comed 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.
     <img alt="0x01 graphic" src="StrangeNoGraphicData">


        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 prayer book,  along with  the blood-stain, was also a lock of
hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a  flake of
tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them
all - the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco - to such a mood of
contemplation  as  gave her a reverent air suitable  in  the  circumstances,
though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however,
can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods
there is only one, and  of religions  none  but  the  speaker's. Orlando, it
seemed,  had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world,
she now reflected upon  her  sins and  the imperfections that had crept into
her  spiritual  state.  The letter S, she reflected,  is the  serpent in the
poet's Eden.  Do what she would  there were  still too many  of these sinful
reptiles in the first stanzas of "The Oak Tree". But "S" was nothing, in her
opinion, compared with  the termination "ing". The present participle is the
Devil himself,  she thought, now  that  we are in the place for believing in
Devils. To  evade  such  temptations  is  the first  duty  of the poet,  she
concluded,  for  as  the ear is  the antechamber  to  the  soul, poetry  can
adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then,
is the  highest office of all, she continued.  His  words reach where others
fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the
wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No  time, no
devotion,  can  be  too great,  therefore,  which  makes the  vehicle of our
message less distorting. We must  shape our words till they are the thinnest
integument for our thoughts.  Thoughts are  divine, etc.  Thus it is obvious
that she was back  in the confines of her own religion which  time had  only
strengthened in  her absence, and was rapidly  acquiring the  intolerance of
belief.
     "I am growing up," she  thought, taking her taper at last. "I am losing
some illusions," she said,  shutting Queen Mary's book,  "perhaps to acquire
others," and she descended among the tombs where the bones of  her ancestors
lay.
     But even the bones  of  her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and  the
rest, had  lost something  of their sanctity  since Rustum el Sadi had waved
his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the fact that only three
or  four hundred  years ago these skeletons had  been men with their way  to
make in the  world like any modern  upstart, and  that  they had made it  by
acquiring  houses  and offices, garters and ribbands, as  any other  upstart
does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred
the quietude  of  the  country, for which choice  they  paid the  penalty by
extreme  poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in  the Strand, or herded sheep
in the fields, filled her with remorse. She thought of the Egyptian pyramids
and  what  bones  lie beneath them  as she stood in the crypt; and the vast,
empty  hills which  lie above the Sea of Marmara seemed,  for the moment,  a
finer dwelling-place than this many-roomed mansion  in  which no bed  lacked
its quilt and no silver dish its silver cover.
     "I  am  growing up," she thought, taking  her taper.  "I  am losing  my
illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones," and she paced down the long gallery
to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was
interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire
(for no sailor  was  present), and she  reviewed, as if it were an avenue of
great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.
     How  she had loved sound when  she was a boy, and thought the volley of
tumultuous syllables  from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then  - it was
the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps - into this  high frenzy
was  let fall some black drop, which  turned her rhapsody into sluggishness.
Slowly there had opened within  her something intricate and  many-chambered,
which  one must  take  a torch  to  explore,  in prose  not verse;  and  she
remembered how  passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne,
whose  book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude after her
affair with  Greene, or  tried to  form, for Heaven knows these  growths are
agelong  in  coming, a spirit capable of resistance. "I will write," she had
said, "what I enjoy writing"; and so had scratched  out  twenty-six volumes.
Yet still, for all her  travels and adventures  and  profound thinkings  and
turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the
future  might bring,  Heaven only  knew.  Change  was incessant, and  change
perhaps  would never cease.  High battlements of  thought, habits  that  had
seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind
and left a naked sky  and fresh stars twinkling in  it. Here she went to the
window, and in spite of the cold could not help unlatching it. She leant out
into the damp night air. She heard a fox bark in the woods, and the  clutter
of a pheasant trailing  through the branches. She heard the snow slither and
flop  from the roof  to the ground. "By my life," she exclaimed,  "this is a
thousand  times  better than Turkey.  Rustum," she  cried, as  if  she  were
arguing with the gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind
and continuing it  with someone who  was not there to contradict  she showed
again the  development of her  soul),  "you were wrong. This is  better than
Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco - of  what odds and ends are  we  compounded,"
she said  (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). "What a phantasmagoria the
mind is  and meeting-place of dissemblables! At  one  moment we  deplore our
birth and state and aspire  to  an  ascetic  exaltation;  the  next  we  are
overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear  the thrushes
sing." And  so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for
explanation and  imprint their message without  leaving any hint as to their
meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed.
     Next  morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had  out her pen and
paper and started afresh upon  "The Oak Tree", for to have  ink and paper in
plenty when one has made do with berries  and margins is a delight not to be
conceived.  Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of despair,
now in the heights  of ecstasy writing  one  in,  when a shadow darkened the
page. She hastily hid her manuscript.
     As her  window gave on  to the  most  central of the courts, as she had
given orders  that she would see no one, as she  knew no one and was herself
legally unknown, she was  first  surprised at the shadow, then  indignant at
it,  then  (when  she  looked  up  and saw  what  caused  it)  overcome with
merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque  shadow, the shadow  of
no less a personage than the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn
and  Scand-op-Boom in  the Roumanian territory. She  was  loping across  the
court  in her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of her
head was changed.  This then was the woman who had chased her from  England!
This was the eyrie of that obscene vulture - this the fatal fowl herself! At
the thought that she had fled all the way to Turkey to avoid  her seductions
(now become excessively flat),  Orlando  laughed aloud. There was  something
inexpressibly  comic  in  the  sight.  She resembled, as Orlando had thought
before,  nothing so much as a monstrous  hare. She had the staring eyes, the
lank cheeks, the high headdress of that animal.  She  stopped now, much as a
hare sits erect in the  corn  when thinking itself unobserved, and stared at
Orlando, who stared back at her from the window. After they had  stared like
this for a certain time, there was nothing  for it but to  ask  her  in, and
soon the two ladies were exchanging compliments while the Archduchess struck
the snow from her mantle.
     "A plague  on women," said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to
fetch a  glass of wine, "they  never  leave  one  a  moment's peace. A  more
ferreting,  inquisiting,  busybodying set of people don't exist.  It was  to
escape this Maypole that I left England,  and  now"  -  here  she turned  to
present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold -  in her place stood  a
tall gentleman in  black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone
with a man.
     Recalled thus suddenly  to a consciousness of  her  sex, which  she had
completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to  be equally
upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.
     "La!" she cried, putting her hand to her side, "how you frighten me!"
     "Gentle  creature," cried the Archduchess, falling  on one  knee and at
the same  time pressing  a  cordial  to Orlando's lips,  "forgive me for the
deceit I have practised on you!"
     Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.
     In  short, they acted the  parts  of man and woman for ten minutes with
great vigour and then fell into natural  discourse. The Archduchess (but she
must in future be known  as the Archduke) told his story - that he was a man
and always  had been one; that he had seen a portrait of  Orlando and fallen
hopelessly in love with  him; that to compass  his ends, he had dressed as a
woman and lodged at the Baker's shop; that he was  desolated when he fled to
Turkey; that he had heard of her  change and hastened  to offer his services
(here  he  teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said  the Archduke Harry,
she was and  would  ever  be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex.
The three  p's would  have  been  more  persuasive  if  they  had  not  been
interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the  strangest kind. "If  this is
love," said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of
the fender, and  now from the woman's  point of  view,  "there  is something
highly ridiculous about it."
     Falling  on  his  knees, the  Archduke  Harry made  the most passionate
declaration of  his  suit. He told  her that  he had  something  like twenty
million ducats in  a strong box at his castle. He  had more acres  than  any
nobleman in England.  The shooting  was excellent:  he could  promise  her a
mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no English moor, or Scotch either,
could rival. True, the pheasants had suffered from the gape in his  absence,
and the does had slipped their young, but that could be put right, and would
be with her help when they lived in Roumania together.
     As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran
down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.
     That men cry as frequently and as  unreasonably as women, Orlando  knew
from her own  experience as a man; but  she was beginning to be  aware  that
women  should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so,
shocked she was.
     The Archduke apologized.  He commanded himself sufficiently to say that
he would leave  her  now,  but would return on  the following  day  for  his
answer.
     That was a Tuesday.  He came on Wednesday; he came on Thursday; he came
on  Friday;  and he  came on  Saturday. It  is true that each  visit  began,
continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there was
much  room  for  silence.  They  sat  on  either side  of the  fireplace and
sometimes the  Archduke knocked over  the fire-irons and Orlando picked them
up again.  Then  the  Archduke  would bethink  him how he had shot an elk in
Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke would
say  that it was not as big as  the reindeer  which  he shot in  Norway; and
Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke  would say  he
had shot  an albatross,  and Orlando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an
albatross as big as an elephant, and the Archduke would say - something very
sensible, no  doubt, but  Orlando heard it not,  for she was looking  at her
writing-table, out of the window, at the door. Upon which the Archduke would
say, "I  adore you", at the very same moment  that Orlando said  "Look, it's
beginning  to rain", at which they  were both much embarrassed,  and blushed
scarlet, and could  neither of them think what to say  next. Indeed, Orlando
was at her wit's end what to talk  about and had  she not bethought her of a
game called  Fly  Loo, at which great sums  of  money  can be lost with very
little expense of spirit, she would have had to marry him, she supposed; for
how else to get rid of him she knew not. By this device, however, and it was
a simple  one, needing only three lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies,
the embarrassment of conversation was overcome and the necessity of marriage
avoided. For now, the Archduke would bet her five hundred pounds to a tester
that a fly would settle on this lump and not  on that. Thus, they would have
occupation  for  a  whole morning  watching  the  flies (who were  naturally
sluggish  at this  season and often spent an hour  or so  circling round the
ceiling) until at length some fine blue-bottle made his choice and the match
was won. Many hundreds of pounds  changed hands  between  them at this game,
which the Archduke, who was a born  gambler, swore was every bit as  good as
horse racing, and vowed he could play at for ever. But Orlando soon began to
weary.
     "What's the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life," she
asked,  "if I  have to pass  all my mornings watching  blue-bottles  with an
Archduke?"
     She began to detest the sight of sugar;  flies made her dizzy. Some way
out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward
in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head
or  run him through the  body  with  a rapier, she could think of  no better
method  than this. She caught a blue-bottle, gently  pressed the life out of
it (it was half dead  already; or  her kindness for the dumb creatures would
not have permitted it) and secured it by a drop of gum  arabic to  a lump of
sugar. While the Archduke was gazing at the ceiling, she  deftly substituted
this lump for the one  she  had laid  her money on, and  crying  "Loo  Loo!"
declared that she had won her bet. Her reckoning was that the Archduke, with
all his knowledge of sport and  horseracing, would detect  the fraud and, as
to cheat at Loo  is the most  heinous of crimes, and men  have been banished
from the society of  mankind to that of apes in the tropics for ever because
of  it, she calculated  that  he  would be  manly enough to  refuse  to have
anything  further  to  do with  her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the
amiable nobleman. He was no nice judge of  flies. A dead  fly looked  to him
much the same as a living one.  She played the trick twenty times on him and
he paid her over 17,250 pounds (which is about 40,885 pounds 6 shillings and
8  pence of  our own money) before Orlando  cheated so grossly that even  he
could be deceived  no longer. When he realized the truth at  last, a painful
scene ensued.  The Archduke rose to his  full height. He  coloured  scarlet.
Tears rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won a fortune from him
was nothing - she was welcome to it; that she had deceived him was something
- it hurt  him to think her capable  of it; but  that she had cheated at Loo
was  everything.  To  love  a  woman  who  cheated at  play  was,  he  said,
impossible. Here he  broke  down  completely. Happily, he  said,  recovering
slightly,  there were no  witnesses. She  was, after  all, only a  woman, he
said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her
and had bent  to  ask her pardon for the violence of his language,  when she
cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a small toad
between his skin and his shirt.
     In justice  to her,  it must be  said  that  she would  infinitely have
preferred a rapier. Toads  are clammy things to conceal about one's person a
whole  morning.  But  if  rapiers are  forbidden;  one must have recourse to
toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel
cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed.
She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.
     "Heaven be praised!" cried Orlando still laughing. She heard  the sound
of chariot  wheels  driven  at a furious pace  down the courtyard. She heard
them rattle  along the road.  Fainter and  fainter the sound became.  Now it
faded away altogether.
     "I am alone," said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.
     That silence is more profound after  noise still wants the confirmation
of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been
made  love  to,  many  women  would take their  oath. As  the  sound  of the
Archduke's chariot wheels died away,  Orlando felt drawing further from  her
and further from her an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune (she did
not mind that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and circumstance
of married life (she did not mind that), but  life she heard going from her,
and  a  lover.  "Life  and  a   lover,"  she  murmured;  and  going  to  her
writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:
     "Life and a lover" - a  line  which did not scan and made no sense with
what went before - something about the  proper way of dipping sheep to avoid
the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,
     "Life  and  a  lover."  Then  laying her  pen  aside she went into  her
bedroom, stood in front of  her mirror, and arranged  her  pearls  about her
neck. Then  since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown  of
sprigged cotton,  she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of peach
bloom;  thence  to  a  wine-coloured  brocade. Perhaps  a dash of powder was
needed, and if her hair were disposed - so - about her brow, it might become
her.  Then she  slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and  drew an emerald
ring upon her finger. "Now," she said when all was ready  and lit the silver
sconces on either side  of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled  to
see  what  Orlando  saw  then burning  in  the  snow  -  for all  about  the
looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and
the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was
green  water,  and she a  mermaid,  slung with pearls,  a siren  in  a cave,
singing  so  that  oarsmen  leant from their  boats  and  fell down, down to
embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly
seductive that it was a thousand  pities that there was no one there to  put
it in plain English,  and  say outright, "Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness
incarnate,"  which  was  the truth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of  her
person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when
their  own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a
fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass - this smile
she  smiled  and then  she listened for a moment  and heard only  the leaves
blowing and the sparrows twittering,  and then she sighed, "Life, a  lover,"
and  then she turned on her heel  with extraordinary  rapidity;  whipped her
pearls from her neck, stripped the  satins from her back, stood erect in the
neat black silk knickerbockers of  an ordinary nobleman, and rang  the bell.
When the  servant came,  she  told him  to  order a coach and six  to  be in
readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent affairs to London. Within an
hour of the Archduke's departure, off she drove.
     And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was
of a simple  English kind  which needs no description, to draw the  reader's
attention  more  particularly  than we could at the  moment  to one  or  two
remarks which have slipped in here and there in the course of the narrative.
For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when
interrupted. Next, that she looked  long and intently in the glass; and now,
as she  drove to London, one might notice her starting and suppressing a cry
when the horses  galloped  faster  than she liked.  Her  modesty as  to  her
writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety  all seems to
hint  that  what was  said a short time  ago about  there being no change in
Orlando  the  man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether  true.
She  was becoming a little more  modest, as women  are, of her brains, and a
little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were
asserting themselves,  and  others were diminishing.  The change  of clothes
had, some  philosophers will say, much to  do  with it. Vain trifles as they
seem, clothes  have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us
warm. They change  our  view of  the world and the world's view  of us.  For
example,  when Captain  Bartolus  saw  Orlando's  skirt, he  had  an  awning
stretched for her  immediately, pressed  her to take another slice of  beef,
and  invited her to go ashore  with him in the long-boat. These  compliments
would certainly not have been paid  her  had her skirts, instead of flowing,
been cut tight  to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid
compliments, it  behoves  us  to make  some  return.  Orlando curtseyed; she
complied; she flattered  the good  man's humours  as she would not have done
had his neat breeches been  a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's
satin  bodice. Thus, there is much to  support  the view that  it is clothes
that wear us and not we  them; we may make them  take  the mould  of  arm or
breast,  but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
So,  having  now  worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain  change was
visible in Orlando, which is to be found if  the reader will  look at above,
even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of
Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the
same person, there are  certain changes. The man has  his hand free to seize
his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her
shoulders.  The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for
his uses and fashioned to his liking.  The woman takes a sidelong  glance at
it,  full  of subtlety, even  of  suspicion.  Had they both  worn  the  same
clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.
     That is the view of some philosophers and wise  ones, but on the whole,
we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily,  one of
great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It
was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of  a woman's dress
and  of a  woman's sex.  And perhaps  in this she was only expressing rather
more openly  than  usual -  openness  indeed was the  soul  of her nature  -
something that happens to most people  without being thus plainly expressed.
For here again, we come  to a dilemma. Different though  the sexes are, they
intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes
place, and  often  it is only  the clothes  that  keep  the male  or  female
likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
Of  the complications  and confusions  which thus  result everyone  has  had
experience; but  here we leave  the general  question  and note only the odd
effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
     For it was this mixture in her of  man  and woman,  one being uppermost
and then  the other,  that often gave her  conduct an unexpected  turn.  The
curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how
did she never take more than ten minutes  to dress? And were not her clothes
chosen rather  at  random, and sometimes worn rather shabby?  And  then they
would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of
power. She  is  excessively  tender-hearted.  She could not endure to  see a
donkey beaten or  a  kitten  drowned. Yet  again,  they  noted, she detested
household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in  summer before
the  sun had risen. No  farmer knew  more about the crops than she did.  She
could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove
six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active
as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the
most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation.
She was unversed in  geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some
caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to
travel south is to travel  downhill. Whether,  then, Orlando was most man or
woman, it is  difficult to say and cannot now be  decided. For her coach was
now rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in the city. The steps
were being let down; the iron gates were being opened. She was entering  her
father's house at Blackfriars,  which though fashion was fast deserting that
end of the town,  was still a  pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens running
down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.
     Here she took up  her lodging and began instantly to look about her for
what she had come in search of - that is to say, life and a lover. About the
first there might  be some doubt; the  second  she  found  without the least
difficulty two days  after her arrival. It  was a  Tuesday  that she came to
town. On Thursday she  went for a walk in the Mall, as was then the habit of
persons of quality. She had not made more than  a turn or  two of the avenue
before she  was observed by a little knot of vulgar people  who go there  to
spy upon their  betters. As she came past them,  a  common woman  carrying a
child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly into Orlando's  face,
and cried out, "Lawk upon us, if it ain't the Lady Orlando!"  Her companions
came  crowding round, and Orlando found herself in a moment the centre of  a
mob  of staring  citizens and tradesmen's wives, all eager to  gaze upon the
heroine  of the celebrated lawsuit. Such was  the  interest  that  the  case
excited in  the minds  of the  common  people. She might, indeed, have found
herself gravely discommoded by the pressure of the crowd - she had forgotten
that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone - had not a tall
gentleman at once stepped forward and offered her the protection of his arm.
It was  the  Archduke. She  was overcome  with  distress and  yet with  some
amusement at the sight. Not only had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her,
but in order to show that he took her levity with the toad in good  part, he
had procured a jewel made in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon
her with a repetition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.
     What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove
home in the  vilest  temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to  go for  a
walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad  set in  emeralds,
and  asked in marriage  by an Archduke?  She took  a kinder view of the case
next day  when  she found on her breakfast table half a  dozen  billets from
some of the greatest ladies in the land - Lady Suffolk, Lady Salisbury, Lady
Chesterfield, Lady  Tavistock, and others  who reminded her  in the politest
manner of old alliances  between their families and her own, and desired the
honour of her acquaintance. Next  day,  which  was a Saturday, many of these
great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday, about  noon, their footmen
brought cards of invitation to various routs, dinners, and assemblies in the
near  future; so that  Orlando  was  launched  without  delay, and with some
splash and foam at that, upon the waters of London society.
     To give a truthful account of London  society at  that or indeed at any
other  time, is beyond the  powers of the  biographer or the historian. Only
those who have little need of the truth, and no  respect for it -  the poets
and the novelists -  can be trusted to do it, for this is one of  the  cases
where the truth  does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma
- a mirage.  To make our meaning plain - Orlando could come home from one of
these  routs at three or four in  the morning  with cheeks like a  Christmas
tree  and eyes like stars. She  would untie a lace, pace the room a score of
times, untie  another  lace, stop, and  pace  the room again.  Often the sun
would be  blazing  over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself
to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and
sighing for  an hour or longer before she slept at  last. And  what  was all
this  stir  about?  Society. And what had  society  said or done  to throw a
reasonable lady into such an  excitement?  In plain language, nothing.  Rack
her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word
to  magnify  into the  name something. Lord O.  had  been gallant.  Lord  A.
polite. The  Marquis of C. charming. Mr M.  amusing. But  when she tried  to
recollect in what their gallantry, politeness,  charm, or wit had consisted,
she was bound  to  suppose her  memory  at fault, for she  could  not name a
thing.  It  was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the
excitement of the  moment  was intense. Thus  we are forced to conclude that
society is  one  of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about
Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of
a dozen different ingredients. Take one out,  and  it is in itself  insipid.
Take  away  Lord O.,  Lord  A.,  Lord  C., or Mr  M. and separately  each is
nothing. Stir  them  all  together  and  they  combine to give  off the most
intoxicating   of   flavours,  the  most  seductive  of  scents.   Yet  this
intoxication,  this  seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At  one and
the same  time,  therefore,  society is everything  and society is  nothing.
Society is  the most  powerful concoction in the world and  society  has  no
existence whatsoever. Such  monsters  the  poets and the novelists alone can
deal  with;  with  such  something-nothings their  works  are stuffed out to
prodigious size; and to them with the best  will in the world we are content
to leave it.
     Following the  example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only say
that society in the  reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled  brilliance. To
have the entry there was the aim of every  well-bred person. The graces were
supreme.  Fathers  instructed  their  sons,  mothers  their  daughters.   No
education was complete for either  sex which did not include the science  of
deportment, the  art of  bowing and  curtseying, the management of the sword
and the fan, the care  of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the flexibility
of the knee, the proper methods  of  entering and  leaving the room, with  a
thousand etceteras, such  as will immediately suggest  themselves to anybody
who  has  himself been in society. Since Orlando had won the praise of Queen
Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl  of rose water  as a boy, it must be
supposed  that  she was  sufficiently expert to pass muster. Yet it  is true
that  there was  an  absentmindedness about  her  which  sometimes  made her
clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of
taffeta; her walk was a little too  much of a  stride for a  woman, perhaps,
and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
     Whether  this  slight  disability  was  enough  to  counterbalance  the
splendour  of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop  too much of that
black humour which ran in the veins of all her  race, certain it is that she
had not been in  the  world more than a score of times before she might have
been heard to ask herself, had  there been anybody but her spaniel Pippin to
hear her, "What the devil is the matter with me?" The occasion was  Tuesday,
the 16th of June 1712; she had just returned from a great  ball at Arlington
House; the dawn was in the sky,  and she  was pulling off her  stockings. "I
don't  care  if I never meet another soul as long as I live," cried Orlando,
bursting into tears. Lovers she had in plenty,  but  life, which  is,  after
all, of  some importance in its way, escaped her. "Is this," she asked - but
there was none to answer, "is this," she finished her sentence all the same,
"what  people  call  life?"  The spaniel raised  her  forepaw  in  token  of
sympathy. The  spaniel licked  Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked  the
spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her  lips. In  short,
there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its
mistress,  and yet it cannot  be denied that  the dumbness  of  animals is a
great impediment to  the refinements  of intercourse. They wag their  tails;
they bow  the front  part of the body and elevate the hind;  they roll, they
jump, they paw, they whine, they bark,  they slobber, they have all sorts of
ceremonies and artifices of their own,  but the whole  thing is of no avail,
since speak they  cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog
gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlington House. They, too,
wag  their tails, bow,  roll, jump, paw, and  slobber, but talk they cannot.
"All these months that I've been  out in the world,"  said Orlando, pitching
one stocking across the room, "I've heard nothing but what Pippin might have
said. I'm cold. I'm  happy. I'm hungry.  I've  caught a mouse. I've buried a
bone. Please kiss my nose." And it was not enough.
     How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we
will  only  seek to  explain by supposing that  this  mysterious composition
which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself,  but has
a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which  either  makes you drunk when you
think it, as Orlando  thought it, delightful,  or gives you a headache  when
you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive.  That the faculty  of speech
has much to do with it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour
is  the  most  ravishing  of  all;  brilliant  wit  can  be  tedious  beyond
description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.
     Orlando threw  the  second  stocking after the first  and went  to  bed
dismally enough, determined that she would  forswear society  for ever.  But
again as it turned out, she was too hasty in  coming to her conclusions. For
the very next morning she woke to find, among the usual  cards of invitation
upon her table, one  from a  certain great  Lady, the Countess  of R. Having
determined overnight that she would never go into society again, we can only
explain Orlando's behaviour  - she  sent a messenger hot-foot to R. House to
say that she would attend her Ladyship with all  the pleasure in the world -
by the fact that she  was  still suffering from  the effect of three honeyed
words dropped into her ear  on  the deck of the "Enamoured Lady" by  Captain
Nicholas Benedict Bartolus  as they sailed down the Thames. Addison, Dryden,
Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had
chimed in her head  like an  incantation ever  since. Who  can  credit  such
folly? but  so it  was.  All  her experience with Nick Greene had taught her
nothing. Such names still exercised  over her the most powerful fascination.
Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no
belief in the usual  divinities she bestowed her credulity upon  great men -
yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all.
But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief
that she almost  believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one.
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.  The  little
glimpse  she had  of these great  men  from the deck of the ship was of  the
nature  of a vision.  That the  cup  was china,  or the  gazette  paper, she
doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he  had dined with Dryden the  night
before,  she flatly disbelieved him.  Now, the Lady  R.'s reception room had
the reputation of  being the antechamber to  the presence room of genius; it
was  the place where men and women met to  swing censers  and chant hymns to
the bust  of  genius  in  a  niche in the wall.  Sometimes  the  God himself
vouchsafed  his  presence   for  a  moment.  Intellect  alone  admitted  the
suppliant, and nothing (so the report  ran)  was  said inside  that was  not
witty.
     It  was thus  with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room. She
found a company  already assembled in  a semicircle round the fire. Lady R.,
an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace  mantilla on her head,
was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre. Thus being somewhat deaf, she
could  control the conversation on both sides  of  her. On both sides of her
sat  men and women of the highest distinction. Every man,  it  was said, had
been  a  Prime  Minister  and  every  woman, it  was whispered, had been the
mistress  of a king. Certain  it is that all were brilliant,  and  all  were
famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence...After three
hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.
     But  what,  the  reader may  ask with  some exasperation,  happened  in
between.  In three hours, such  a company must have said  the  wittiest, the
profoundest, the  most interesting  things  in the world. So it  would  seem
indeed. But the fact appears to  be that they said nothing. It is a  curious
characteristic which  they  share with all the most brilliant societies that
the world has seen. Old  Madame du Deffand  and her friends talked for fifty
years without stopping.  And  of  it all, what remains? Perhaps  three witty
sayings. So that we  are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said,
or that nothing witty  was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings
lasted eighteen thousand two hundred  and fifty nights, which does not leave
a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
     The truth would seem  to  be - if  we dare  use  such a word  in such a
connection - that  all these groups  of people lie under an enchantment. The
hostess is  our modern Sibyl. She  is a witch  who  lays her  guests under a
spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty;  in a third
profound. It is all an illusion (which is  nothing against it, for illusions
are the most valuable and necessary of all  things, and  she who can  create
one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it  is notorious that
illusions are shattered by  conflict with reality, so  no real happiness, no
real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This
serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no more than three witty things
in  the course of fifty years. Had she said more, her circle would have been
destroyed. The  witticism, as it  left  her  lips, bowled  over the  current
conversation as a cannon ball lays low the violets and the daisies. When she
made  her   famous   "mot  de  Saint  Denis"  the  very  grass  was  singed.
Disillusionment  and desolation followed. Not a word was uttered. "Spare  us
another such, for Heaven's sake, Madame!" her friends cried with one accord.
And she  obeyed. For almost  seventeen years she  said nothing memorable and
all went well. The  beautiful counterpane  of illusion lay unbroken  on  her
circle as it  lay  unbroken on the circle of Lady R. The guests thought that
they  were  happy,  thought  that they  were witty, thought  that  they were
profound,  and, as they  thought this, other people thought  it  still  more
strongly; and so it got about that  nothing was more delightful than one  of
Lady  R.'s assemblies;  everyone envied  those who were admitted; those  who
were admitted  envied  themselves because  other people envied them;  and so
there seemed no end to it - except that which we have now to relate.
     For  about  the  third time  Orlando  went  there  a  certain  incident
occurred.  She was  still under the illusion that  she was listening  to the
most brilliant epigrams  in  the  world, though,  as a  matter of fact,  old
General C. was only saying, at some length, how the  gout had left his  left
leg and  gone to his right, while Mr L. interrupted when any proper name was
mentioned, "R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest
friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in  Yorkshire" - which,  such is the
force of illusion, sounded like  the  wittiest  repartee, the most searching
comment  upon  human life,  and  kept the  company in a  roar; when the door
opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon
a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their faces,
the rest began  to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was a  draught.
The  Marchioness  of  C. feared  a  cat must be under the sofa. It was as if
their eyes were being slowly opened after a  pleasant  dream and nothing met
them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It was as  if the fumes
of some  delicious wine were  slowly leaving  them. Still the General talked
and still Mr L. remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the
General's neck was, how bald  Mr  L.'s  head  was. As  for what  they said -
nothing more tedious and  trivial could be imagined.  Everybody fidgeted and
those who had fans yawned behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon
the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.
     Then the little  gentleman said, He said  next, He said finally  (These
sayings are  too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all
to be found in his published works.),
     Here, it cannot be denied,  was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity.
The company was thrown into complete dismay. One such saying was bad enough;
but  three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive
it.
     "Mr Pope," said old Lady R. in a  voice trembling with sarcastic  fury,
"you are  pleased  to be  witty." Mr Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke  a word.
They sat  in dead silence  some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they  rose
and slunk  from  the room.  That they would  ever  come  back  after such an
experience  was doubtful. Link-boys could be heard calling their coaches all
down  South Audley  Street. Doors were  slammed  and  carriages  drove  off.
Orlando found  herself near Mr Pope on the staircase. His lean and misshapen
frame was shaken by a variety  of emotions.  Darts of malice, rage, triumph,
wit, and terror  (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his  eyes. He looked
like  some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in  its forehead.  At  the
same time, the  strangest tempest  of emotion seized now  upon the  luckless
Orlando. A  disillusionment  so  complete as that  inflicted not an hour ago
leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more
bare and  stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the  highest danger
for  the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests  in  such moments. In
such  moments,  rich men sign  away their  wealth;  and  happy men cut their
throats  with  carving knives. Orlando  would have  done  all willingly, but
there was a rasher  thing still for her to do, and this she did. She invited
Mr Pope to come home with her.
     For if it is rash  to walk into a  lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate
the Atlantic in a rowing boat,  rash to stand on one  foot on  the top of St
Paul's, it is  still  more  rash to  go home alone with a poet.  A  poet  is
Atlantic and  lion  in  one. While one drowns us  the other gnaws  us. If we
survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can  destroy illusions
is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the
earth. Roll up that tender  air  and  the plant dies, the colour  fades. The
earth we walk on is a parched cinder.  It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles
scorch  our feet. By the truth we  are undone. Life is  a dream. 'Tis waking
that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life - (and so on
for  six pages  if you  will, but  the style  is  tedious  and may  well  be
dropped).
     On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by
the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars. That she was still
flesh and  blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due  to a  fact to
which  we  drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see the more
we believe. Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at
that  time very imperfectly  lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement
upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the benighted  traveller had to trust
to  the stars or  the  red flame of some night watchman to save him from the
gravel pits  at  Park  Lane  or  the oak woods  where swine  rootled  in the
Tottenham Court  Road. But even so it wanted much of our modern  efficiency.
Lamp-posts  lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or  so,  but
between lay a considerable stretch of pitch  darkness. Thus for  ten minutes
Orlando and Mr Pope would be in blackness; and then for  about half a minute
again in the  light. A  very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando.
As the light  faded,  she began  to feel  steal over  her the most delicious
balm. "This  is  indeed  a very great honour for a young woman to be driving
with Mr Pope," she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. "I am
the most blessed of my sex. Half  an inch from me - indeed, I feel the  knot
of his knee  ribbons pressing against my thigh - is the greatest wit in  Her
Majesty's dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me
with fury." Here came the lamp-post again. "What a foolish wretch I am!" she
thought. "There is no such thing as  fame and glory. Ages to come will never
cast a thought on me or on Mr Pope either. What's an `age', indeed? What are
`we'?" and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of  two
blind  ants,  momentarily  thrown  together  without interest or concern  in
common,  across a  blackened  desert.  She  shivered.  But  here  again  was
darkness.  Her  illusion revived.  "How  noble  his  brow  is," she  thought
(mistaking  a hump on a cushion  for  Mr  Pope's forehead  in the darkness).
"What a weight  of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom,  and truth - what a
wealth of all those  jewels, indeed, for which  people are  ready  to barter
their lives! Yours  is the only light that burns for ever.  But for  you the
human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness"; (here the coach gave
a great lurch as it fell into a rut in  Park Lane) "without genius we should
be  upset and undone.  Most august, most  lucid  of beams,"  - thus  she was
apostrophizing the  hump on the cushion when they  drove beneath one of  the
street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realized  her mistake. Mr Pope had a
forehead no bigger than another man's. "Wretched man," she thought, "how you
have  deceived me!  I  took that hump for your forehead.  When  one sees you
plain, how ignoble, how despicable  you  are! Deformed and  weakly, there is
nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise."
     Again they were in  darkness and her anger became modified directly she
could see nothing but the poet's knees.
     "But it  is  I  that am  a wretch,"  she reflected,  once they were  in
complete obscurity again, "for base as you may be, am I not still  baser? It
is you who nourish and protect me,  you who  scare the wild beast,  frighten
the savage,  make me clothes  of  the silkworm's  wool,  and carpets of  the
sheep's. If I  want  to worship, have you  not provided me with  an image of
yourself and set it in the sky?  Are not  evidences of your care everywhere?
How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be, therefore?  Let it be
all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you."
     Here  they reached the big  lamp-post  at  the corner  of  what is  now
Piccadilly Circus. The light  blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides  some
degraded creatures of her own  sex,  two wretched  pigmies on a stark desert
land. Both were naked, solitary, and  defenceless. The  one was powerless to
help the other. Each had enough to  do to look after itself. Looking Mr Pope
full in the face, "It is equally  vain," she thought, "for you to think  you
can  protect me,  or for me to think I  can worship you. The light  of truth
beats upon us  without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming
to us both."
     All this time,  of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of
birth and education use, about  the Queen's temper and  the Prime Minister's
gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket,  along
the  Strand,  up  Fleet  Street,  and  reached,  at  length,  her  house  in
Blackfriars. For some  time  the  dark  spaces between  the lamps  had  been
becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright - that is to say, the
sun  was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a  summer's
morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they
alighted, Mr Pope handing Orlando  from  her carriage and Orlando curtseying
Mr Pope  to precede her into her mansion with the  most scrupulous attention
to the rites of the Graces.
     From  the foregoing  passage, however,  it must  not  be supposed  that
genius (but  the disease is now  stamped out in the  British Isles, the late
Lord  Tennyson, it  is said,  being the  last person to suffer from  it)  is
constantly  alight, for  then  we  should see everything  plain  and perhaps
should  be scorched  to  death  in  the  process. Rather  it  resembles  the
lighthouse in its working, which  sends one ray and then no more for a time;
save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash
six or seven beams in quick succession  (as Mr Pope did that night) and then
lapse  into  darkness for a year or  for ever.  To  steer  by  its beams  is
therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them  men of genius are,
it is said, much like other people.
     It was happy  for Orlando,  though at first  disappointing,  that  this
should be so, for  she now  began to live much  in  the  company of  men  of
genius. Nor were they so different from the rest  of us  as  one might  have
supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift,  proved, she found, to  be fond of tea. They
liked arbours.  They  collected little bits of  coloured glass.  They adored
grottos. Rank  was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore
plum-coloured  suits one day and grey another. Mr  Swift  had a fine malacca
cane. Mr Addison scented his  handkerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered with his head.
A piece  of  gossip  did  not  come  amiss.  Nor  were  they  without  their
jealousies. (We  are  jotting down a few  reflections that  came  to Orlando
higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such
trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but
the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits  revived, and she took to
tearing up her cards of invitation to great parties; kept her evenings free;
began to look forward to Mr Pope's  visit, to Mr  Addison's, to Mr Swift's -
and so  on and so  on. If the reader will  here  refer to  the "Rape  of the
Lock",  to the  "Spectator",  to "Gulliver's Travels",  he  will  understand
precisely what these  mysterious words  may  mean.  Indeed,  biographers and
critics  might save themselves all their labours if readers would only  take
this advice. For when we read:
     Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
     Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
     Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
     Forget her Pray'rs or miss a Masquerade,
     Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball
     - we know  as if we  heard him how  Mr Pope's tongue  flickered  like a
lizard's, how his eyes flashed, how his hand  trembled, how he loved, how he
lied, how he suffered. In  short,  every secret  of a  writer's soul,  every
experience  of his  life; every quality of  his mind is written large in his
works; yet we  require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound
the other. That time hangs  heavy on people's hands is the only  explanation
of the monstrous growth.
     So, now that we have read  a page  or two of the "Rape of the Lock", we
know  exactly why Orlando  was so much amused and so much  frightened and so
very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that afternoon.
     Mrs Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr Addison waited on her
Ladyship. At this, Mr Pope  got  up with a  wry smile, made  his congee, and
limped off. In came  Mr Addison.  Let us, as  he takes his  seat,  read  the
following passage from the "Spectator":
     "I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal,  that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks.  The lynx shall
cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the peacock, parrot and swan
shall pay contributions  to  her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells,
and  the  rocks for  gems,  and every part of  nature furnish out  its share
towards the  embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of
it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I  have been
speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it."
     We  hold that  gentleman,  cocked hat  and all, in  the hollow,  of our
hands.  Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrinkle
in  his stocking? Does not every ripple  and  curve  of  his wit lie exposed
before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his  urbanity and the fact
that he would marry  a Countess and die very respectably  in the end? All is
clear. And when Mr Addison has said his say, there is a terrific  rap at the
door,  and Mr  Swift,  who  had these  arbitrary  ways with  him,  walks  in
unannounced.  One moment,  where is "Gulliver's Travels"? Here it is! Let us
read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
     "I enjoyed perfect Health of  Body and  Tranquillity of Mind; I did not
find the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of  a secret
or open  Enemy.  I had no  occasion of  bribing,  flattering or pimping,  to
procure the Favour  of  any great Man or of  his Minion.  I wanted no  Fence
against Fraud  or Oppression; Here was neither Physician to destroy my Body,
nor Lawyer to ruin  my Fortune; No Informer to watch my Words, and  Actions,
or forge Accusations  against  me for  Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers,
Backbiters,  Pickpockets,  Highwaymen,   Housebreakers,  Attorneys,   Bawds,
Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers..."
     But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and
yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He  is so coarse
and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so  kind; scorns the whole world, yet talks
baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a madhouse.
     So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the weather
was fine, she carried them down  to the country  with her, and  feasted them
royally in  the Round Parlour, which she had hung with their pictures all in
a  circle, so that Mr Pope could not say that Mr Addison came before him, or
the other way  about. They were  very witty, too  (but their wit  is  all in
their  books) and taught her the most important part  of style, which is the
natural run of  the voice in  speaking -  a quality which  none that has not
heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of
the air, and breaks like a  wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away,
and is never to be  recaptured,  least of all  by those who  prick  up their
ears, half a century  later, and  try. They  taught her this,  merely by the
cadence of their voices in speech; so that her style changed  somewhat,  and
she wrote some very pleasant,  witty verses and characters  in prose. And so
she  lavished  her wine  on  them and  put bank-notes, which they  took very
kindly, beneath their plates at dinner, and accepted  their dedications, and
thought herself highly honoured by the exchange.
     Thus time ran  on, and Orlando  could  often be heard saying to herself
with an emphasis which might,  perhaps, make the hearer a little suspicious,
"Upon my  soul,  what a life this is!" (For she was still in  search of that
commodity.) But  circumstances soon forced her  to consider the matter  more
narrowly.
     One day she was  pouring out tea for Mr  Pope while, as anyone can tell
from the verses quoted above, he  sat very  bright-eyed, observant,  and all
crumpled up in a chair by her side.
     "Lord," she thought, as she raised the  sugar tongs, "how women in ages
to  come will  envy  me! And yet"  -  she  paused;  for Mr Pope  needed  her
attention. And yet -  let us finish her thought for her  - when anybody says
"How  future ages will envy  me", it is safe to say that they are  extremely
uneasy at  the  present moment. Was this life quite  so exciting,  quite  so
flattering, quite so  glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer  has done
his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had  a  positive hatred of tea; for
another, the intellect, divine as  it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of
lodging  in the most  seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the  cannibal
among the  other faculties so that  often,  where  the Mind  is biggest, the
Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest
of them  scarcely have room to breathe. Then the  high opinion poets have of
themselves;  then the  low  one  they have of  others;  then  the  enmities,
injuries, envies,  and repartees in which they  are constantly engaged; then
the  volubility with  which  they impart them; then the  rapacity with which
they demand sympathy  for them; all this, one may whisper, lest the wits may
overhear us, makes pouring out  tea  a more precarious and, indeed,  arduous
occupation than is  generally allowed. Added to which (we whisper again lest
the women may  overhear us), there is a little secret  which men share among
them;  Lord Chesterfield whispered  it to his son with strict injunctions to
secrecy, "Women  are but  children of  a larger growth...A man of sense only
trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them", which, since
children always  hear what they are not meant to,  and sometimes, even, grow
up,  may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony  of pouring out
tea is a curious  one. A woman knows very well that,  though a wit sends her
his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea,
this  by  no  means  signifies that  he respects  her  opinions, admires her
understanding, or will refuse,  though the rapier is  denied him, to run her
through the body with  his pen.  All this, we say,  whisper it as low as  we
can, may have  leaked  out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended
and the  sugar tongs distended the ladies  may fidget a  little, look out of
the  window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with  a great
plop  - as Orlando  did  now - into  Mr Pope's tea. Never  was any mortal so
ready to suspect an insult or so  quick to avenge one as Mr  Pope. He turned
to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough  draught of a  certain
famous  line  in  the  "Characters  of  Women". Much  polish  was afterwards
bestowed  on it, but even in the original it  was  striking enough.  Orlando
received it  with  a  curtsey. Mr Pope left her with a bow. Orlando, to cool
her cheeks,  for  really  she felt as  if  the little man  had  struck  her,
strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the garden. Soon the cool breezes
did their work. To her amazement she found  that she was hugely  relieved to
find herself alone.  She watched the merry boatloads rowing up the river. No
doubt the sight  put her in  mind of one or two incidents  in her past life.
She sat  herself  down  in profound meditation beneath  a fine  willow tree.
There she sat till the stars  were in the  sky. Then she  rose,  turned, and
went into the house, where  she sought her bedroom and  locked the door. Now
she opened a cupboard in which hung still  many of the  clothes she had worn
as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit
richly trimmed with  Venetian lace.  It was a little out of fashion, indeed,
but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure
of a noble Lord. She took a turn or two before the mirror to  make sure that
her petticoats had not lost  her  the  freedom  of her legs,  and  then  let
herself secretly out of doors.
     It was  a fine night early in April. A myriad  stars mingling  with the
light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a
light  infinitely becoming to the human  countenance and to the architecture
of Mr Wren. Everything appeared  in its  tenderest form,  yet,  just  as  it
seemed  on the point  of dissolution, some drop of silver  sharpened  it  to
animation.  Thus it was that talk  should be, thought Orlando (indulging  in
foolish reverie);  that society  should  be, that friendship should be, that
love  should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith  in human
intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a  haystack  and a
waggon presents us with  so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we
begin the search again.
     She  entered  Leicester  Square  as  she  made  these observations. The
buildings  had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs  by day. The canopy of
the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to fill up the outline of roof and
chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly with one arm drooping by her side,
the other reposing in her lap, on a  seat beneath a plane tree in the middle
of  the square seemed  the very figure of grace, simplicity, and desolation.
Orlando  swept  her hat off to her in the  manner  of a gallant  paying  his
addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place. The young woman raised her
head. It was of the most exquisite shapeliness. The young  woman  raised her
eyes.  Orlando  saw  them to  be of  a lustre such  as is sometimes seen  on
teapots  but rarely in a  human face.  Through  this  silver glaze the young
woman  looked  up  at  him  (for a  man he was to  her)  appealing,  hoping,
trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted his arm. For - need we stress the
point? - she was of the tribe which nightly burnishes their  wares, and sets
them  in  order on the  common counter to wait the highest  bidder. She  led
Orlando to  the room in Gerrard Street which  was her lodging. To  feel  her
hanging lightly yet like a suppliant  on her arm, roused in Orlando  all the
feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet,
having  been  so  lately a woman  herself,  she  suspected that  the  girl's
timidity and her hesitating answers  and the very  fumbling  with the key in
the latch and the fold  of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put
on to gratify  her  masculinity. Upstairs they went, and the pains which the
poor  creature had been at to decorate  her room and hide the fact that  she
had no other deceived Orlando not a  moment. The deception roused her scorn;
the truth roused her  pity.  One thing  showing through the other  bred  the
oddest assortment  of feeling, so that she  did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. Meanwhile  Nell, as the  girl called herself, unbuttoned her gloves;
carefully  concealed the left-hand thumb, which  wanted  mending; then  drew
behind a  screen, where,  perhaps,  she  rouged  her  cheeks,  arranged  her
clothes, fixed a new  kerchief round her neck - all  the time  prattling  as
women do, to amuse her lover, though Orlando could have sworn, from the tone
of her voice, that her thoughts were elsewhere. When all was  ready, out she
came, prepared - but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the strangest
torment of  anger,  merriment,  and pity  she  flung  off  all  disguise and
admitted herself a woman.
     At  this,  Nell burst into  such a roar of laughter as  might have been
heard across the way.
     "Well, my  dear," she said, when she had somewhat recovered, "I'm by no
means sorry to hear  it. For the plain Dunstable  of the matter is" (and  it
was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the  same sex, her
manner changed  and she dropped  her plaintive, appealing  ways), "the plain
Dunstable of the matter is, that I'm not in the mood for the society  of the
other sex to-night. Indeed, I'm in the devil  of a  fix." Whereupon, drawing
up the fire and stirring a bowl of punch, she told Orlando  the  whole story
of her  life. Since it is Orlando's life that engages us at present, we need
not relate the adventures of the other  lady, but it is certain that Orlando
had never known the hours speed faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell
had not a particle of wit about her, and when the name of Mr Pope came up in
talk  asked innocently if he  were connected with the perruque maker of that
name in Jermyn Street.  Yet,  to Orlando, such is the charm of ease  and the
seduction of beauty,  this poor girl's talk, larded though  it  was with the
commonest expressions of the street corners, tasted like wine after the fine
phrases she  had  been used to,  and she was  forced to  the conclusion that
there was  something in the sneer of Mr  Pope,  in the  condescension  of Mr
Addison, and in the secret of  Lord Chesterfield which took away her  relish
for  the society of  wits, deeply though she must continue to respect  their
works.
     These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and  Prue
Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which  they now elected
her a member. Each would tell the  story of the  adventures which had landed
her in her present way of  life. Several were the natural daughters of earls
and one was a  good  deal nearer  than she  should have been to  the  King's
person.  None  was too  wretched or  too  poor  but  to  have some  ring  or
handkerchief in her  pocket  which  stood her in  lieu of  pedigree. So they
would  draw round the  punch-bowl  which  Orlando  made it  her  business to
furnish generously, and  many were the  fine  tales they  told and  many the
amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied that when  women get
together - but hist - they are always careful to see that the doors are shut
and  that not a word of it gets into  print. All they desire is  -  but hist
again  - is  that not a man's  step  on the stair? All they desire, we  were
about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women
have no desires,  says this  gentleman,  coming  into  Nell's parlour;  only
affectations. Without  desires (she has  served  him and  he  is gone) their
conversation  cannot be of  the slightest interest to  anyone.  "It  is well
known,"  says Mr S. W., "that when they lack the  stimulus of the other sex,
women  can find nothing to say  to each other.  When they are alone, they do
not talk, they scratch." And since they cannot  talk together and scratching
cannot continue  without  interruption  and it is well known (Mr  T.  R. has
proved it) "that women are incapable of any feeling  of affection for  their
own sex and  hold each  other in the greatest aversion", what can we suppose
that women do when they seek out each other's society?
     As that is not a  question that can engage the attention of  a sensible
man, let us, who  enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians  from
any sex  whatever, pass it  over, and merely state  that  Orlando  professed
great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen
to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.
     But to give  an exact and particular account of  Orlando's life at this
time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and grope  in the
ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about  Gerrard Street
and Drury  Lane at  that  time, we  seem now to catch sight of her and  then
again to lose it. The task is made still more difficult by the fact that she
found  it convenient  at this  time  to change frequently  from one  set  of
clothes to another. Thus she often  occurs in contemporary memoirs as "Lord"
So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed to him, and it
is he who  is said to have written the poems that were really hers. She had,
it  seems,  no difficulty  in sustaining the different  parts,  for  her sex
changed  far  more  frequently  than  those who have  worn only  one set  of
clothing can conceive; nor can  there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold
harvest by this device;  the  pleasures  of  life  were  increased  and  its
experiences multiplied.  For  the  probity of  breeches  she  exchanged  the
seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
     So  then one may  sketch her spending  her morning in  a China robe  of
ambiguous  gender among  her books; then receiving a client  or two (for she
had  many scores of suppliants) in the same garment;  then she  would take a
turn  in  the garden  and clip the nut trees - for which  knee-breeches were
convenient; then she would change  into a flowered taffeta which best suited
a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and
so back again  to town, where she  would don a  snuff-coloured gown  like  a
lawyer's and visit the courts to hear how her  cases  were  doing, - for her
fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no  nearer consummation than
they had been a hundred years  ago;  and so, finally, when night  came,  she
would more  often than not become  a  nobleman complete from head to toe and
walk the streets in search of adventure.
     Returning  from  some of  these junketings  - of which there were  many
stories told at the time, as, that  she fought a  duel, served on one of the
King's ships as a captain, was seen  to dance naked on  a  balcony, and fled
with a certain  lady  to the Low Countries where the lady's husband followed
them - but of the truth or otherwise of these stories, we express no opinion
- returning from whatever  her  occupation may have  been,  she made a point
sometimes of passing beneath the windows of a coffee house, where she  could
see the wits without being  seen,  and thus could fancy  from their gestures
what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying without hearing a word
of them; which was perhaps  an  advantage; and once she  stood half  an hour
watching three shadows on the blind drinking tea together in a house in Bolt
Court.
     Never was  any play so absorbing. She wanted  to cry out, Bravo! Bravo!
For, to  be sure, what  a fine drama it  was - what  a  page  torn from  the
thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow with the  pouting
lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair, uneasy, petulant, officious;
there  was  the bent female shadow, crooking a finger in the cup to feel how
deep the tea was, for she was blind; and there was the Roman-looking rolling
shadow in the big  armchair - he who twisted his fingers so oddly and jerked
his head from side to side and swallowed down the tea in such vast gulps. Dr
Johnson,  Mr Boswell, and Mrs Williams, -  those were the shadows' names. So
absorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot to think how other ages would
have envied her, though it seems probable  that on this occasion they would.
She was content to gaze and gaze. At length Mr Boswell rose. He saluted  the
old  woman  with  tart  asperity. But  with what humility did  he not  abase
himself before the  great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full  height and
rocking  somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most  magnificent phrases
that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though she never heard a
word that any of the three shadows said as they sat there drinking tea.
     At  length  she came home one night  after one of these saunterings and
mounted to her bedroom. She took off her laced coat and stood there in shirt
and breeches looking out of  the window. There was something stirring in the
air which forbade her  to go to bed. A white haze lay over the town, for  it
was a frosty night  in midwinter and a  magnificent vista lay all round her.
She could see St  Paul's, the Tower,  Westminster