gone) and all the shop seemed
to pitch and toss with yellow water and far off she saw the masts of the
Russian ship standing out to sea, and then, miraculously (perhaps the door
opened again) the conch which the scent had made became a platform, a dais,
off which stepped a fat, furred woman, marvellously well preserved,
seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke's mistress; she who, leaning over the
banks of the Volga, eating sandwiches, had watched men drown; and began
walking down the shop towards her.
"Oh Sasha!" Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should have
come to this; she had grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowed her head
over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in fur, and a girl in
Russian trousers, with all these smells of wax candles, white flowers, and
old ships that it brought with it might pass behind her back unseen.
"Any napkins, towels, dusters today, Ma'am?" the shopman persisted. And
it is enormously to the credit of the shopping list, which Orlando now
consulted, that she was able to reply with every appearance of composure,
that there was only one thing in the world she wanted and that was bath
salts; which was in another department.
But descending in the lift again - so insidious is the repetition of
any scene - she was again sunk far beneath the present moment; and thought
when the lift bumped on the ground, that she heard a pot broken against a
river bank. As for finding the right department, whatever it might be, she
stood engrossed among the handbags, deaf to the suggestions of all the
polite, black, combed, sprightly shop assistants, who descending as they did
equally and some of them, perhaps, as proudly, even from such depths of the
past as she did, chose to let down the impervious screen of the present so
that today they appeared shop assistants in Marshall & Snelgrove's
merely. Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great glass doors she
could see the traffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to pile itself upon
omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice blocks had pitched and
tossed that day on the Thames. An old nobleman in furred slippers had sat
astride one of them. There he went - she could see him now - calling down
maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood.
"Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself;
"this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer
one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in
the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers.
When I step out of doors - as I do now," here she stepped on to the pavement
of Oxford Street, "what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells.
I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?" Her eyes filled with tears.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will,
perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her
motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And
indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the
art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to
synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously
in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime
in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely
forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely
the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the
rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet
born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years
old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's
life, whatever the "Dictionary of National Biography" may say, is always a
matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business - this time-keeping;
nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it
may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose
her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or
the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the
present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently
assaulted.
"Confound it all!" she cried, for it is a great shock to the nervous
system, hearing a clock strike - so much so that for some time now there is
nothing to be said of her save that she frowned slightly, changed her gears
admirably, and cried out, as before, "Look where you're going!" "Don't you
know your own mind?" "Why didn't you say so then?" while the motor-car shot,
swung, squeezed, and slid, for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street,
down Haymarket, down Northumberland Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to the
left, straight on, to the right, straight on again...
The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October
1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags.
Children ran out. There were sales at drapers' shops. Streets widened and
narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a
funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written "Ra - Un",
but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost
had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin - that was over a porch. A woman looked
out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn
and Applebed, Undert - . Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to
finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other
across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and
mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the
process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up
small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself
that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have
existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given her over for a
person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at last, one green
screen was held out on the right, against which the little bits of paper
fell more slowly; and then another was held out on the left so that one
could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and
then green screens were held continuously on either side, so that her mind
regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage,
a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.
When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette,
and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as
if the person she wanted might not be there, "Orlando?" For if there are (at
a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how
many different people are there not - Heaven help us - all having lodgment
at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and
fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to
call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one's name) meaning by
that, Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not
altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said
(being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando?
still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built
up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have
attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their
own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name)
so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green
curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it
a glass of wine - and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own
experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him
- and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.
So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called "Orlando?" with a note of
interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.
"All right then," Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on
these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to
call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a
biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven
selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing then, only
those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy
who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who
sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the
bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in
love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the
Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the woman to come to
her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the
Patroness of Letters; the woman who called Mar (meaning hot baths and
evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop
(meaning the death we die daily) or all three together - which meant more
things than we have space to write out - all were different and she may have
called upon any one of them.
Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are now in the region of
"perhaps" and "appears") was that the one she needed most kept aloof, for
she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove -
there was a new one at every corner - as happens when, for some
unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has
the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some
people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we
have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key
self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking
this self as the reader can judge from overhearing her talk as she drove
(and if it is rambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes
unintelligible, it is the reader's fault for listening to a lady talking to
herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding in brackets which
self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may well be wrong).
"What then? Who then?" she said. "Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman.
Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? The garter in the
hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious,
vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don't care a damn if I am.
Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don't count (here a new self
came in). Lying in bed of a morning listening to the pigeons on fine linen;
silver dishes; wine; maids; footmen. Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many things for
nothing. Hence my books (here she mentioned fifty classical titles; which
represented, so we think, the early romantic works that she tore up).
Facile, glib, romantic. But (here another self came in) a duffer, a fumbler.
More clumsy I couldn't be. And - and - (here she hesitated for a word and if
we suggest "Love" we may be wrong, but certainly she laughed and blushed and
then cried out ) - A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles
on the ceiling! (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was
sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over
crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was
passing a clump) growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a
tumbledown barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came
trotting across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night. But
people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.)
I don't know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here she turned
into the High Street of her native town, which was crowded, for it was
market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and old women with hens in
baskets.) I like peasants. I understand crops. But (here another self came
skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a lighthouse). Fame!
(She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening
papers (here she alluded to the "Oak Tree" and "The Burdett Coutts" Memorial
Prize which she had won; and we must snatch space to remark how discomposing
it is for her biographer that this culmination to which the whole book
moved, this peroration with which the book was to end, should be dashed from
us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a
woman, everything is out of place - culminations and perorations; the accent
never falls where it does with a man). Fame! she repeated. A poet - a
charlatan; both every morning as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to
meet; to meet, to dine; fame - fame! (She had here to slow down to pass
through the crowd of market people. But no one noticed her. A porpoise in a
fishmonger's shop attracted far more attention than a lady who had won a
prize and might, had she chosen, have worn three coronets one on top of
another on her brow.) Driving very slowly she now hummed as if it were part
of an old song, "With my guineas I'll buy flowering trees, flowering trees,
flowering trees and walk among my flowering trees and tell my sons what fame
is". So she hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and there like a
barbaric necklace of heavy beads. "And walk among my flowering trees," she
sang, accenting the words strongly, "and see the moon rise slow, the waggons
go..." Here she stopped short and looked ahead of her intently at the bonnet
of the car in profound meditation.
"He sat at Twitchett's table," she mused, "with a dirty ruff on...Was
it old Mr Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh-p-re? (for when we
speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole.) She
gazed for ten minutes ahead of her, letting the car come almost to a
standstill.
"Haunted!" she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. "Haunted! ever
since I was a child. There flies the wild goose. It flies past the window
out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the steering-wheel tighter) and
stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. I've seen it, here - there
- there - England, Persia, Italy. Always it flies fast out to sea and always
I fling after it words like nets (here she flung her hand out) which shrivel
as I've seen nets shrivel drawn on deck with only sea-weed in them; and
sometimes there's an inch of silver - six words - in the bottom of the net.
But never the great fish who lives in the coral groves." Here she bent her
head, pondering deeply.
And it was at this moment, when she had ceased to call "Orlando" and
was deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom she had called
came of its own accord; as was proved by the change that now came over her
(she had passed through the lodge gates and was entering the park).
The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition
makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow
becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is
contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and
become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or
wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable
that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two
thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but
when communication is established they fall silent.
Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curving drive between the elms
and oaks through the falling turf of the park whose fall was so gentle that
had it been water it would have spread the beach with a smooth green tide.
Planted here and in solemn groups were beech trees and oak trees. The deer
stepped among them, one white as snow, another with its head on one side,
for some wire netting had caught in its horns. All this, the trees, deer,
and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if her mind had
become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely. Next
minute she drew up in the courtyard where, for so many hundred years she had
come, on horseback or in coach and six, with men riding before or coming
after; where plumes had tossed, torches flashed, and the same flowering
trees that let their leaves drop now had shaken their blossoms. Now she was
alone. The autumn leaves were falling. The porter opened the great gates.
"Morning, James," she said, "there're some things in the car. Will you bring
'em in?" words of no beauty, interest, or significance themselves, it will
be conceded, but now so plumped out with meaning that they fell like ripe
nuts from a tree, and proved that when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary
is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true
indeed of every movement and action now, usual though they were; so that to
see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather
jacket, which she did in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with
the beauty of movement as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art.
Then she strode into the dining-room where her old friends Dryden, Pope,
Swift, Addison regarded her demurely at first as who should say Here's the
prize winner! but when they reflected that two hundred guineas was in
question, they nodded their heads approvingly. Two hundred guineas, they
seemed to say; two hundred guineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herself
a slice of bread and ham, clapped the two together and began to eat,
striding up and down the room, thus shedding her company habits in a second,
without thinking. After five or six such turns, she tossed off a glass of
red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her hand, strode
down the long corridor and through a dozen drawing-rooms and so began a
perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and spaniels as
chose to follow her.
This, too, was all in the day's routine. As soon would she come home
and leave her own grandmother without a kiss as come back and leave the
house unvisited. She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in;
stirred, opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence. She
fancied, too, that, hundreds and thousands of times as she had seen them,
they never looked the same twice, as if so long a life as theirs had stored
in them a myriad moods which changed with winter and summer, bright weather
and dark, and her own fortunes and the people's characters who visited them.
Polite, they always were to strangers, but a little weary: with her, they
were entirely open and at their ease. Why not indeed? They had known each
other for close on four centuries now. They had nothing to conceal. She knew
their sorrows and joys. She knew what age each part of them was and its
little secrets - a hidden drawer, a concealed cupboard, or some deficiency
perhaps, such as a part made up, or added later. They, too, knew her in all
her moods and changes. She had hidden nothing from them; had come to them as
boy and woman, crying and dancing, brooding and gay. In this window-seat,
she had written her first verses; in that chapel, she had been married. And
she would be buried here, she reflected, kneeling on the window-sill in the
long gallery and sipping her Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it,
the body of the heraldic leopard would be making yellow pools on the floor
the day they lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in no
immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever
with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the room - she
had strolled into the Ambassador's bedroom - shone like a shell that has
lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and
painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and
sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty. No
Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of
the house still beat. Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so
that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry
rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move
it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. The heart still beat, she
thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail indomitable heart
of the immense building.
Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery whose
floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of chairs with all
their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out for
Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who never
came. The sight made her gloomy. She unhooked the rope that fenced them off.
She sat on the Queen's chair; she opened a manuscript book lying on Lady
Betty's table; she stirred her fingers in the aged rose leaves; she brushed
her short hair with King James' silver brushes: she bounced up and down upon
his bed (but no King would ever sleep there again, for all Louise's new
sheets) and pressed her cheek against the worn silver counterpane that lay
upon it. But everywhere were little lavender bags to keep the moth out and
printed notices, "Please do not touch", which, though she had put them there
herself, seemed to rebuke her. The house was no longer hers entirely, she
sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past the touch and control
of the living. Never would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was
in the bedroom that had been old Nick Greene's), or holes burnt in the
carpet. Never two hundred servants come running and brawling down the
corridors with warming pans and great branches for the great fireplaces.
Never would ale be brewed and candles made and saddles fashioned and stone
shaped in the workshops outside the house. Hammers and mallets were silent
now. Chairs and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in
glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.
So she sat at the end of the gallery with her dogs couched round her,
in Queen Elizabeth's hard armchair. The gallery stretched far away to a
point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into the
past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking;
the great men she had known; Dryden, Swift, and Pope; and statesmen in
colloquy; and lovers dallying in the window-seats; and people eating and
drinking at the long tables; and the wood smoke curling round their heads
and making them sneeze and cough. Still further down, she saw sets of
splendid dancers formed for the quadrille. A fluty, frail, but nevertheless
stately music began to play. An organ boomed. A coffin was borne into the
chapel. A marriage procession came out of it. Armed men with helmets left
for the wars. They brought banners back from Flodden and Poitiers and stuck
them on the wall. The long gallery filled itself thus, and still peering
further, she thought she could make out at the very end, beyond the
Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older, further, darker, a cowled
figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with his hands clasped, and a
book in them, murmuring -
Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so
demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder. Her
own face, that had been dark and sombre as she gazed, was lit as by an
explosion of gunpowder. In this same light everything near her showed with
extreme distinctness. She saw two flies circling round and noticed the blue
sheen on their bodies; she saw a knot in the wood where her foot was, and
her dog's ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a bough creaking in the
garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift screaming past the window. Her
own body quivered and tingled as if suddenly stood naked in a hard frost.
Yet, she kept, as she had not done when the clock struck ten in London,
complete composure (for she was now one and entire, and presented, it may
be, a larger surface to the shock of time). She rose, but without
precipitation, called her dogs, and went firmly but with great alertness of
movement down the staircase and out into the garden. Here the shadows of the
plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of earth
in the flower beds as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the
intricacy of the twigs of every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and
the marking of veins and petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along
the path, and every button on his gaiters was visible; she saw Betty and
Prince, the cart horses, and never had she marked so clearly the white star
on Betty's forehead, and the three long hairs that fell down below the rest
on Prince's tail. Out in the quadrangle the old grey walls of the house
looked like a scraped new photograph; she heard the loud speaker condensing
on the terrace a dance tune that people were listening to in the red velvet
opera house at Vienna. Braced and strung up by the present moment she was
also strangely afraid, as if whenever the gulf of time gaped and let a
second through some unknown danger might come with it. The tension was too
relentless and too rigorous to be endured long without discomfort. She
walked more briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her,
through the garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself, by a
great effort, to stop by the carpenter's shop, and to stand stock-still
watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with her eye
fixed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled through her like a
meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. She saw with disgusting
vividness that the thumb on Joe's right hand was without a finger nail and
there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The
sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that
moment's darkness, when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the
pressure of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the
flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by
looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present - whence its
terror, its nondescript character - something one trembles to pin through
the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow
without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change
whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now, while she flickered her eye in
her faintness in the carpenter's shop, stole out, and attaching itself to
the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something
tolerable, comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. Yes, she
thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter's
shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by the Serpentine,
she thought, the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a
thousand deaths. I am about to understand...
Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot conceal
the fact that she was now a very indifferent witness to the truth of what
was before her and might easily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an old
man called Smith for one who was called Jones and was no relation of his
whatever. For the shadow of faintness which the thumb without a nail had
cast had deepened now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest
from sight), into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what
they are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in
which everything is reflected - and, indeed, some say that all our most
violent passions, and art and religion, are the reflections which we see in
the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured
for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and
immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became
not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were
partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes;
the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something
else, as if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and
there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated and made
the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant chequer of light
and shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound, chased a rabbit and so
reminded her that it must be about half past four - it was indeed
twenty-three minutes to six - she forgot the time.
The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to
the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier,
and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but
it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were
still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground,
she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way
and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the
world. She liked to attach herself to something hard. As she flung herself
down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of her
leather jacket - her poem "The Oak Tree". "I should have brought a trowel,"
she reflected. The earth was so shallow over the roots that it seemed
doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book here. Besides, the
dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations,
she thought. Perhaps it would be as well then to do without them. She had a
little speech on the tip of her tongue which she meant to speak over the
book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author
and artist.) "I bury this as a tribute," she was going to have said, "a
return to the land of what the land has given me," but Lord! once one began
mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene
getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for
his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had
thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do
with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry?
What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do
with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice
answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting
people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill
suited as could be to the thing itself - a voice answering a voice. What
could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the
intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these
years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown
horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen
and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden
blowing irises and fritillaries?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and
watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun
lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a
church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of
light burning on some glass-house; a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The
fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched
long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In
the far distance Snowdon's crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the
far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She
listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No - only the wind blew.
There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. "And there," she
thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances,
drop once more to the land beneath her, "was my land once: that Castle
between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was
mine." Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light)
shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses, castles,
and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were
before her. It was blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side.
Goats cropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above. The
raucous voice of old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, "What is your
antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do
you need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and
housemaids dusting?"
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like
landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once
more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into
view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages with
lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing
the darkness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or
eleven, she could not say. Night had come - night that she loved of all
times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine
more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look
deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to see in the pool
of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat
on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great
waves past Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness. There was her husband's
brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white
arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always
sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig
was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
"Ecstasy!" she cried, "ecstasy!" And then the wind sank, the waters
grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.
"Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!" she cried, standing by the oak tree.
The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue
feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow
that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in
moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell
slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the
moon was on the waters, and nothing moved in between sky and sea. Then he
came.
All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the
weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great
house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was
none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a
dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing in the
courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more
stepped from her chariot.
"The house is at your service, Ma'am," she cried, curtseying deeply.
"Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in".
As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of
the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked
anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her
ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming
nearer and nearer.
"Here! Shel, here! she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now
showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon
spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It
hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the
darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured,
and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild
bird.
"It is the goose!" Orlando cried. "The wild goose..."
And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of
midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty
Eight.
ðÏÐÕÌÑÒÎÏÓÔØ: 1, Last-modified: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 08:57:10 GmT