Orlando

Virginia Woolf

Published: 1928

Categorie(s): Fiction, LGBT, Lesbian, Biographical

Source: Feedbooks

About Woolf:

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an
English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost
modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the
interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary
society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works
include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927),
and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own
(1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room
of her own if she is to write fiction".

Also available on Feedbooks
Woolf:

- To
the Lighthouse (1927)

- Mrs.
Dalloway (1925)

- A
Haunted House (1921)

- The
Waves (1931)

- Mrs
Dalloway in Bond Street (1923)

- Between the
Acts (1941)

- The
Duchess and the Jeweller (1938)

- The
New Dress (1927)

- The
Mark on the Wall (1917)

- The
Years (1937)

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Preface

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.

Chapter 1

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 milkpails.
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 parrakeets, 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 befel
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 etait apparente en Pologne l’ete dernier,’ or
‘La beaute 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 fagotee) 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 forebore 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.

Chapter 2

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 folies, 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 the 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 shapliest 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.

Chapter 3

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 bluejackets, nobody can say.
But the Admiral ordered the bugles to be sounded; a hundred
bluejackets 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.

Chapter 4

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 prayerbook, 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 bluebottle 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.

Chapter 5

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 ever 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 if 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.

Chapter 6

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
its 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 almshouses 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.

The End

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