To Vita Sakville-West
The cover of the first edition of the book with a portrait of Vita
Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so
illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write
without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne,
Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,
to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as
illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am
specially indebted to Mr C.P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of
real property this book could never have been written. Mr Sydney Turner's
wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders.
I have had the advantage - how great I alone can estimate - of Mr Arthur
Waley's knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs J.M. Keynes) has been at
hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr
Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess.
I have, I hope, profited in another department by the singularly
penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr Julian Bell. Miss M.K.
Snowdon's indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and
Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have
helped me in ways too various to specify. I must content myself with naming
Mr Angus Davidson; Mrs Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose
knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr Francis Birrell;
my brother, Dr Adrian Stephen; Mr F.L. Lucas; Mr and Mrs Desmond Maccarthy;
that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr Clive Bell; Mr G.H.
Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr J.M. Keynes; Mr Hugh Walpole;
Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville-West; Mr and Mrs St. John
Hutchinson; Mr Duncan Grant; Mr and Mrs Stephen Tomlin; Mr and Lady Ottoline
Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs Sydney Woolf; Mr Osbert Sitwell; Madame
Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr J.T. Sheppard;
Mr and Mrs T.S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr
Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr Raymond
Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil;
Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr E.M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my
sister, Vanessa Bell - but the list threatens to grow too long and is
already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the
pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which
the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking
the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted
courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she
could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has
invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to
which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally,
I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America,
who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany,
the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine
and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the
time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of
a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football,
and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand
or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando's father,
or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan
who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now
it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing
through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields,
and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many
colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters.
So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young
to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother
and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and
plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that
the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it
with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him
through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the
house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped
in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and
summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His
fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the
northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of
darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made
by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the
window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic
leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it
was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing. Thus,
those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might
observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set
shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light,
Orlando's face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun
itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the
mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such
a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or
poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must
go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that
is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely
for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the
down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The
lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an
exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its
short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely
to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end
without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born
devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the
window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that
the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like
the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which
were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we
rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a
thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to
ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady
in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind
her; sights exalted him - the birds and the trees; and made him in love with
death - the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral
stairway into his brain - which was a roomy one - all these sights, and the
garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot
and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer
detests. But to continue - Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the
table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day
of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled "Aethelbert: A
Tragedy in Five Acts", and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.
Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent,
evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of
his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid
plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a
word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a
fluency and sweetness which, considering his age - he was not yet seventeen
- and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run,
were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a halt. He was
describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order
to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more
audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush
growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more.
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and
letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear
each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme
and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out
of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting,
once think "how many more suns shall I see set?", etc. etc. (the thought is
too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one's
cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one's foot on a painted chest as
one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.
He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener,
coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let
himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He skirted all stables,
kennels, breweries, carpenters' shops, washhouses, places where they make
tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins - for the house
was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts - and gained the
ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a
kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer
should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated
with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally
loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and
ever alone.
So, after a long silence, "I am alone," he breathed at last, opening
his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly
uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to
a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that
nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty or
perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see the
English Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and
pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas
with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon firing; and
forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower;
and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of Orlando's
father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls. To the east there
were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and perhaps on the very
sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and
serrated edges of Snowdon herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a
moment Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognizing. That was his father's
house; that his uncle's. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the
trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer,
the fox, the badger, and the butterfly.
He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his
movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak
tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's
spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or,
for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was
riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as
it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his
floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed
filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he
walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the
flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer
stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground;
and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks
wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies
shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's
evening were woven web-like about his body.
After an hour or so - the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds had
turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black - a
trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill sound came from the
valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a spot compact and mapped out;
a maze; a town, yet girt about with walls; it came from the heart of his own
great house in the valley, which, dark before, even as he looked and the
single trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itself with other shriller
sounds, lost its darkness and became pierced with lights. Some were small
hurrying lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to answer summonses;
others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt in empty
banqueting-halls made ready to receive guests who had not come; and others
dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of
serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting
with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot.
Coaches turned and wheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed their plumes. The
Queen had come.
Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at a
wicket gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his room. He
tossed his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to the other. He
dipped his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his finger nails. With no
more than six inches of looking-glass and a pair of old candles to help him,
he had thrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and
shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias in less than ten
minutes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was flushed. He was excited.
But he was terribly late.
By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast
congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres distant
on the other side of the house. But half-way there, in the back quarters
where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs Stewkley's
sitting-room stood open - she was gone, doubtless, with all her keys to wait
upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the servant's dinner table with a
tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, shabby man,
whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He
held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of
rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered
shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some
green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did not see Orlando. For all
his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry?
"Tell me," he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had
the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how
speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the
depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his
pen in his fingers, this way and that way; and gazed and mused; and then,
very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. Whereupon Orlando,
overcome with shyness, darted off and reached the banqueting-hall only just
in time to sink upon his knees and, hanging his head in confusion, to offer
a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself.
Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed hands
in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long
fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed,
sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a hand that had only to raise itself for
a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like
a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was yet caparisoned
in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though
perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though strung together by
a thousand fears; and the Queen's eyes were light yellow. All this he felt
as the great rings flashed in the water and then something pressed his hair
- which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing nothing more likely to be of use
to a historian. And in truth, his mind was such a welter of opposites - of
the night and the blazing candles, of the shabby poet and the great Queen,
of silent fields and the clatter of serving men - that he could see nothing;
or only a hand.
By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a head. But
if it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the
attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and terror,
surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of state by a
lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted,
wide open. The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so
innocently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a young
nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold;
and loyalty and manly charm - all qualities which the old woman loved the
more the more they failed her. For she was growing old and worn and bent
before her time. The sound of cannon was always in her ears. She saw always
the glistening poison drop and the long stiletto. As she sat at table she
listened; she heard the guns in the Channel; she dreaded - was that a curse,
was that a whisper? Innocence, simplicity, were all the more dear to her for
the dark background she set them against. And it was that same night, so
tradition has it, when Orlando was sound asleep, that she made over
formally, putting her hand and seal finally to the parchment, the gift of
the great monastic house that had been the Archbishop's and then the King's
to Orlando's father.
Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a queen
without knowing it. And perhaps, for women's hearts are intricate, it was
his ignorance and the start he gave when her lips touched him that kept the
memory of her young cousin (for they had blood in common) green in her mind.
At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not passed, and
Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen
histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend
the Queen at Whitehall.
"Here," she said, watching him advance down the long gallery towards
her, "comes my innocent!" (There was a serenity about him always which had
the look of innocence when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.)
"Come!" she said. She was sitting bolt upright beside the fire. And she
held him a foot's pace from her and looked him up and down. Was she matching
her speculations the other night with the truth now visible? Did she find
her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips, hands - she ran them
over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but when she saw his legs she
laughed out loud. He was the very image of a noble gentleman. But inwardly?
She flashed her yellow hawk's eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul.
The young man withstood her gaze blushing only a damask rose as became him.
Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth - she read him like a page.
Instantly she plucked a ring from her finger (the joint was swollen rather)
and as she fitted it to his, named him her Treasurer and Steward; next hung
about him chains of office; and bidding him bend his knee, tied round it at
the slenderest part the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was
denied him. When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent
him to Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about to sail
for the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she bear to think
of that tender flesh torn and that curly head rolled in the dust? She kept
him with her. At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the
Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the
huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the
cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him
bury his face in that astonishing composition - she had not changed her
dress for a month - which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his
boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother's furs were
stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. "This," she breathed, "is
my victory!" - even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.
For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw
one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid
ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be
the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which she
leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange
domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in
her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it, never kept
her warm.
Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was
lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the
ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were
barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies
always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murderers always
open, a boy - could it be Orlando - kissing a girl? who in the Devil's name
was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck
violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was
lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and
groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man's treachery.
It was Orlando's fault perhaps; yet, after all, are we to blame
Orlando? The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their
poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was
different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was,
we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was
divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder
and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular
half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell
vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating
this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully
how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is
over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for using the artifices
of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks
and roses, that was not their way. The withered intricacies and ambiguities
of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and
went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers'. Plucked they
must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all. Thus,
if Orlando followed the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age
itself, and plucked his flower in the window-seat even with the snow on the
ground and the Queen vigilant in the corridor we can scarcely bring
ourselves to blame him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature
bade him do. As for the girl, we know no more than Queen Elizabeth herself
did what her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana, for
he made rhymes to them all in turn; equally, she may have been a court lady,
or some serving maid. For Orlando's taste was broad; he was no lover of
garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination
for him.
Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait
in him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain grandmother
of his had worn a smock and carried milk-pails. Some grains of the Kentish
or Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, fine fluid which came to him from
Normandy. He held that the mixture of brown earth and blue blood was a good
one. Certain it is that he had always a liking for low company, especially
for that of lettered people whose wits so often keep them under, as if there
were the sympathy of blood between them. At this season of his life, when
his head brimmed with rhymes and he never went to bed without striking off
some conceit, the cheek of an innkeeper's daughter seemed fresher and the
wit of a gamekeeper's niece seemed quicker than those of the ladies at
Court. Hence, he began going frequently to Wapping Old Stairs and the beer
gardens at night, wrapped in a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and
the garter at his knee. There, with a mug before him, among the sanded
alleys and bowling greens and all the simple architecture of such places, he
listened to sailors' stories of hardship and horror and cruelty on the
Spanish main; how some had lost their toes, others their noses - for the
spoken story was never so rounded or so finely coloured as the written.
Especially he loved to hear them volley forth their songs of the Azores,
while the parakeets, which they had brought from those parts, pecked at the
rings in their ears, tapped with their hard acquisitive beaks at the rubies
on their fingers, and swore as vilely as their masters. The women were
scarcely less bold in their speech and less free in their manner than the
birds. They perched on his knee, flung their arms round his neck and,
guessing that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak,
were quite as eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself.
Nor was opportunity lacking. The river was astir early and late with
barges, wherries, and craft of all description. Every day sailed to sea some
fine ship bound for the Indies; now and again another blackened and ragged
with hairy men on board crept painfully to anchor. No one missed a boy or
girl if they dallied a little on the water after sunset; or raised an
eyebrow if gossip had seen them sleeping soundly among the treasure sacks
safe in each other's arms. Such indeed was the adventure that befell
Orlando, Sukey, and the Earl of Cumberland. The day was hot; their loves had
been active; they had fallen asleep among the rubies. Late that night the
Earl, whose fortunes were much bound up in the Spanish ventures, came to
check the booty alone with a lantern. He flashed the light on a barrel. He
started back with an oath. Twined about the cask two spirits lay sleeping.
Superstitious by nature, and his conscience laden with many a crime, the
Earl took the couple - they were wrapped in a red cloak, and Sukey's bosom
was almost as white as the eternal snows of Orlando's poetry - for a phantom
sprung from the graves of drowned sailors to upbraid him. He crossed
himself. He vowed repentance. The row of alms houses still standing in the
Sheen Road is the visible fruit of that moment's panic. Twelve poor old
women of the parish today drink tea and tonight bless his Lordship for a
roof above their heads; so that illicit love in a treasure ship - but we
omit the moral.
Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of this
way of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, but of the
primitive manner of the people. For it has to be remembered that crime and
poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for
us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief
that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read
a virtue; no fancy that what we call "life" and "reality" are somehow
connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed, any equivalent for
these two words at all. It was not to seek "life" that Orlando went among
them; not in quest of "reality" that he left them. But when he had heard a
score of times how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey her honour - and they
told the stories admirably, it must be admitted - he began to be a little
weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be cut off in one way and
maidenhood lost in another - or so it seemed to him - whereas the arts and
the sciences had a diversity about them which stirred his curiosity
profoundly. So, always keeping them in happy memory, he left off frequenting
the beer gardens and the skittle alleys, hung his grey cloak in his
wardrobe, let his star shine at his neck and his garter twinkle at his knee,
and appeared once more at the Court of King James. He was young, he was
rich, he was handsome. No one could have been received with greater
acclamation than he was.
It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their
favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in
marriage - Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne - so he called them in his sonnets.
To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-mannered gentle lady
enough; indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months and a half;
but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood. A hare
brought up roasted at her father's table turned her faint. She was much
under the influence of the Priests too, and stinted her underlinen in order
to give to the poor. She took it on her to reform Orlando of his sins, which
sickened him, so that he drew back from the marriage, and did not much
regret it when she died soon after of the small-pox.
Favilla, who comes next, was of a different sort altogether. She was
the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer assiduity and
the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court, where her address in
horsemanship, her fine instep, and her grace in dancing won the admiration
of all. Once, however, she was so ill-advised as to whip a spaniel that had
torn one of her silk stockings (and it must be said in justice that Favilla
had few stockings and those for the most part of drugget) within an inch of
its life beneath Orlando's window. Orlando, who was a passionate lover of
animals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked, and the two front turned
inward, which, he said, is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel disposition
in women, and so broke the engagement that very night for ever.
The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his flames. She
was by birth one of the Irish Desmonds and had therefore a family tree of
her own as old and deeply rooted as Orlando's itself. She was fair, florid,
and a trifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, had a perfect set of teeth
in the upper jaw, though those on the lower were slightly discoloured. She
was never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee; fed them with white
bread from her own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals; and was never
dressed before mid-day owing to the extreme care she took of her person. In
short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Orlando,
and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both sides were busy with
covenants, jointures, settlements, messuages, tenements, and whatever is
needed before one great fortune can mate with another when, with the
suddenness and severity that then marked the English climate, came the Great
Frost.
The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever
visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the
ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her
usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder
and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at
the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous.
Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon
sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The
fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little
bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his
hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone
raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within
a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of
petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great
increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for
there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had
been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give
little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics
blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks,
scratching-posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking
troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part,
to this day.
But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the
trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the
utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the
opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with the citizens.
He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and
more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and
given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes,
alleys, drinking booths, etc. at his expense. For himself and the courtiers,
he reserved a certain space immediately opposite the Palace gates; which,
railed off from the public only by a silken rope, became at once the centre
of the most brilliant society in England. Great statesmen, in their beards
and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal
Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the
Turk in striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals
strode up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon
and telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers
dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when
the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless
in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood,
lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire.
But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice
which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So
clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of
several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay
motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely
of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the
philosophers. Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of
some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the
bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The
old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side,
sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for
all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain
blueness about the lips hinted the truth. 'Twas a sight King James specially
liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with
him. In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene
by day. But it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the
frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and
stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of
flute and trumpet the courtiers danced.
Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe
and lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absentminded. He much preferred the
plain dances of his own country, which he danced as a child to these
fantastic foreign measures. He had indeed just brought his feet together
about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some
such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the
Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose
tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled
him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was
about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in
oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur.
But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which
issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and
extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a
pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space
of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen
her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the
narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were
simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things
he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were
at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons
of things is out of the question.)...A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow
- so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be - no
woman could skate with such speed and vigour - swept almost on tiptoe past
him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of
his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater
came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever had a
mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as
if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a
stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was
shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came
to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando
stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through
the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arm with the
beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small
white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if
he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.
The stranger's name, he found, was the Princess Marousha Stanilovska
Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she had come in the train of the
Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father, to
attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their
great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent; drinking some black
liquid which they spat out now and then upon the ice. None spoke English,
and French with which some at least were familiar was then little spoken at
the English Court.
It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became
acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table spread
under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. The Princess was
placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis Vere and the other the
young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see the predicament she soon had
them in, for though both were fine lads in their way, the babe unborn had as
much knowledge of the French tongue as they had. When at the beginning of
dinner the Princess turned to the Earl and said, with a grace which ravished
his heart, "Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d'un gentilhomme qui vous
," or "La beautne helped
her largely to horse-radish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made
him beg for a marrow bone. At this the Princess could no longer contain her
laughter, and Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars' heads and stuffed
peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in
wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult
of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone.
Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten
cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had
meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it
tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through
with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted;
the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the
birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood
woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole
or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a
crevice; he stretched his hand - in fact he was rattling off one of his most
impassioned sonnets when the Princess addressed him, "Would you have the
goodness to pass the salt?"
He blushed deeply.
"With all the pleasure in the world, Madame," he replied, speaking
French with a perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, he spoke the tongue as
his own; his mother's maid had taught him. Yet perhaps it would have been
better for him had he never learnt that tongue; never answered that voice;
never followed the light of those eyes...
The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat
beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the nauseating mixture
they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the
men in England? Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her hair
rigged up like a Maypole (comme une grande perche mal fagoth archness and drollery that he
could not help but laugh; and he saw from the blank faces of the company
that nobody understood a word, he answered her as freely as she asked him,
speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of
the Court.
Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more attention than
mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her side, and their
conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was carried on with such
animation, provoked such blushes and laughter, that the dullest could guess
the subject. Moreover, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary.
Nobody had ever seen him so animated. In one night he had thrown off his
boyish clumsiness; he was changed from a sulky stripling, who could not
enter a ladies' room without sweeping half the ornaments from the table, to
a nobleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. To see him hand the Muscovite
(as she was called) to her sledge, or offer her his hand for the dance, or
catch the spotted kerchief which she had let drop, or discharge any other of
those manifold duties which the supreme lady exacts and the lover hastens to
anticipate was a sight to kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make the quick
pulse of youth beat faster. Yet over it all hung a cloud. The old men
shrugged their shoulders. The young tittered between their fingers. All knew