Project Gutenberg Australia



Title: Orlando
Author: Virginia Woolf
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Language:   English
Date first posted: April 2002
Date most recently updated: July 2015

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ORLANDO

A BIOGRAPHY

BY

VIRGINIA WOOLF.



TO

V. SACKVILLE-WEST.




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
verse 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 the 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 rooted 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




Project Gutenberg Australia