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experience was doubtful. Link-boys could be heard calling their coaches all
down South Audley Street. Doors were slammed and carriages drove off.
Orlando found herself near Mr Pope on the staircase. His lean and misshapen
frame was shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, triumph,
wit, and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his eyes. He looked
like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead. At the
same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon the luckless
Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago
leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more
bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger
for the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In
such moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their
throats with carving knives. Orlando would have done all willingly, but
there was a rasher thing still for her to do, and this she did. She invited
Mr Pope to come home with her.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate
the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St
Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is
Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we
survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions
is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the
earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The
earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles
scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking
that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life - (and so on
for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be
dropped).
On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by
the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars. That she was still
flesh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due to a fact to
which we drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see the more
we believe. Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at
that time very imperfectly lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement
upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the benighted traveller had to trust
to the stars or the red flame of some night watchman to save him from the
gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak woods where swine rootled in the
Tottenham Court Road. But even so it wanted much of our modern efficiency.
Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or so, but
between lay a considerable stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes
Orlando and Mr Pope would be in blackness; and then for about half a minute
again in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando.
As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most delicious
balm. "This is indeed a very great honour for a young woman to be driving
with Mr Pope," she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. "I am
the most blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me - indeed, I feel the knot
of his knee ribbons pressing against my thigh - is the greatest wit in Her
Majesty's dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me
with fury." Here came the lamp-post again. "What a foolish wretch I am!" she
thought. "There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never
cast a thought on me or on Mr Pope either. What's an `age', indeed? What are
`we'?" and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two
blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in
common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was
darkness. Her illusion revived. "How noble his brow is," she thought
(mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr Pope's forehead in the darkness).
"What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth - what a
wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter
their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the
human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness"; (here the coach gave
a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) "without genius we should
be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams," - thus she was
apostrophizing the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the
street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realized her mistake. Mr Pope had a
forehead no bigger than another man's. "Wretched man," she thought, "how you
have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you
plain, how ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and weakly, there is
nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise."
Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she
could see nothing but the poet's knees.
"But it is I that am a wretch," she reflected, once they were in
complete obscurity again, "for base as you may be, am I not still baser? It
is you who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten
the savage, make me clothes of the silkworm's wool, and carpets of the
sheep's. If I want to worship, have you not provided me with an image of
yourself and set it in the sky? Are not evidences of your care everywhere?
How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be
all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you."
Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now
Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides some
degraded creatures of her own sex, two wretched pigmies on a stark desert
land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The one was powerless to
help the other. Each had enough to do to look after itself. Looking Mr Pope
full in the face, "It is equally vain," she thought, "for you to think you
can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth
beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming
to us both."
All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of
birth and education use, about the Queen's temper and the Prime Minister's
gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket, along
the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her house in
Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had been
becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright - that is to say, the
sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a summer's
morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they
alighted, Mr Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando curtseying
Mr Pope to precede her into her mansion with the most scrupulous attention
to the rites of the Graces.
From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that
genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late
Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is
constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps
should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the
lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time;
save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash
six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that night) and then
lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is
therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are,
it is said, much like other people.
It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this
should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of
genius. Nor were they so different from the rest of us as one might have
supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They
liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored
grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore
plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr Swift had a fine malacca
cane. Mr Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered with his head.
A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their
jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that came to Orlando
higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such
trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but
the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits revived, and she took to
tearing up her cards of invitation to great parties; kept her evenings free;
began to look forward to Mr Pope's visit, to Mr Addison's, to Mr Swift's -
and so on and so on. If the reader will here refer to the "Rape of the
Lock", to the "Spectator", to "Gulliver's Travels", he will understand
precisely what these mysterious words may mean. Indeed, biographers and
critics might save themselves all their labours if readers would only take
this advice. For when we read:
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Pray'rs or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball
- we know as if we heard him how Mr Pope's tongue flickered like a
lizard's, how his eyes flashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved, how he
lied, how he suffered. In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every
experience of his life; every quality of his mind is written large in his
works; yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound
the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation
of the monstrous growth.
So, now that we have read a page or two of the "Rape of the Lock", we
know exactly why Orlando was so much amused and so much frightened and so
very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that afternoon.
Mrs Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr Addison waited on her
Ladyship. At this, Mr Pope got up with a wry smile, made his congee, and
limped off. In came Mr Addison. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the
following passage from the "Spectator":
"I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall
cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the peacock, parrot and swan
shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells,
and the rocks for gems, and every part of nature furnish out its share
towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of
it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I have been
speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it."
We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all, in the hollow, of our
hands. Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrinkle
in his stocking? Does not every ripple and curve of his wit lie exposed
before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his urbanity and the fact
that he would marry a Countess and die very respectably in the end? All is
clear. And when Mr Addison has said his say, there is a terrific rap at the
door, and Mr Swift, who had these arbitrary ways with him, walks in
unannounced. One moment, where is "Gulliver's Travels"? Here it is! Let us
read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
"I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tranquillity of Mind; I did not
find the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of a secret
or open Enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering or pimping, to
procure the Favour of any great Man or of his Minion. I wanted no Fence
against Fraud or Oppression; Here was neither Physician to destroy my Body,
nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No Informer to watch my Words, and Actions,
or forge Accusations against me for Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers,
Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, Housebreakers, Attorneys, Bawds,
Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers..."
But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and
yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He is so coarse
and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole world, yet talks
baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a madhouse.
So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the weather
was fine, she carried them down to the country with her, and feasted them
royally in the Round Parlour, which she had hung with their pictures all in
a circle, so that Mr Pope could not say that Mr Addison came before him, or
the other way about. They were very witty, too (but their wit is all in
their books) and taught her the most important part of style, which is the
natural run of the voice in speaking - a quality which none that has not
heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of
the air, and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away,
and is never to be recaptured, least of all by those who prick up their
ears, half a century later, and try. They taught her this, merely by the
cadence of their voices in speech; so that her style changed somewhat, and
she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose. And so
she lavished her wine on them and put bank-notes, which they took very
kindly, beneath their plates at dinner, and accepted their dedications, and
thought herself highly honoured by the exchange.
Thus time ran on, and Orlando could often be heard saying to herself
with an emphasis which might, perhaps, make the hearer a little suspicious,
"Upon my soul, what a life this is!" (For she was still in search of that
commodity.) But circumstances soon forced her to consider the matter more
narrowly.
One day she was pouring out tea for Mr Pope while, as anyone can tell
from the verses quoted above, he sat very bright-eyed, observant, and all
crumpled up in a chair by her side.
"Lord," she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, "how women in ages
to come will envy me! And yet" - she paused; for Mr Pope needed her
attention. And yet - let us finish her thought for her - when anybody says
"How future ages will envy me", it is safe to say that they are extremely
uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so
flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has done
his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for
another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of
lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal
among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the
Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest
of them scarcely have room to breathe. Then the high opinion poets have of
themselves; then the low one they have of others; then the enmities,
injuries, envies, and repartees in which they are constantly engaged; then
the volubility with which they impart them; then the rapacity with which
they demand sympathy for them; all this, one may whisper, lest the wits may
overhear us, makes pouring out tea a more precarious and, indeed, arduous
occupation than is generally allowed. Added to which (we whisper again lest
the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among
them; Lord Chesterfield whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to
secrecy, "Women are but children of a larger growth...A man of sense only
trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them", which, since
children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow
up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out
tea is a curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her
his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea,
this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her
understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her
through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as we
can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended
and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little, look out of
the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with a great
plop - as Orlando did now - into Mr Pope's tea. Never was any mortal so
ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr Pope. He turned
to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain
famous line in the "Characters of Women". Much polish was afterwards
bestowed on it, but even in the original it was striking enough. Orlando
received it with a curtsey. Mr Pope left her with a bow. Orlando, to cool
her cheeks, for really she felt as if the little man had struck her,
strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the garden. Soon the cool breezes
did their work. To her amazement she found that she was hugely relieved to
find herself alone. She watched the merry boatloads rowing up the river. No
doubt the sight put her in mind of one or two incidents in her past life.
She sat herself down in profound meditation beneath a fine willow tree.
There she sat till the stars were in the sky. Then she rose, turned, and
went into the house, where she sought her bedroom and locked the door. Now
she opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn
as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit
richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed,
but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure
of a noble Lord. She took a turn or two before the mirror to make sure that
her petticoats had not lost her the freedom of her legs, and then let
herself secretly out of doors.
It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the
light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a
light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the architecture
of Mr Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it
seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to
animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in
foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that
love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human
intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a
waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we
begin the search again.
She entered Leicester Square as she made these observations. The
buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day. The canopy of
the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to fill up the outline of roof and
chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly with one arm drooping by her side,
the other reposing in her lap, on a seat beneath a plane tree in the middle
of the square seemed the very figure of grace, simplicity, and desolation.
Orlando swept her hat off to her in the manner of a gallant paying his
addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place. The young woman raised her
head. It was of the most exquisite shapeliness. The young woman raised her
eyes. Orlando saw them to be of a lustre such as is sometimes seen on
teapots but rarely in a human face. Through this silver glaze the young
woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her) appealing, hoping,
trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted his arm. For - need we stress the
point? - she was of the tribe which nightly burnishes their wares, and sets
them in order on the common counter to wait the highest bidder. She led
Orlando to the room in Gerrard Street which was her lodging. To feel her
hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the
feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet,
having been so lately a woman herself, she suspected that the girl's
timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in
the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put
on to gratify her masculinity. Upstairs they went, and the pains which the
poor creature had been at to decorate her room and hide the fact that she
had no other deceived Orlando not a moment. The deception roused her scorn;
the truth roused her pity. One thing showing through the other bred the
oddest assortment of feeling, so that she did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girl called herself, unbuttoned her gloves;
carefully concealed the left-hand thumb, which wanted mending; then drew
behind a screen, where, perhaps, she rouged her cheeks, arranged her
clothes, fixed a new kerchief round her neck - all the time prattling as
women do, to amuse her lover, though Orlando could have sworn, from the tone
of her voice, that her thoughts were elsewhere. When all was ready, out she
came, prepared - but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the strangest
torment of anger, merriment, and pity she flung off all disguise and
admitted herself a woman.
At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laughter as might have been
heard across the way.
"Well, my dear," she said, when she had somewhat recovered, "I'm by no
means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter is" (and it
was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the same sex, her
manner changed and she dropped her plaintive, appealing ways), "the plain
Dunstable of the matter is, that I'm not in the mood for the society of the
other sex to-night. Indeed, I'm in the devil of a fix." Whereupon, drawing
up the fire and stirring a bowl of punch, she told Orlando the whole story
of her life. Since it is Orlando's life that engages us at present, we need
not relate the adventures of the other lady, but it is certain that Orlando
had never known the hours speed faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell
had not a particle of wit about her, and when the name of Mr Pope came up in
talk asked innocently if he were connected with the perruque maker of that
name in Jermyn Street. Yet, to Orlando, such is the charm of ease and the
seduction of beauty, this poor girl's talk, larded though it was with the
commonest expressions of the street corners, tasted like wine after the fine
phrases she had been used to, and she was forced to the conclusion that
there was something in the sneer of Mr Pope, in the condescension of Mr
Addison, and in the secret of Lord Chesterfield which took away her relish
for the society of wits, deeply though she must continue to respect their
works.
These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and Prue
Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they now elected
her a member. Each would tell the story of the adventures which had landed
her in her present way of life. Several were the natural daughters of earls
and one was a good deal nearer than she should have been to the King's
person. None was too wretched or too poor but to have some ring or
handkerchief in her pocket which stood her in lieu of pedigree. So they
would draw round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it her business to
furnish generously, and many were the fine tales they told and many the
amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied that when women get
together - but hist - they are always careful to see that the doors are shut
and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is - but hist
again - is that not a man's step on the stair? All they desire, we were
about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women
have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell's parlour; only
affectations. Without desires (she has served him and he is gone) their
conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. "It is well
known," says Mr S. W., "that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex,
women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do
not talk, they scratch." And since they cannot talk together and scratching
cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr T. R. has
proved it) "that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their
own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion", what can we suppose
that women do when they seek out each other's society?
As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible
man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from
any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed
great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen
to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.
But to give an exact and particular account of Orlando's life at this
time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and grope in the
ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about Gerrard Street
and Drury Lane at that time, we seem now to catch sight of her and then
again to lose it. The task is made still more difficult by the fact that she
found it convenient at this time to change frequently from one set of
clothes to another. Thus she often occurs in contemporary memoirs as "Lord"
So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed to him, and it
is he who is said to have written the poems that were really hers. She had,
it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex
changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of
clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold
harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its
experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she exchanged the
seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of
ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or two (for she
had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a
turn in the garden and clip the nut trees - for which knee-breeches were
convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited
a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and
so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a
lawyer's and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing, - for her
fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation than
they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she
would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and
walk the streets in search of adventure.
Returning from some of these junketings - of which there were many
stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the
King's ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled
with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady's husband followed
them - but of the truth or otherwise of these stories, we express no opinion
- returning from whatever her occupation may have been, she made a point
sometimes of passing beneath the windows of a coffee house, where she could
see the wits without being seen, and thus could fancy from their gestures
what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying without hearing a word
of them; which was perhaps an advantage; and once she stood half an hour
watching three shadows on the blind drinking tea together in a house in Bolt
Court.
Never was any play so absorbing. She wanted to cry out, Bravo! Bravo!
For, to be sure, what a fine drama it was - what a page torn from the
thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow with the pouting
lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair, uneasy, petulant, officious;
there was the bent female shadow, crooking a finger in the cup to feel how
deep the tea was, for she was blind; and there was the Roman-looking rolling
shadow in the big armchair - he who twisted his fingers so oddly and jerked
his head from side to side and swallowed down the tea in such vast gulps. Dr
Johnson, Mr Boswell, and Mrs Williams, - those were the shadows' names. So
absorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot to think how other ages would
have envied her, though it seems probable that on this occasion they would.
She was content to gaze and gaze. At length Mr Boswell rose. He saluted the
old woman with tart asperity. But with what humility did he not abase
himself before the great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full height and
rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent phrases
that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though she never heard a
word that any of the three shadows said as they sat there drinking tea.
At length she came home one night after one of these saunterings and
mounted to her bedroom. She took off her laced coat and stood there in shirt
and breeches looking out of the window. There was something stirring in the
air which forbade her to go to bed. A white haze lay over the town, for it
was a frosty night in midwinter and a magnificent vista lay all round her.
She could see St Paul's, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires
and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent
and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the
smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets and squares
of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and orderly
prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless
sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every roof, the
cowl of every chimney, was perceptible; even the cobbles in the streets
showed distinct one from another, and Orlando could not help comparing this
orderly scene with the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the
city of London in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the
city, if such one could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and
conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars
reflected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle
of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where the wine shop used to
stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man. She could
remember the cries of many a one wounded in such night brawlings, when she
was a little boy, held to the diamond-paned window in her nurse's arms.
Troops of ruffians, men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the
streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and
knives gleaming in their fists. On such a night as this the impermeable
tangle of the forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined, writhing
in contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on one of the hills
which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed to
rot or parch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence,
poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed
and stank - Orlando could remember even now the smell of them on a hot night
- in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. Now - she leant out
of her window - all was light, order, and serenity. There was the faint
rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night
watchman - "Just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning". No sooner had the
words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then
for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St
Paul's. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken
and spread with extraordinary speed. At the same time a light breeze rose
and by the time the sixth stroke of midnight had struck the whole of the
eastern sky was covered with an irregular moving darkness, though the sky to
the west and north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloud spread north. Height
upon height above the city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, with all its
lights shining, burnt more brilliantly than ever by contrast. With the
eighth stroke, some hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled over Piccadilly. They
seemed to mass themselves and to advance with extraordinary rapidity towards
the west end. As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge
blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of
midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the
city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth
century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.
The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of
the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or
rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering
gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived
beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of
England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no
sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so
girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its
beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took
the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under
this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense,
and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to
make its way into every house - damp, which is the most insidious of all
enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted
by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible,
ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the
stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest
of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our
hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour
of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.
Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat
down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the
brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards
were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which
he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house;
furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare.
Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the
crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a
drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and
glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces,
and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads,
and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little
dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home - which had become extremely
important - was completely altered.
Outside the house - it was another effect of the damp - ivy grew in
unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in
greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery,
a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children
were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the
drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown
and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp
struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds.
In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one
subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled
in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No
open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously
practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the
damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life
of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at
nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty;
for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus -
for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the
woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics,
and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now
encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our
witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who
could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his
memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one
morning - all about nothing - he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went for
a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery.
Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He seemed to
himself "to crush the mould of a million more under his feet". Thick smoke
exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He reflected that no
fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance.
Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers "came scrolloping
across the grass to his feet". Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck
till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves.
Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh
his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth
confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He
looked upwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great
frontispiece of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the
instigation of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in
year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or
elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed
upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide
above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the
undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was
copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head
in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.
While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well for
Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the
climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear
knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even she, at length, was
forced to acknowledge that times were changed. One afternoon in the early
part of the century she was driving through St James's Park in her old
panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not
often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with
strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was sufficiently
strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause
her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and flamingo clouds
made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves that she was
insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins dying in Ionian
seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck the earth, the sunbeam
seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy (for it
had something of a banquet-table air) - a conglomeration at any rate of the
most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a
vast mound where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a
vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow's weeds and bridal
veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes,
military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes,
cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps,
elephants, and mathematical instruments - the whole supported like a
gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in
flowing white; on the left by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and
sponge-bag trousers. The incongruity of the objects, the association of the
fully clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours
and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with the most profound
dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent,
so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it must be, the effect
of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the first breeze
that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past, as if it were
destined to endure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking back into the corner
of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that
garish erection. Only the noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust;
but there they would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north,
eternally. She looked back as her coach swept up Constitution Hill. Yes,
there it was, still beaming placidly in a light which - she pulled her watch
out of her fob - was, of course, the light of twelve o'clock mid-day. None
other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of
dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever. She was determined
not to look again. Already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly.
But what was more peculiar a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her
cheeks as she passed Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a
superior power down upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she
was wearing black breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached
her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot
thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.
Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of
her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which
she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew (who had
succeeded good old Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.
"So do we all, m'lady," said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. "The
walls is sweating," she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and
sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the
finger-prints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that many
windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely
tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals
and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were already wearing three or
four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was August.
"But is it true, m'lady," the good woman asked, hugging herself, while
the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, "that the Queen, bless her, is
wearing a what d'you call it, a?," the good woman hesitated and blushed.
"A crinoline," Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached
Blackfriars). Mrs Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down
her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were
they not all of them weak women - wearing crinolines the better to conceal
the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable
fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was
impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child - to bear fifteen or
twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman's life was spent,
after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made
obvious.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot," said Mrs Bartholomew, mopping up her
tears, "in the liberry."
And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins Orlando now sat
down.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot in the liberry" - Orlando minced out the
down South Audley Street. Doors were slammed and carriages drove off.
Orlando found herself near Mr Pope on the staircase. His lean and misshapen
frame was shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, triumph,
wit, and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his eyes. He looked
like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead. At the
same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon the luckless
Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago
leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more
bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger
for the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In
such moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their
throats with carving knives. Orlando would have done all willingly, but
there was a rasher thing still for her to do, and this she did. She invited
Mr Pope to come home with her.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate
the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St
Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is
Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we
survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions
is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the
earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The
earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles
scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking
that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life - (and so on
for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be
dropped).
On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by
the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars. That she was still
flesh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due to a fact to
which we drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see the more
we believe. Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at
that time very imperfectly lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement
upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the benighted traveller had to trust
to the stars or the red flame of some night watchman to save him from the
gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak woods where swine rootled in the
Tottenham Court Road. But even so it wanted much of our modern efficiency.
Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or so, but
between lay a considerable stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes
Orlando and Mr Pope would be in blackness; and then for about half a minute
again in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando.
As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most delicious
balm. "This is indeed a very great honour for a young woman to be driving
with Mr Pope," she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. "I am
the most blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me - indeed, I feel the knot
of his knee ribbons pressing against my thigh - is the greatest wit in Her
Majesty's dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me
with fury." Here came the lamp-post again. "What a foolish wretch I am!" she
thought. "There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never
cast a thought on me or on Mr Pope either. What's an `age', indeed? What are
`we'?" and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two
blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in
common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was
darkness. Her illusion revived. "How noble his brow is," she thought
(mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr Pope's forehead in the darkness).
"What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth - what a
wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter
their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the
human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness"; (here the coach gave
a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) "without genius we should
be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams," - thus she was
apostrophizing the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the
street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realized her mistake. Mr Pope had a
forehead no bigger than another man's. "Wretched man," she thought, "how you
have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you
plain, how ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and weakly, there is
nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise."
Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she
could see nothing but the poet's knees.
"But it is I that am a wretch," she reflected, once they were in
complete obscurity again, "for base as you may be, am I not still baser? It
is you who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten
the savage, make me clothes of the silkworm's wool, and carpets of the
sheep's. If I want to worship, have you not provided me with an image of
yourself and set it in the sky? Are not evidences of your care everywhere?
How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be
all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you."
Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now
Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides some
degraded creatures of her own sex, two wretched pigmies on a stark desert
land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The one was powerless to
help the other. Each had enough to do to look after itself. Looking Mr Pope
full in the face, "It is equally vain," she thought, "for you to think you
can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth
beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming
to us both."
All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of
birth and education use, about the Queen's temper and the Prime Minister's
gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket, along
the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her house in
Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had been
becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright - that is to say, the
sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a summer's
morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they
alighted, Mr Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando curtseying
Mr Pope to precede her into her mansion with the most scrupulous attention
to the rites of the Graces.
From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that
genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late
Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is
constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps
should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the
lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time;
save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash
six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that night) and then
lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is
therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are,
it is said, much like other people.
It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this
should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of
genius. Nor were they so different from the rest of us as one might have
supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They
liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored
grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore
plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr Swift had a fine malacca
cane. Mr Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered with his head.
A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their
jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that came to Orlando
higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such
trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but
the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits revived, and she took to
tearing up her cards of invitation to great parties; kept her evenings free;
began to look forward to Mr Pope's visit, to Mr Addison's, to Mr Swift's -
and so on and so on. If the reader will here refer to the "Rape of the
Lock", to the "Spectator", to "Gulliver's Travels", he will understand
precisely what these mysterious words may mean. Indeed, biographers and
critics might save themselves all their labours if readers would only take
this advice. For when we read:
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Pray'rs or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball
- we know as if we heard him how Mr Pope's tongue flickered like a
lizard's, how his eyes flashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved, how he
lied, how he suffered. In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every
experience of his life; every quality of his mind is written large in his
works; yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound
the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation
of the monstrous growth.
So, now that we have read a page or two of the "Rape of the Lock", we
know exactly why Orlando was so much amused and so much frightened and so
very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that afternoon.
Mrs Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr Addison waited on her
Ladyship. At this, Mr Pope got up with a wry smile, made his congee, and
limped off. In came Mr Addison. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the
following passage from the "Spectator":
"I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall
cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the peacock, parrot and swan
shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells,
and the rocks for gems, and every part of nature furnish out its share
towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of
it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I have been
speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it."
We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all, in the hollow, of our
hands. Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrinkle
in his stocking? Does not every ripple and curve of his wit lie exposed
before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his urbanity and the fact
that he would marry a Countess and die very respectably in the end? All is
clear. And when Mr Addison has said his say, there is a terrific rap at the
door, and Mr Swift, who had these arbitrary ways with him, walks in
unannounced. One moment, where is "Gulliver's Travels"? Here it is! Let us
read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
"I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tranquillity of Mind; I did not
find the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of a secret
or open Enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering or pimping, to
procure the Favour of any great Man or of his Minion. I wanted no Fence
against Fraud or Oppression; Here was neither Physician to destroy my Body,
nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No Informer to watch my Words, and Actions,
or forge Accusations against me for Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers,
Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, Housebreakers, Attorneys, Bawds,
Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers..."
But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and
yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He is so coarse
and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole world, yet talks
baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a madhouse.
So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the weather
was fine, she carried them down to the country with her, and feasted them
royally in the Round Parlour, which she had hung with their pictures all in
a circle, so that Mr Pope could not say that Mr Addison came before him, or
the other way about. They were very witty, too (but their wit is all in
their books) and taught her the most important part of style, which is the
natural run of the voice in speaking - a quality which none that has not
heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of
the air, and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away,
and is never to be recaptured, least of all by those who prick up their
ears, half a century later, and try. They taught her this, merely by the
cadence of their voices in speech; so that her style changed somewhat, and
she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose. And so
she lavished her wine on them and put bank-notes, which they took very
kindly, beneath their plates at dinner, and accepted their dedications, and
thought herself highly honoured by the exchange.
Thus time ran on, and Orlando could often be heard saying to herself
with an emphasis which might, perhaps, make the hearer a little suspicious,
"Upon my soul, what a life this is!" (For she was still in search of that
commodity.) But circumstances soon forced her to consider the matter more
narrowly.
One day she was pouring out tea for Mr Pope while, as anyone can tell
from the verses quoted above, he sat very bright-eyed, observant, and all
crumpled up in a chair by her side.
"Lord," she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, "how women in ages
to come will envy me! And yet" - she paused; for Mr Pope needed her
attention. And yet - let us finish her thought for her - when anybody says
"How future ages will envy me", it is safe to say that they are extremely
uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so
flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has done
his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for
another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of
lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal
among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the
Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest
of them scarcely have room to breathe. Then the high opinion poets have of
themselves; then the low one they have of others; then the enmities,
injuries, envies, and repartees in which they are constantly engaged; then
the volubility with which they impart them; then the rapacity with which
they demand sympathy for them; all this, one may whisper, lest the wits may
overhear us, makes pouring out tea a more precarious and, indeed, arduous
occupation than is generally allowed. Added to which (we whisper again lest
the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among
them; Lord Chesterfield whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to
secrecy, "Women are but children of a larger growth...A man of sense only
trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them", which, since
children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow
up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out
tea is a curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her
his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea,
this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her
understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her
through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as we
can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended
and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little, look out of
the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with a great
plop - as Orlando did now - into Mr Pope's tea. Never was any mortal so
ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr Pope. He turned
to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain
famous line in the "Characters of Women". Much polish was afterwards
bestowed on it, but even in the original it was striking enough. Orlando
received it with a curtsey. Mr Pope left her with a bow. Orlando, to cool
her cheeks, for really she felt as if the little man had struck her,
strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the garden. Soon the cool breezes
did their work. To her amazement she found that she was hugely relieved to
find herself alone. She watched the merry boatloads rowing up the river. No
doubt the sight put her in mind of one or two incidents in her past life.
She sat herself down in profound meditation beneath a fine willow tree.
There she sat till the stars were in the sky. Then she rose, turned, and
went into the house, where she sought her bedroom and locked the door. Now
she opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn
as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit
richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed,
but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure
of a noble Lord. She took a turn or two before the mirror to make sure that
her petticoats had not lost her the freedom of her legs, and then let
herself secretly out of doors.
It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the
light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a
light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the architecture
of Mr Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it
seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to
animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in
foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that
love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human
intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a
waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we
begin the search again.
She entered Leicester Square as she made these observations. The
buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day. The canopy of
the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to fill up the outline of roof and
chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly with one arm drooping by her side,
the other reposing in her lap, on a seat beneath a plane tree in the middle
of the square seemed the very figure of grace, simplicity, and desolation.
Orlando swept her hat off to her in the manner of a gallant paying his
addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place. The young woman raised her
head. It was of the most exquisite shapeliness. The young woman raised her
eyes. Orlando saw them to be of a lustre such as is sometimes seen on
teapots but rarely in a human face. Through this silver glaze the young
woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her) appealing, hoping,
trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted his arm. For - need we stress the
point? - she was of the tribe which nightly burnishes their wares, and sets
them in order on the common counter to wait the highest bidder. She led
Orlando to the room in Gerrard Street which was her lodging. To feel her
hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the
feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet,
having been so lately a woman herself, she suspected that the girl's
timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in
the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put
on to gratify her masculinity. Upstairs they went, and the pains which the
poor creature had been at to decorate her room and hide the fact that she
had no other deceived Orlando not a moment. The deception roused her scorn;
the truth roused her pity. One thing showing through the other bred the
oddest assortment of feeling, so that she did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girl called herself, unbuttoned her gloves;
carefully concealed the left-hand thumb, which wanted mending; then drew
behind a screen, where, perhaps, she rouged her cheeks, arranged her
clothes, fixed a new kerchief round her neck - all the time prattling as
women do, to amuse her lover, though Orlando could have sworn, from the tone
of her voice, that her thoughts were elsewhere. When all was ready, out she
came, prepared - but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the strangest
torment of anger, merriment, and pity she flung off all disguise and
admitted herself a woman.
At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laughter as might have been
heard across the way.
"Well, my dear," she said, when she had somewhat recovered, "I'm by no
means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter is" (and it
was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the same sex, her
manner changed and she dropped her plaintive, appealing ways), "the plain
Dunstable of the matter is, that I'm not in the mood for the society of the
other sex to-night. Indeed, I'm in the devil of a fix." Whereupon, drawing
up the fire and stirring a bowl of punch, she told Orlando the whole story
of her life. Since it is Orlando's life that engages us at present, we need
not relate the adventures of the other lady, but it is certain that Orlando
had never known the hours speed faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell
had not a particle of wit about her, and when the name of Mr Pope came up in
talk asked innocently if he were connected with the perruque maker of that
name in Jermyn Street. Yet, to Orlando, such is the charm of ease and the
seduction of beauty, this poor girl's talk, larded though it was with the
commonest expressions of the street corners, tasted like wine after the fine
phrases she had been used to, and she was forced to the conclusion that
there was something in the sneer of Mr Pope, in the condescension of Mr
Addison, and in the secret of Lord Chesterfield which took away her relish
for the society of wits, deeply though she must continue to respect their
works.
These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and Prue
Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they now elected
her a member. Each would tell the story of the adventures which had landed
her in her present way of life. Several were the natural daughters of earls
and one was a good deal nearer than she should have been to the King's
person. None was too wretched or too poor but to have some ring or
handkerchief in her pocket which stood her in lieu of pedigree. So they
would draw round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it her business to
furnish generously, and many were the fine tales they told and many the
amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied that when women get
together - but hist - they are always careful to see that the doors are shut
and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is - but hist
again - is that not a man's step on the stair? All they desire, we were
about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women
have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell's parlour; only
affectations. Without desires (she has served him and he is gone) their
conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. "It is well
known," says Mr S. W., "that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex,
women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do
not talk, they scratch." And since they cannot talk together and scratching
cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr T. R. has
proved it) "that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their
own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion", what can we suppose
that women do when they seek out each other's society?
As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible
man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from
any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed
great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen
to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.
But to give an exact and particular account of Orlando's life at this
time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and grope in the
ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about Gerrard Street
and Drury Lane at that time, we seem now to catch sight of her and then
again to lose it. The task is made still more difficult by the fact that she
found it convenient at this time to change frequently from one set of
clothes to another. Thus she often occurs in contemporary memoirs as "Lord"
So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed to him, and it
is he who is said to have written the poems that were really hers. She had,
it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex
changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of
clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold
harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its
experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she exchanged the
seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of
ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or two (for she
had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a
turn in the garden and clip the nut trees - for which knee-breeches were
convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited
a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and
so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a
lawyer's and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing, - for her
fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation than
they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she
would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and
walk the streets in search of adventure.
Returning from some of these junketings - of which there were many
stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the
King's ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled
with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady's husband followed
them - but of the truth or otherwise of these stories, we express no opinion
- returning from whatever her occupation may have been, she made a point
sometimes of passing beneath the windows of a coffee house, where she could
see the wits without being seen, and thus could fancy from their gestures
what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying without hearing a word
of them; which was perhaps an advantage; and once she stood half an hour
watching three shadows on the blind drinking tea together in a house in Bolt
Court.
Never was any play so absorbing. She wanted to cry out, Bravo! Bravo!
For, to be sure, what a fine drama it was - what a page torn from the
thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow with the pouting
lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair, uneasy, petulant, officious;
there was the bent female shadow, crooking a finger in the cup to feel how
deep the tea was, for she was blind; and there was the Roman-looking rolling
shadow in the big armchair - he who twisted his fingers so oddly and jerked
his head from side to side and swallowed down the tea in such vast gulps. Dr
Johnson, Mr Boswell, and Mrs Williams, - those were the shadows' names. So
absorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot to think how other ages would
have envied her, though it seems probable that on this occasion they would.
She was content to gaze and gaze. At length Mr Boswell rose. He saluted the
old woman with tart asperity. But with what humility did he not abase
himself before the great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full height and
rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent phrases
that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though she never heard a
word that any of the three shadows said as they sat there drinking tea.
At length she came home one night after one of these saunterings and
mounted to her bedroom. She took off her laced coat and stood there in shirt
and breeches looking out of the window. There was something stirring in the
air which forbade her to go to bed. A white haze lay over the town, for it
was a frosty night in midwinter and a magnificent vista lay all round her.
She could see St Paul's, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires
and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent
and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the
smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets and squares
of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and orderly
prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless
sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every roof, the
cowl of every chimney, was perceptible; even the cobbles in the streets
showed distinct one from another, and Orlando could not help comparing this
orderly scene with the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the
city of London in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the
city, if such one could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and
conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars
reflected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle
of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where the wine shop used to
stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man. She could
remember the cries of many a one wounded in such night brawlings, when she
was a little boy, held to the diamond-paned window in her nurse's arms.
Troops of ruffians, men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the
streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and
knives gleaming in their fists. On such a night as this the impermeable
tangle of the forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined, writhing
in contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on one of the hills
which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed to
rot or parch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence,
poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed
and stank - Orlando could remember even now the smell of them on a hot night
- in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. Now - she leant out
of her window - all was light, order, and serenity. There was the faint
rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night
watchman - "Just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning". No sooner had the
words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then
for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St
Paul's. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken
and spread with extraordinary speed. At the same time a light breeze rose
and by the time the sixth stroke of midnight had struck the whole of the
eastern sky was covered with an irregular moving darkness, though the sky to
the west and north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloud spread north. Height
upon height above the city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, with all its
lights shining, burnt more brilliantly than ever by contrast. With the
eighth stroke, some hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled over Piccadilly. They
seemed to mass themselves and to advance with extraordinary rapidity towards
the west end. As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge
blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of
midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the
city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth
century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.
The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of
the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or
rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering
gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived
beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of
England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no
sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so
girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its
beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took
the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under
this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense,
and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to
make its way into every house - damp, which is the most insidious of all
enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted
by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible,
ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the
stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest
of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our
hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour
of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.
Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat
down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the
brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards
were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which
he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house;
furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare.
Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the
crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a
drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and
glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces,
and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads,
and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little
dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home - which had become extremely
important - was completely altered.
Outside the house - it was another effect of the damp - ivy grew in
unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in
greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery,
a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children
were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the
drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown
and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp
struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds.
In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one
subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled
in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No
open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously
practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the
damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life
of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at
nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty;
for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus -
for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the
woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics,
and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now
encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our
witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who
could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his
memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one
morning - all about nothing - he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went for
a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery.
Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He seemed to
himself "to crush the mould of a million more under his feet". Thick smoke
exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He reflected that no
fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance.
Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers "came scrolloping
across the grass to his feet". Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck
till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves.
Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh
his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth
confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He
looked upwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great
frontispiece of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the
instigation of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in
year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or
elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed
upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide
above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the
undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was
copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head
in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.
While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well for
Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the
climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear
knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even she, at length, was
forced to acknowledge that times were changed. One afternoon in the early
part of the century she was driving through St James's Park in her old
panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not
often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with
strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was sufficiently
strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause
her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and flamingo clouds
made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves that she was
insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins dying in Ionian
seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck the earth, the sunbeam
seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy (for it
had something of a banquet-table air) - a conglomeration at any rate of the
most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a
vast mound where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a
vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow's weeds and bridal
veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes,
military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes,
cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps,
elephants, and mathematical instruments - the whole supported like a
gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in
flowing white; on the left by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and
sponge-bag trousers. The incongruity of the objects, the association of the
fully clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours
and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with the most profound
dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent,
so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it must be, the effect
of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the first breeze
that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past, as if it were
destined to endure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking back into the corner
of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that
garish erection. Only the noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust;
but there they would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north,
eternally. She looked back as her coach swept up Constitution Hill. Yes,
there it was, still beaming placidly in a light which - she pulled her watch
out of her fob - was, of course, the light of twelve o'clock mid-day. None
other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of
dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever. She was determined
not to look again. Already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly.
But what was more peculiar a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her
cheeks as she passed Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a
superior power down upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she
was wearing black breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached
her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot
thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.
Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of
her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which
she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew (who had
succeeded good old Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.
"So do we all, m'lady," said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. "The
walls is sweating," she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and
sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the
finger-prints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that many
windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely
tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals
and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were already wearing three or
four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was August.
"But is it true, m'lady," the good woman asked, hugging herself, while
the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, "that the Queen, bless her, is
wearing a what d'you call it, a?," the good woman hesitated and blushed.
"A crinoline," Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached
Blackfriars). Mrs Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down
her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were
they not all of them weak women - wearing crinolines the better to conceal
the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable
fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was
impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child - to bear fifteen or
twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman's life was spent,
after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made
obvious.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot," said Mrs Bartholomew, mopping up her
tears, "in the liberry."
And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins Orlando now sat
down.
"The muffins is keepin' 'ot in the liberry" - Orlando minced out the