Abbey, with all the spires
and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent
and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the
smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets and squares
of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and orderly
prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless
sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every roof, the
cowl of every chimney, was perceptible; even the cobbles in the streets
showed distinct one from another, and Orlando could not help comparing this
orderly scene with the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the
city of London in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the
city, if such one could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and
conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars
reflected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle
of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where the wine shop used to
stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man. She could
remember the cries of many a one wounded in such night brawlings, when she
was a little boy, held to the diamond-paned window in her nurse's arms.
Troops of ruffians, men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the
streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and
knives gleaming in their fists. On such a night as this the impermeable
tangle of the forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined, writhing
in contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on one of the hills
which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed to
rot or parch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence,
poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed
and stank - Orlando could remember even now the smell of them on a hot night
- in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. Now - she leant out
of her window - all was light, order, and serenity. There was the faint
rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night
watchman - "Just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning". No sooner had the
words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then
for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St
Paul's. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken
and spread with extraordinary speed. At the same time a light breeze rose
and by the time the sixth stroke of midnight had struck the whole of the
eastern sky was covered with an irregular moving darkness, though the sky to
the west and north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloud spread north. Height
upon height above the city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, with all its
lights shining, burnt more brilliantly than ever by contrast. With the
eighth stroke, some hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled over Piccadilly. They
seemed to mass themselves and to advance with extraordinary rapidity towards
the west end. As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge
blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of
midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the
city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth
century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.
CHAPTER 5.
The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of
the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or
rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering
gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived
beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of
England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no
sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so
girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its
beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took
the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under
this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense,
and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to
make its way into every house - damp, which is the most insidious of all
enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted
by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible,
ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the
stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest
of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our
hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour
of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.
Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat
down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the
brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards
were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which
he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house;
furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare.
Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the
crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a
drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and
glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces,
and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads,
and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little
dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home - which had become extremely
important - was completely altered.
Outside the house - it was another effect of the damp - ivy grew in
unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in
greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery,
a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children
were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the
drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown
and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp
struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds.
In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one
subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled
in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No
open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously
practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the
damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life
of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at
nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty;
for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus -
for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the
woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics,
and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now
encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our
witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who
could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his
memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one
morning - all about nothing - he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went for
a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery.
Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He seemed to
himself "to crush the mould of a million more under his feet". Thick smoke
exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He reflected that no
fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance.
Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers "came scrolloping
across the grass to his feet". Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck
till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves.
Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh
his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth
confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He
looked upwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great
frontispiece of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the
instigation of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in
year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or
elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed
upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide
above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the
undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was
copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head
in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.
While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well for
Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the
climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear
knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even she, at length, was
forced to acknowledge that times were changed. One afternoon in the early
part of the century she was driving through St James's Park in her old
panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not
often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with
strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was sufficiently
strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause
her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and flamingo clouds
made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves that she was
insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins dying in Ionian
seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck the earth, the sunbeam
seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy (for it
had something of a banquet-table air) - a conglomeration at any rate of the
most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a
vast mound where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a
vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow's weeds and bridal
veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes,
military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes,
cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps,
elephants, and mathematical instruments - the whole supported like a
gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in
flowing white; on the left by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and
sponge-bag trousers. The incongruity of the objects, the association of the
fully clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours
and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with the most profound
dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent,
so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it must be, the effect
of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the first breeze
that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past, as if it were
destined to endure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking back into the corner
of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that
garish erection. Only the noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust;
but there they would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north,
eternally. She looked back as her coach swept up Constitution Hill. Yes,
there it was, still beaming placidly in a light which - she pulled her watch
out of her fob - was, of course, the light of twelve o'clock mid-day. None
other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of
dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever. She was determined
not to look again. Already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly.
But what was more peculiar a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her
cheeks as she passed Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a
superior power down upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she
was wearing black breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached
her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot
thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.
Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of
her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which
she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew (who had
succeeded good old Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.
"So do we all, m'lady," said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. "The
walls is sweating," she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and
sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the
finger-prints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that many
windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely
tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals
and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were already wearing three or
four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was August.
"But is it true, m'lady," the good woman asked, hugging herself, while
the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, "that the Queen, bless her, is
wearing a what d'you call it, a?," the good woman hesitated and blushed.
"A crinoline," Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached
Blackfriars). Mrs Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down
her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were
they not all of them weak women - wearing crinolines the better to conceal
the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable
fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was
impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child - to bear fifteen or
twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman's life was spent,
after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made
obvious.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot," said Mrs Bartholomew, mopping up her
tears, "in the liberry."
And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins Orlando now sat
down.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot in the liberry" - Orlando minced out the
horrid cockney phrase in Mrs Bartholomew's refined cockney accents as she
drank - but no, she detested the mild fluid - her tea. It was in this very
room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace
with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on the table
when Lord Burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of the
subjunctive. "Little man, little man," - Orlando could hear her say - "is
`must' a word to be addressed to princes?" And down came the flagon on the
table: there was the mark of it still.
But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great
Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her
arm-chair with a curse. Tomorrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more
of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. And then (here she
blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a
bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on...The blushes came and
went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. One
might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her cheeks.
And if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the crinoline being
blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous position must excuse her (even
her sex was still in dispute) and the irregular life she had lived before.
At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed
as if the spirit of the age - if such indeed it were - lay dormant for a
time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or
relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper,
sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained - the manuscript of her poem,
"The Oak Tree". She had carried this about with her for so many years now,
and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained,
some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when
with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the
lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most
conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the
date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for
close three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she
began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read,
how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy,
in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid;
and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried
prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she
had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same
brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same
passion for the country and the seasons.
"After all," she thought, getting up and going to the window, "nothing
has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a chair
has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the same
lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the same
carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth,
but what difference..."
No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the
door was flung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed by
Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just
dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the
eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which
spread and meandered round her pen. It was some infirmity of the quill, she
supposed; it was split or dirty. She dipped it again. The blot increased.
She tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came. Next she began
to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed
monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry
with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had
she said "Impossible" than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to
curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written
in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever
read in her life:
I am myself but a vile link
Amid life's weary chain,
But I have spoken hallow'd words,
Oh, do not say in vain!
Will the young maiden, when her tears,
Alone in moonlight shine,
Tears for the absent and the loved,
Murmur?
she wrote without a stop as Bartholomew and Basket grunted and groaned
about the room, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.
Again she dipped her pen and off it went:
She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve
Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
Had faded into paleness, broken by
Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,
but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page and
blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all
of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink
flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. What had happened to
her? Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she
demanded. But the room was empty. No one answered her, unless the dripping
of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an
extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a
thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales.
Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about
the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and
twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years
or so. But all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands;
and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally
to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the
second finger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see what caused
this agitation, she saw nothing - nothing but the vast solitary emerald
which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It
was of the finest water. It was worth ten thousand pounds at least. The
vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some
of the darkest manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not
enough; and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were
asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight - till poor
Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand
without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask
which dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were
much quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly
perceived what she had never noticed before - a thick ring of rather
jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.
"Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew," she said, stretching her hand
to take it.
At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a
rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it away
from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. "No," she said, with
resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but as for taking
off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor Queen Victoria on
her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had put it on her finger
twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked
in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact,
Orlando understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with emotion;
that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her
station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she
let it out of her keeping for a second.
"Heaven help us," said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the
pigeons at their pranks, "what a world we live in! What a world to be sure!"
Its complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole world was
ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to
church. Wedding rings were everywhere. She drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck,
thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. Rings filled
the jewellers' shops, not the flashing pastes and diamonds of Orlando's
recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. At the same time,
she began to notice a new habit among the town people. In the old days, one
would meet a boy trifling with a girl under a hawthorn hedge frequently
enough. Orlando had flicked many a couple with the tip of her whip and
laughed and passed on. Now, all that was changed. Couples trudged and
plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman's
right hand was invariably passed through the man's left and her fingers were
firmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the horses' noses were on them
that they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one piece,
heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only suppose that some new
discovery had been made about the race; that they were somehow stuck
together, couple after couple, but who had made it and when, she could not
guess. It did not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits
and the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or
mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no indissoluble
alliance among the brutes that she could see. Could it be Queen Victoria
then, or Lord Melbourne? Was it from them that the great discovery of
marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of
dogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. It
was strange - it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this
indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and
sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were accompanied by such a tingling
and twanging of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas
in order. They were languishing and ogling like a housemaid's fancies. They
made her blush. There was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands
and wear it like the rest. This she did, slipping it, overcome with shame,
upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. The tingling
persisted more violently, more indignantly than ever. She did not sleep a
wink that night. Next morning when she took up the pen to write, either she
could think of nothing, and the pen made one large lachrymose blot after
another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies
about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the
fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds
itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel
herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider
the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and
submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.
That this was much against her natural temperament has been
sufficiently made plain. When the sound of the Archduke's chariot wheels
died away, the cry that rose to her lips was "Life! A Lover!" not "Life! A
Husband!" and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and
run about the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. Such is the
indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down
anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those
who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the
Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the
eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change
from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and
she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For
it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it;
some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a
woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were
fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so
christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which
she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress
she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could
she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high
mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp
leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were
quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became
nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the
first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things
inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen
Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has another allotted
to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them
do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie
down; never, never, never to get up again. Thus did the spirit work upon
her, for all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of
emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those twangings and
tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the
sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if angels were plucking harp-strings
with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the wild
autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he
had married a very great lady and had hunted hares in Roumania these many
years now; nor Mr M.; he was become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he
made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for fishes.
One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the
Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean
upon.
"Whom," she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping
her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of
appealing womanhood as she did so, "can I lean upon?" Her words formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had
written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of
the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling
pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had stopped at last
and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her
plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
"Everyone is mated except myself," she mused, as she trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and Pippin
even - transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to
have a partner. "Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all," Orlando thought,
glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned windows of the hall,
"am single, am mateless, am alone."
Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down
unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved
hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One must lean on someone, she
thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and help
him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid to ask
it. So she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and
apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys
to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.
At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be
hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss
her. But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume
from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers. She
had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.
The air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. As the rooks went
whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming
through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind
her, over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so far for years. Six
feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn between her fingers and
pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw,
gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, mysterious as the lake into which
Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur. A single feather quivered in the air
and fell into the middle of it. Then, some strange ecstasy came over her.
Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and
flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while
the rooks' hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she
ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle
was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the
bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks' hoarse
laughter was in her ears. "I have found my mate," she murmured. "It is the
moor. I am nature's bride," she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the
cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by
the pool. "Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a
greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild
birds' feathers - the owl's, the nightjar's. I shall dream wild dreams. My
hands shall wear no wedding ring," she continued, slipping it from her
finger. "The roots shall twine about them. Ah!" she sighed, pressing her
head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, "I have sought happiness through many
ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life - and
behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women," she
continued; "none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace
here with only the sky above me - as the gipsy told me years ago. That was
in Turkey." And she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into
which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it,
and camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of
red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only mountains,
very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she
heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields of
irises and gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered
themselves down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw
the great hump of the South Downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and
where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with ships passing; and
she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and thought at first, "That's
the Armada," and then thought "No, it's Nelson," and then remembered how
those wars were over and the ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails
on the winding river were those of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle
sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming
here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle
as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out
and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. Indeed, she was
falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the
ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a
heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil,
or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought
it changed to the trot of a horse's hoofs; one, two, three, four, she
counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she
could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The
horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the
yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him,
she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
"Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!"
"I'm dead, sir!" she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It
was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous,
passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild,
dark-plumed name - a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of
rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting
descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things
which will be described presently.
"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship
in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the
Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he
explained.
In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed,
as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each
other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such
unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether
they were beggars or people of substance. He had a castle in the Hebrides,
but it was ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting hall. He
had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the East. He was on his
way now to join his brig at Falmouth, but the wind had fallen and it was
only when the gale blew from the South-west that he could put out to sea.
Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on
the weather vane. Mercifully its tail pointed due east and was steady as a
rock. "Oh! Shel, don't leave me!" she cried. "I'm passionately in love with
you," she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful
suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
"You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then
took place since the world began. When it was over and they were seated
again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west gale? Where was he
bound for?
"For the Horn," he said briefly, and blushed. (For a man had to blush
as a woman had, only at rather different things.) It was only by dint of
great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she gathered
that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures -
which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale. Masts had been
snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him).
Sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a
raft with a biscuit.
"It's about all a fellow can do nowadays," he said sheepishly, and
helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision which she
had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for
which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he
roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the
tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than any she had
cried before: "I am a woman," she thought, "a real woman, at last." She
thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare
and unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left foot, she would
have sat upon his knee.
"Shel, my darling," she began again, "tell me..." and so they talked
two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would
profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well
that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or
saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy
the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their
setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come
about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost
dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions
do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the
most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which
reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that
the space is filled to repletion.
After some days more of this kind of talk,
"Orlando, my dearest," Shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling
outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there was a
couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.
"Show 'em up," said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck,
taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the
fireplace. Two officers in bottlegreen uniforms with truncheons at their
hips then entered the room and stood at attention. Formalities being over,
they gave into Orlando's own hands, as their commission was, a legal
document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs of sealing wax,
the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest
importance.
Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her
right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to
the matter.
"The lawsuits are settled," she read out..."some in my favour, as for
example...others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in
Constantinople, Shel," she explained) "Children pronounced illegitimate,
(they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don't
inherit, which is all to the good...Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex," she
read out with some solemnity, "is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The
estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed
and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage" -
but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, "but there
won't be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be
taken as read." Whereupon she appended her own signature beneath Lord
Palmerston's and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of
her titles, her house, and her estate - which was now so much shrunk, for
the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was
infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much
quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was
filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken
out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street
incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the
Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass
cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded.
Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were
burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys
with the label "I am a base Pretender", lolling from their mouths. The
Queen's cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a
command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night.
Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from
the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs
W.E. Gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding
her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] - all of
which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason
that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando's life. She
skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bonfires were blazing in
the marketplace, she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine
was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above
them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one
could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest
at last, on Orlando's foot.
"Tell me, Mar," she would say (and here it must be explained, that when
she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy,
amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs
were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet
perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might
be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant
farms, a cock crowing - all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)
- "Tell me, Mar," she would say, "about Cape Horn." Then Shelmerdine would
make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and
an empty snail shell or two.
"Here's the north," he would say. "There's the south. The wind's coming
from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we've just lowered the
top-boom mizzen: and so you see - here, where this bit of grass is, she
enters the current which you'll find marked - where's my map and compasses,
Bo'sun? Ah! thanks, that'll do, where the snail shell is. The current
catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall
be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf is, - for you
must understand my dear" - and so he would go on, and she would listen to
every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without
his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles
clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there
reflected on the destiny of man; came down again; had a whisky and soda;
went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read
Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true
end of life; decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a
thousand other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied,
Yes, negresses are seductive, aren't they? he having told her that the
supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how
well she had taken his meaning.
"Are you positive you aren't a man?" he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,
"Can it be possible you're not a woman?" and then they must put it to
the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of
the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman
could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and
subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.
And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has
become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so
scanty in comparison with ideas that "the biscuits ran out" has to stand for
kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's
philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most
profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple
one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the
poor man is lying.)
So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with
spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart of
the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there among the snail
shells, making models of Cape Horn. "Bonthrop," she would say, "I'm off,"
and when she called him by his second name, "Bonthrop", it should signify to
the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks on a
desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily,
die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and
with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby asking her out
every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so
saying "Bonthrop", she said in effect, "I'm dead", and pushed her way as a
spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep
into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and movement were over and
she were free now to take her way - all of which the reader should hear in
her voice when she said "Bonthrop", and should also add, the better to
illumine the word, that for him too the same word signified, mystically,
separation and isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in
unfathomable seas.
After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked "Shelmerdine", and
stooping, she picked up one of those autumn crocuses which to some people
signify that very word, and put it with the jay's feather that came tumbling
blue through the beech woods, in her breast. Then she called "Shelmerdine"
and the word went shooting this way and that way through the woods and
struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells in the grass. He
saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay's feather
in her breast, and cried "Orlando", which meant (and it must be remembered
that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes,
some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken
as if something were breaking through; which proved to be a ship in full
sail, heaving and tossing a little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole
year of summer days to make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down,
heaving this way, heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the
crest of this wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly
stands over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at
her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap
on deck - as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the
26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine recited
Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which had started
to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across Orlando's foot.
A second leaf followed and then a third. Orlando shivered and turned pale.
It was the wind. Shelmerdine - but it would be more proper now to call him
Bonthrop - leapt to his feet.
"The wind!" he cried.
Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with
leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts,
frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after
till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as
fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that
taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr Dupper
catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book.
And they thrust Queen Mary's prayer book in his hands and he searched,
hastily fluttering the pages, and said, "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and
Lady Orlando, kneel down"; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and
now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter
through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and
a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud
and faint alternately, and Mr Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried
now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all
was quiet for a moment, and one word - it might be "the jaws of death" -
rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes
and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang loud and others
prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap
of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a
golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. All was movement and
confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing
and the rain pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger,
went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for
the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for
her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt
forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out "Marmaduke Bonthrop
Shelmerdine!" and he answered her "Orlando!" and the words went dashing and
circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher,
further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and
fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
CHAPTER 6.
Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent.
There was the ink pot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her
poem, broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about
to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing
changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had
changed - she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.
There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that
she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had proved
worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with
superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of
her finger.
"The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand,"
she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, "for it to be of any
use at all."
She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as
if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her.
Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able to collect her
thoughts, the effect that her behaviour would have had upon the spirit of
the age. She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had
taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met
with its approval. She was certainly feeling more herself. Her finger had
not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet,
she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but if
one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one
liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And
finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to
write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at
the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could not.
What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt better
in her life.
"Hang it all!" she cried, with a touch of her old spirit. "Here goes!"
And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise,
there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping.
She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did. Ah!
but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over her lest the pen
might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again. She read,
And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls:
As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with the most
obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder, and
when she had written "Egyptian girls", the power told her to stop. Grass,
the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as governesses use to
the beginning, is all right; the hanging cups of fritillaries - admirable;
the snaky flower - a thought, strong from a lady's pen, perhaps, but
Wordsworth no doubt, sanctions it; but - girls? Are girls necessary? You
have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that'll do.
And so the spirit passed on.
Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a
deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as - to compare great things
with small - a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the
corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obligingly
made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful
whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it
would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have
had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She
had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by
putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no
satirist, cynic, or psychologist - any one of which goods would have been
discovered at once - to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a
deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between
a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a
nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends.
Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she
need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained
herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She
wrote. She wrote.
It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January,
February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August
follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at
November again, with a whole year accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little
bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may complain that he
could recite the calendar for himself and so save his pocket whatever sum
the Hogarth Press may think proper to charge for this book. But what can the
biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into which
Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion
is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer;
life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with
sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles
asunder. Therefore - since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what
Orlando is doing now - there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar,
tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window,
until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin
drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a
kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her
chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a
wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would
be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is
life. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a
man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere
wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with
a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects,
we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration
for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on
whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp
altogether and indulging - witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her
palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns - what is more
humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone
through before our eyes when we know that what causes it - thought and
imagination - are of no importance whatsoever?
But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when
we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand
for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's
whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her
table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that
calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in
the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and
thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she
thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will
write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody
objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk
and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window
- all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible
subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things?
Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be
admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love?
She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen
starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists
define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority - has nothing
whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is
slipping off one's petticoat and - But we all know what love is. Did Orlando
do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of
one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine,
we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were
sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two
rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a snail.
One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf. Then a
servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is
engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no
visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best
and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the
colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers the hour in its usual
cryptic way. One's mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,
about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a
hob. Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of the
under-footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring
the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the
starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on
the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of
scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we
meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and
out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they
don't know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me
what life is; Life, Life, Life!
We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue
purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see
there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he
says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life's
labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant
agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when
they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will
breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in
snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men
tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them
speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is- having asked them
all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once
in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it
was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who
waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is - alas, we don't know.
At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction,
Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to
the window, and exclaimed, "Done!"
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which
now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going
on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
"And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that
she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually attacked
her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent spectacle with
staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way. The manuscript
which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a
living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was
between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was
that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in
her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned
with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes were about her in
profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can none of them read. It is a
lamentable oversight on the part of Providence which had never struck her
before. Human beings alone are thus gifted. Human beings had become
necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London
at once.
"There's just time to catch the eleven forty five, M'Lady," said
Basket. Orlando had not yet realized the invention of the steam engine, but
such was her absorption in the sufferings of a being, who, though not
herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for the
first time, took her seat in a railway carriage, and had the rug arranged
about her knees without giving a thought to"that stupendous invention, which
had (the historians say) completely changed the face of Europe in the past
twenty years" (as, indeed, happens much more frequently than historians
suppose). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty; rattled horribly;
and the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled up to London in
something less than an hour and stood on the platform at Charing Cross, not
knowing where to go.
The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days
in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part to
an umbrella factory. She had bought another in Mayfair which was sanitary,
convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair
that her poem would be relieved of its desire? Pray God, she thought,
remembering the brightness of their ladyships' eyes and the symmetry of
their lordship's legs, they haven't taken to reading there. For that would
be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.'s. The same sort of talk would
be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might have shifted from
the General's left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr L. might have stayed ten
days with R. instead of T. Then Mr Pope would come in. Oh! but Mr Pope was
dead. Who were the wits now, she wondered - but that was not a question one
could put to a porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by
the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets
of the strangest little boxes on wheels were drawn up by the pavement. She
walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all
sizes, drawn by blood horses and by dray horses, conveying one solitary
dowager or crowded to the top by whiskered men in silk hats, were
inextricably mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so
long used to the look of a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at
loggerheads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the
street sounded violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the
pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their
own bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility,
poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood men,
holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside great
baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses'
noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster!
Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of
national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She
looked anxiously at people's faces. But that confused her still more. Here
would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as if he knew some
terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering
his way along as if it were a festival for all the world. Indeed, she came
to the conclusion that there was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each
man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?
She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast
windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing gowns, and flowers,
and fishing rods, and luncheon baskets; while stuff of every hue and
pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and festooned and ballooned
across and across. Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate mansions,
soberly numbered "one", "two", "three", and so on right up to two or three
hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and six steps and a
pair of curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid on tables, and a
parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out of another, until her
mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open squares with
black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle, and war
horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons
fluttering. So she walked and walked along pavements between houses until
she felt very hungry, and something fluttering above her heart rebuked her
with having forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript. "The Oak Tree".
She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where she
stood. No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and handsome, was
singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was approaching. There was
something vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she felt
certain that she had met him at some time or other. But where? Could it be
that this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane in his
hand and a flower in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed
white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was! - her old, her very old
friend, Nick Greene!
At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognized her. "The
Lady Orlando!" he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.
"Sir Nicholas!" she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively by
something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who had
lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen
in the world and become certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine
things into the bargain.
With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was correct; he
was a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was the author of a
score of volumes. He was, in short, the most influential critic of the
Victorian age.
A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who had
caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy, restless
fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the Italian
fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest that they had
seen the sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now sprucely dressed in a
grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his button-hole, and grey suede
gloves to match. But even as she marvelled, he made another bow, and asked
her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow was a thought
overdone perhaps, but the imitation of fine breeding was creditable. She
followed him, wondering, into a superb restaurant, all red plush, white
table-cloths, and silver cruets, as unlike as could be the old tavern or
coffee house with its sanded floor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch
and chocolate, and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly
on the table beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same
man. His nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin was
shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links; where
his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he had
ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her of his taste in
Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same man. "Ah!" he said,
heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, "ah! my dear lady,
the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson -
those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison - those were the heroes. All,
all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!"
- he threw an immense amount of scorn into his voice. "The truth of it is,"
he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, "that all our young writers are in
the pay of the booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their
tailor's bills. It is an age," he said, helping himself to hors-d'oeuvres,
"marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - none of which the
Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant."
"No, my dear lady," he continued, passing with approval the turbot au
gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, "the great days are
over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the past; honour those
writers - there are still a few left of 'em - who take antiquity for their
model and write, not for pay but - " Here Orlando almost shouted "Glawr!"
Indeed she could have sworn that she had heard him say the very same things
three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but the spirit
was the same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,
some change there was. For while he ran on about taking Addison as one's
model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and lying in bed of a morning
(which she was proud to think her pension paid quarterly enabled him to do)
rolling the best works of the best authors round and round on one's tongue
for an hour, at least, before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of
the present time and the deplorable condition of our native tongue (he had
lived long in America, she believed) might be purified - while he ran on in
much the same way that Greene had run on three hundred years ago, she had
time to ask herself, how was it then that he had changed? He had grown
plump; but he was a man verging on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature
had been a prosperous pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless,
uneasy vivacity had gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no
longer quite so free and easy. He mentioned, it is true, "my dear friend
Pope" or "my illustrious friend Addison" every other second, but he had an
air of respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it
seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own blood
relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the poets.
Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature
all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as
something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something
errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly
gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her
disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper part
of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell "The Oak Tree", a poem.
"A manuscript!" said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez. "How
interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it." And once
more, after an interval of some three hundred years, Nicholas Greene took
Orlando's poem and, laying it down among the coffee cups and the liqueur
glasses, began to read it. But now his verdict was very different from what
it had been then. It reminded him, he said as he turned over the pages, of
Addison's "Cato". It compared favourably with Thomson's "Seasons". There was
no trace in it, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit. It was
composed with a regard to truth, to nature, to the dictates of the human
heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It
must, of course, be published instantly.
Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her
manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress. The idea tickled Sir
Nicholas considerably.
"But what about royalties?" he asked.
Orlando's mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who
happened to be staying there.
Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to
the fact that Messrs - (here he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers)
would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book on their list.
He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten per cent on all copies up to
two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would
himself write a line to Mr -, who was the most influential; then a
compliment - say a little puff of her own poems - addressed to the wife of
the editor of the - never did any harm. He would call -. So he ran on.
Orlando understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not
altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit
to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So
Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it
into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with
many compliments on both sides, they parted.
Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone, - and she
felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it - she
had nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked - the extraordinary
chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St James's Street; a
married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee
house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in the
afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier
dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought
popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow
the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable,
as the reader chooses to consider it upon her relations with her husband
(who was at the Horn), that whenever anything popped violently into her
head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired to him.
There was one, as it happened, close at hand. "My God Shel," she wired;
"life literature Greene toady" - here she dropped into a cypher language
which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the
utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph
clerk being any wiser, and added the words "Rattigan Glumphoboo", which
summed it up precisely. For not only had the events of the morning made a
deep impression on her, but it cannot have escaped the reader's attention
that Orlando was growing up - which is not necessarily growing better - and
"Rattigan Glumphoboo" described a very complicated spiritual state - which
if the reader puts all his intelligence at our service he may discover for
himself.
There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was
probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper clouds raced
swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that her husband would
be at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cutting away some tattered spar,
or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving the post office, she
turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which was a shop so common in
our day that it needs no description, yet, to her eyes, strange in the
extreme; a shop where they sold books. All her life long Orlando had known
manuscripts; she had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which
Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare's
script and Milton's. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios,
often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But
these innumerable little volumes, bright, identical, ephemeral, for they
seemed bound in cardboard and printed on tissue paper, surprised her
infinitely. The whole works of Shakespeare cost half a crown, and could be
put in your pocket. One could hardly read them, indeed, the print was so
small, but it was a marvel, none the less. "Works" - the works of every
writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of
the long shelves. On tables and chairs, more "works" were piled and tumbled,
and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often works about other works
by Sir Nicholas and a score of others whom, in her ignorance, she supposed,
since they were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave
an astounding order to the bookseller to send her everything of any
importance in the shop and left.
She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath that
cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through the body
by Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often to blame in the matter, began
framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life literature
Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her
with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity
by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She had carried off a sheaf
of papers and critical journals from the book shop, and at length, flinging
herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she spread these pages round her and
did her best to fathom the noble art of prose composition as these masters
practised it. For still the old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred
type of a weekly newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying
on her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she
had once known - John Donne. But she had pitched herself, without knowing
it, not far from the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in
her ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed
overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers
crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball
bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through
the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She
read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked up at the sky and
looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to be made into the
other? But how monstrously difficult! For - here came by a pair of tight
scarlet trousers - how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs
dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading
Sir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in the intervals of looking about
her), she somehow got the impression - here she rose and walked - they made
one feel - it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling - one must never, never
say what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a
bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made
one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody
else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought,
pushing a little boat off with her toe, I don't think I could (here the
whole of Sir Nicholas' article came before her as articles do, ten minutes
after they are read, with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his
writing-table, and the time of the day thrown in), I don't think I could,
she continued, considering the article from this point of view, sit in a
study, no, it's not a study, it's a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day
long, and talk to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which
they mustn't repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she
continued, weeping bitterly, they're all so manly; and then, I do detest
Duchesses; and I don't like cake; and though I'm spiteful enough, I could
never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and
write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed,
launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost
sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses
call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much
more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the
Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the
waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean
liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and the wave
she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she
watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop's ship
climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a
thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it
went and disappeared. "It's sunk!" she cried out in an agony - and then,
behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on
the other side of the Atlantic.
"Ecstasy!" she cried. "Ecstasy! Where's the post office?" she wondered.
"For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him..." And repeating "A toy boat
on the Serpentine", and "Ecstasy", alternately, for the thoughts were
interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing, she hurried towards Park
Lane.
"A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat," she repeated, thus enforcing upon
herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor
eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's something
useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a
spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them);
free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind;
something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop:
that's what it is -a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy - it's ecstasy that
matters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope
Gate, for the consequence of not living with one's husband, except when the
wind is sunk, is that one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would no
doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen
Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in a
flash. She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did
not care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it
might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene's article had plunged her in the
depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she
repeated: "Ecstasy, ecstasy", as she stood waiting to cross.
But the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her standing
there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine, while
the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in
four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a golden river had
coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies
held card-cases between their fingers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted
canes between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One
thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great
elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is: how do these
leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant,
propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando thought, looking at the stately,
still faces, their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is
the consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and
splendid there they sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the
stream became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved,
dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.
So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street, where,
when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember curlew calling and one
very old man with a gun.
She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of her
house, how Lord Chesterfield had said - but her memory was checked. Her
discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see Lord Chesterfield
putting his hat down here and his coat down there with an elegance of
deportment which it was a pleasure to watch, was now completely littered
with parcels. While she had been sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had
delivered her order, and the house was crammed - there were parcels slipping
down the staircase - with the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey
paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of these packets as
she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the others, and, rapidly
cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by innumerable volumes.
Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order.
For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not
merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and
embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles,
Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons - all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and
requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's reverence for print
had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the
benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she
tried to come to a conclusion.
And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a
conclusion upon Victorian literature - one is to write it out in sixty
volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of
this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to
choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion
(opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a
single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile
of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as
her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound
note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next
(here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that
literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent;
next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon
that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the
same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures
must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a
peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing
very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at
Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very
delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the
highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit
of six lines, we must omit.
Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the
window for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes to a
conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and must wait
for the unseen antagonist to return it to them. What would be sent her next
from the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her
hands clasped, she stood for a considerable space of time wondering.
Suddenly she started - and here we could only wish that, as on a former
occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and
provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up
what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no! Having
thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen it fall short by
several inches, these ladies had given up all intercourse with her these
many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen
this pale March morning to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to
shroud this undeniable event whatever it may be? For after giving that
sudden, violent start, Orlando - but Heaven be praised, at this very moment
there struck up outside one of these frail, reedy, fluty, jerky,
old-fashioned barrel-organs which are still sometimes played by Italian
organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the intervention, humble
though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with all
its gasps and groans, to fill this page with sound until the moment comes
when it is impossible to deny its coming; which the footman has seen coming
and the maid-servant; and the reader will have to see too; for Orlando
herself is clearly unable to ignore it any longer - let the barrel-organ
sound and transport us on thought, which is no more than a little boat, when
music sounds, tossing on the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers,
the most clumsy, the most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens
where washing is hanging to - what is this place? Do you recognize the Green
and in the middle the steeple, and the gate with a lion couchant on either
side? Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here we are at Kew, and I
will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape
hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk
there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in
October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said,
and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging
a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the
kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from
bank to bank.
Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.
Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys and their smoke; behold the
city clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her
dog for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time
not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though Heaven has mercifully
decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on
for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist; still through
our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid fulfilment of
natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw
blazing - such silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this
all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays - saw blazing a fire in a
field against minarets near Constantinople.
Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure
of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates;
and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark
chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and
confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of
links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows
on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink
and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from
bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether it is what the
male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it
comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream
- would it were true, as the rhyme hints "like a dream" - but duller and
worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent,
habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the
wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.
Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which
bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn
parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us
and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so
deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of
dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth,
prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.
But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind
land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he
flies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods
back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling,
dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us
safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on - (here the
barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).
"It's a very fine boy, M'Lady," said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting
her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In other words Orlando was safely
delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the
morning.
Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage;
nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by any
means, the same day. No - for if we look out of the window, as Orlando was
doing at the moment, we shall see that Park Lane itself has considerably
changed. Indeed one might stand there ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood
now, without seeing a single barouche landau. "Look