into the shop. Shade and scent enveloped her. The present fell from her like
drops of scalding water. Light swayed up and down like thin stuffs puffed
out by a summer breeze. She took a list from her bag and began reading in a
curious stiff voice at first, as if she were holding the words - boy's
boots, bath salts, sardines - under a tap of many-coloured water. She
watched them change as the light fell on them. Bath and boots became blunt,
obtuse; sardines serrated itself like a saw. So she stood in the
ground-floor department of Messrs Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way
and that; snuffed this smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then she
got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was
shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose,
is magic. In the eighteenth century we knew how everything was done; but
here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying
- but how it's done I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic
returns. Now the lift gave a little jerk as it stopped at the first floor;
and she had a vision of innumerable coloured stuffs flaunting in a breeze
from which came distinct, strange smells; and each time the lift stopped and
flung its doors open, there was another slice of the world displayed with
all the smells of that world clinging to it. She was reminded of the river
off Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where the treasure ships and the
merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and curiously they had smelt! How
well she remembered the feel of rough rubies running through her fingers
when she dabbled them in a treasure sack! And then lying with Sukey - or
whatever her name was - and having Cumberland's lantern flashed on them! The
Cumberlands had a house in Portland Place now and she had lunched with them
the other day and ventured a little joke with the old man about alms-houses
in the Sheen Road. He had winked. But here as the lift could go no higher,
she must get out - Heaven knows into what "department" as they called it.
She stood still to consult her shopping list, but was blessed if she could
see, as the list bade her, bath salts, or boy's boots anywhere about. And
indeed, she was about to descend again, without buying anything, but was
saved from that outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her
list; which happened to be "sheets for a double bed".
"Sheets for a double bed," she said to a man at a counter and, by a
dispensation of Providence, it was sheets that the man at that particular
counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch, no, Grimsditch was dead;
Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was dead; Louise then - Louise had come to her
in a great taking the other day, for she had found a hole in the bottom of
the sheet in the royal bed. Many kings and queens had slept there -
Elizabeth; James; Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the sheet had
a hole in it. But Louise was positive she knew who had done it. It was the
Prince Consort.
"Sale bosch!" she said (for there had been another war; this time
against the Germans).
"Sheets for a double bed," Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double bed
with a silver counterpane in a room fitted in a taste which she now thought
perhaps a little vulgar - all in silver; but she had furnished it when she
had a passion for that metal. While the man went to get sheets for a double
bed, she took out a little looking-glass and a powder puff. Women were not
nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering herself with the
greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself first turned woman and
lay on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". She gave her nose the right tint
deliberately. She never touched her cheeks. Honestly, though she was now
thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. She looked just as pouting, as
sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha
had said) as she had done that day on the ice, when the Thames was frozen
and they had gone skating -
"The best Irish linen, Ma'am," said the shopman, spreading the sheets
on the counter, - and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here, as
she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between the
departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-goods department,
a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles, and the scent
curved like a shell round a figure - was it a boy's or was it a girl's -
young, slender, seductive - a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in Russian
trousers; but faithless, faithless!
"Faithless!" cried Orlando (the man had gone) and all the shop seemed
to pitch and toss with yellow water and far off she saw the masts of the
Russian ship standing out to sea, and then, miraculously (perhaps the door
opened again) the conch which the scent had made became a platform, a dais,
off which stepped a fat, furred woman, marvellously well preserved,
seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke's mistress; she who, leaning over the
banks of the Volga, eating sandwiches, had watched men drown; and began
walking down the shop towards her.
"Oh Sasha!" Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should have
come to this; she had grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowed her head
over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in fur, and a girl in
Russian trousers, with all these smells of wax candles, white flowers, and
old ships that it brought with it might pass behind her back unseen.
"Any napkins, towels, dusters today, Ma'am?" the shopman persisted. And
it is enormously to the credit of the shopping list, which Orlando now
consulted, that she was able to reply with every appearance of composure,
that there was only one thing in the world she wanted and that was bath
salts; which was in another department.
But descending in the lift again - so insidious is the repetition of
any scene - she was again sunk far beneath the present moment; and thought
when the lift bumped on the ground, that she heard a pot broken against a
river bank. As for finding the right department, whatever it might be, she
stood engrossed among the handbags, deaf to the suggestions of all the
polite, black, combed, sprightly shop assistants, who descending as they did
equally and some of them, perhaps, as proudly, even from such depths of the
past as she did, chose to let down the impervious screen of the present so
that today they appeared shop assistants in Marshall & Snelgrove's
merely. Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great glass doors she
could see the traffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to pile itself upon
omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice blocks had pitched and
tossed that day on the Thames. An old nobleman in furred slippers had sat
astride one of them. There he went - she could see him now - calling down
maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood.
"Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself;
"this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer
one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in
the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers.
When I step out of doors - as I do now," here she stepped on to the pavement
of Oxford Street, "what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells.
I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?" Her eyes filled with tears.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will,
perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her
motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And
indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the
art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to
synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously
in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime
in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely
forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely
the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the
rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet
born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years
old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's
life, whatever the "Dictionary of National Biography" may say, is always a
matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business - this time-keeping;
nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it
may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose
her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or
the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the
present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently
assaulted.
"Confound it all!" she cried, for it is a great shock to the nervous
system, hearing a clock strike - so much so that for some time now there is
nothing to be said of her save that she frowned slightly, changed her gears
admirably, and cried out, as before, "Look where you're going!" "Don't you
know your own mind?" "Why didn't you say so then?" while the motor-car shot,
swung, squeezed, and slid, for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street,
down Haymarket, down Northumberland Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to the
left, straight on, to the right, straight on again...
The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October
1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags.
Children ran out. There were sales at drapers' shops. Streets widened and
narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a
funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written "Ra - Un",
but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost
had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin - that was over a porch. A woman looked
out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn
and Applebed, Undert - . Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to
finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other
across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and
mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the
process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up
small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself
that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have
existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given her over for a
person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at last, one green
screen was held out on the right, against which the little bits of paper
fell more slowly; and then another was held out on the left so that one
could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and
then green screens were held continuously on either side, so that her mind
regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage,
a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.
When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette,
and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as
if the person she wanted might not be there, "Orlando?" For if there are (at
a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how
many different people are there not - Heaven help us - all having lodgment
at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and
fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to
call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one's name) meaning by
that, Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not
altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said
(being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando?
still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built
up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have
attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their
own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name)
so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green
curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it
a glass of wine - and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own
experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him
- and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.
So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called "Orlando?" with a note of
interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.
"All right then," Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on
these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to
call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a
biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven
selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing then, only
those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy
who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who
sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the
bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in
love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the
Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the woman to come to
her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the
Patroness of Letters; the woman who called Mar (meaning hot baths and
evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop
(meaning the death we die daily) or all three together - which meant more
things than we have space to write out - all were different and she may have
called upon any one of them.
Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are now in the region of
"perhaps" and "appears") was that the one she needed most kept aloof, for
she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove -
there was a new one at every corner - as happens when, for some
unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has
the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some
people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we
have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key
self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking
this self as the reader can judge from overhearing her talk as she drove
(and if it is rambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes
unintelligible, it is the reader's fault for listening to a lady talking to
herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding in brackets which
self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may well be wrong).
"What then? Who then?" she said. "Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman.
Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? The garter in the
hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious,
vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don't care a damn if I am.
Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don't count (here a new self
came in). Lying in bed of a morning listening to the pigeons on fine linen;
silver dishes; wine; maids; footmen. Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many things for
nothing. Hence my books (here she mentioned fifty classical titles; which
represented, so we think, the early romantic works that she tore up).
Facile, glib, romantic. But (here another self came in) a duffer, a fumbler.
More clumsy I couldn't be. And - and - (here she hesitated for a word and if
we suggest "Love" we may be wrong, but certainly she laughed and blushed and
then cried out ) - A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles
on the ceiling! (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was
sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over
crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was
passing a clump) growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a
tumbledown barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came
trotting across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night. But
people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.)
I don't know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here she turned
into the High Street of her native town, which was crowded, for it was
market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and old women with hens in
baskets.) I like peasants. I understand crops. But (here another self came
skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a lighthouse). Fame!
(She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening
papers (here she alluded to the "Oak Tree" and "The Burdett Coutts" Memorial
Prize which she had won; and we must snatch space to remark how discomposing
it is for her biographer that this culmination to which the whole book
moved, this peroration with which the book was to end, should be dashed from
us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a
woman, everything is out of place - culminations and perorations; the accent
never falls where it does with a man). Fame! she repeated. A poet - a
charlatan; both every morning as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to
meet; to meet, to dine; fame - fame! (She had here to slow down to pass
through the crowd of market people. But no one noticed her. A porpoise in a
fishmonger's shop attracted far more attention than a lady who had won a
prize and might, had she chosen, have worn three coronets one on top of
another on her brow.) Driving very slowly she now hummed as if it were part
of an old song, "With my guineas I'll buy flowering trees, flowering trees,
flowering trees and walk among my flowering trees and tell my sons what fame
is". So she hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and there like a
barbaric necklace of heavy beads. "And walk among my flowering trees," she
sang, accenting the words strongly, "and see the moon rise slow, the waggons
go..." Here she stopped short and looked ahead of her intently at the bonnet
of the car in profound meditation.
"He sat at Twitchett's table," she mused, "with a dirty ruff on...Was
it old Mr Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh-p-re? (for when we
speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole.) She
gazed for ten minutes ahead of her, letting the car come almost to a
standstill.
"Haunted!" she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. "Haunted! ever
since I was a child. There flies the wild goose. It flies past the window
out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the steering-wheel tighter) and
stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. I've seen it, here - there
- there - England, Persia, Italy. Always it flies fast out to sea and always
I fling after it words like nets (here she flung her hand out) which shrivel
as I've seen nets shrivel drawn on deck with only sea-weed in them; and
sometimes there's an inch of silver - six words - in the bottom of the net.
But never the great fish who lives in the coral groves." Here she bent her
head, pondering deeply.
And it was at this moment, when she had ceased to call "Orlando" and
was deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom she had called
came of its own accord; as was proved by the change that now came over her
(she had passed through the lodge gates and was entering the park).
The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition
makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow
becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is
contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and
become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or
wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable
that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two
thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but
when communication is established they fall silent.
Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curving drive between the elms
and oaks through the falling turf of the park whose fall was so gentle that
had it been water it would have spread the beach with a smooth green tide.
Planted here and in solemn groups were beech trees and oak trees. The deer
stepped among them, one white as snow, another with its head on one side,
for some wire netting had caught in its horns. All this, the trees, deer,
and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if her mind had
become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely. Next
minute she drew up in the courtyard where, for so many hundred years she had
come, on horseback or in coach and six, with men riding before or coming
after; where plumes had tossed, torches flashed, and the same flowering
trees that let their leaves drop now had shaken their blossoms. Now she was
alone. The autumn leaves were falling. The porter opened the great gates.
"Morning, James," she said, "there're some things in the car. Will you bring
'em in?" words of no beauty, interest, or significance themselves, it will
be conceded, but now so plumped out with meaning that they fell like ripe
nuts from a tree, and proved that when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary
is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true
indeed of every movement and action now, usual though they were; so that to
see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather
jacket, which she did in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with
the beauty of movement as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art.
Then she strode into the dining-room where her old friends Dryden, Pope,
Swift, Addison regarded her demurely at first as who should say Here's the
prize winner! but when they reflected that two hundred guineas was in
question, they nodded their heads approvingly. Two hundred guineas, they
seemed to say; two hundred guineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herself
a slice of bread and ham, clapped the two together and began to eat,
striding up and down the room, thus shedding her company habits in a second,
without thinking. After five or six such turns, she tossed off a glass of
red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her hand, strode
down the long corridor and through a dozen drawing-rooms and so began a
perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and spaniels as
chose to follow her.
This, too, was all in the day's routine. As soon would she come home
and leave her own grandmother without a kiss as come back and leave the
house unvisited. She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in;
stirred, opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence. She
fancied, too, that, hundreds and thousands of times as she had seen them,
they never looked the same twice, as if so long a life as theirs had stored
in them a myriad moods which changed with winter and summer, bright weather
and dark, and her own fortunes and the people's characters who visited them.
Polite, they always were to strangers, but a little weary: with her, they
were entirely open and at their ease. Why not indeed? They had known each
other for close on four centuries now. They had nothing to conceal. She knew
their sorrows and joys. She knew what age each part of them was and its
little secrets - a hidden drawer, a concealed cupboard, or some deficiency
perhaps, such as a part made up, or added later. They, too, knew her in all
her moods and changes. She had hidden nothing from them; had come to them as
boy and woman, crying and dancing, brooding and gay. In this window-seat,
she had written her first verses; in that chapel, she had been married. And
she would be buried here, she reflected, kneeling on the window-sill in the
long gallery and sipping her Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it,
the body of the heraldic leopard would be making yellow pools on the floor
the day they lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in no
immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever
with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the room - she
had strolled into the Ambassador's bedroom - shone like a shell that has
lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and
painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and
sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty. No
Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of
the house still beat. Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so
that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry
rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move
it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. The heart still beat, she
thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail indomitable heart
of the immense building.
Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery whose
floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of chairs with all
their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out for
Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who never
came. The sight made her gloomy. She unhooked the rope that fenced them off.
She sat on the Queen's chair; she opened a manuscript book lying on Lady
Betty's table; she stirred her fingers in the aged rose leaves; she brushed
her short hair with King James' silver brushes: she bounced up and down upon
his bed (but no King would ever sleep there again, for all Louise's new
sheets) and pressed her cheek against the worn silver counterpane that lay
upon it. But everywhere were little lavender bags to keep the moth out and
printed notices, "Please do not touch", which, though she had put them there
herself, seemed to rebuke her. The house was no longer hers entirely, she
sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past the touch and control
of the living. Never would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was
in the bedroom that had been old Nick Greene's), or holes burnt in the
carpet. Never two hundred servants come running and brawling down the
corridors with warming pans and great branches for the great fireplaces.
Never would ale be brewed and candles made and saddles fashioned and stone
shaped in the workshops outside the house. Hammers and mallets were silent
now. Chairs and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in
glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.
So she sat at the end of the gallery with her dogs couched round her,
in Queen Elizabeth's hard armchair. The gallery stretched far away to a
point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into the
past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking;
the great men she had known; Dryden, Swift, and Pope; and statesmen in
colloquy; and lovers dallying in the window-seats; and people eating and
drinking at the long tables; and the wood smoke curling round their heads
and making them sneeze and cough. Still further down, she saw sets of
splendid dancers formed for the quadrille. A fluty, frail, but nevertheless
stately music began to play. An organ boomed. A coffin was borne into the
chapel. A marriage procession came out of it. Armed men with helmets left
for the wars. They brought banners back from Flodden and Poitiers and stuck
them on the wall. The long gallery filled itself thus, and still peering
further, she thought she could make out at the very end, beyond the
Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older, further, darker, a cowled
figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with his hands clasped, and a
book in them, murmuring -
Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so
demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder. Her
own face, that had been dark and sombre as she gazed, was lit as by an
explosion of gunpowder. In this same light everything near her showed with
extreme distinctness. She saw two flies circling round and noticed the blue
sheen on their bodies; she saw a knot in the wood where her foot was, and
her dog's ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a bough creaking in the
garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift screaming past the window. Her
own body quivered and tingled as if suddenly stood naked in a hard frost.
Yet, she kept, as she had not done when the clock struck ten in London,
complete composure (for she was now one and entire, and presented, it may
be, a larger surface to the shock of time). She rose, but without
precipitation, called her dogs, and went firmly but with great alertness of
movement down the staircase and out into the garden. Here the shadows of the
plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of earth
in the flower beds as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the
intricacy of the twigs of every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and
the marking of veins and petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along
the path, and every button on his gaiters was visible; she saw Betty and
Prince, the cart horses, and never had she marked so clearly the white star
on Betty's forehead, and the three long hairs that fell down below the rest
on Prince's tail. Out in the quadrangle the old grey walls of the house
looked like a scraped new photograph; she heard the loud speaker condensing
on the terrace a dance tune that people were listening to in the red velvet
opera house at Vienna. Braced and strung up by the present moment she was
also strangely afraid, as if whenever the gulf of time gaped and let a
second through some unknown danger might come with it. The tension was too
relentless and too rigorous to be endured long without discomfort. She
walked more briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her,
through the garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself, by a
great effort, to stop by the carpenter's shop, and to stand stock-still
watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with her eye
fixed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled through her like a
meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. She saw with disgusting
vividness that the thumb on Joe's right hand was without a finger nail and
there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The
sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that
moment's darkness, when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the
pressure of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the
flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by
looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present - whence its
terror, its nondescript character - something one trembles to pin through
the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow
without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change
whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now, while she flickered her eye in
her faintness in the carpenter's shop, stole out, and attaching itself to
the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something
tolerable, comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. Yes, she
thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter's
shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by the Serpentine,
she thought, the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a
thousand deaths. I am about to understand...
Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot conceal
the fact that she was now a very indifferent witness to the truth of what
was before her and might easily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an old
man called Smith for one who was called Jones and was no relation of his
whatever. For the shadow of faintness which the thumb without a nail had
cast had deepened now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest
from sight), into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what
they are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in
which everything is reflected - and, indeed, some say that all our most
violent passions, and art and religion, are the reflections which we see in
the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured
for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and
immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became
not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were
partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes;
the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something
else, as if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and
there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated and made
the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant chequer of light
and shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound, chased a rabbit and so
reminded her that it must be about half past four - it was indeed
twenty-three minutes to six - she forgot the time.
The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to
the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier,
and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but
it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were
still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground,
she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way
and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the
world. She liked to attach herself to something hard. As she flung herself
down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of her
leather jacket - her poem "The Oak Tree". "I should have brought a trowel,"
she reflected. The earth was so shallow over the roots that it seemed
doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book here. Besides, the
dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations,
she thought. Perhaps it would be as well then to do without them. She had a
little speech on the tip of her tongue which she meant to speak over the
book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author
and artist.) "I bury this as a tribute," she was going to have said, "a
return to the land of what the land has given me," but Lord! once one began
mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene
getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for
his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had
thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do
with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry?
What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do
with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice
answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting
people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill
suited as could be to the thing itself - a voice answering a voice. What
could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the
intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these
years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown
horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen
and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden
blowing irises and fritillaries?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and
watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun
lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a
church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of
light burning on some glass-house; a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The
fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched
long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In
the far distance Snowdon's crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the
far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She
listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No - only the wind blew.
There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. "And there," she
thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances,
drop once more to the land beneath her, "was my land once: that Castle
between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was
mine." Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light)
shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses, castles,
and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were
before her. It was blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side.
Goats cropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above. The
raucous voice of old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, "What is your
antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do
you need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and
housemaids dusting?"
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like
landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once
more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into
view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages with
lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing
the darkness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or
eleven, she could not say. Night had come - night that she loved of all
times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine
more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look
deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to see in the pool
of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat
on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great
waves past Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness. There was her husband's
brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white
arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always
sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig
was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
"Ecstasy!" she cried, "ecstasy!" And then the wind sank, the waters
grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.
"Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!" she cried, standing by the oak tree.
The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue
feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow
that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in
moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell
slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the
moon was on the waters, and nothing moved in between sky and sea. Then he
came.
All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the
weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great
house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was
none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a
dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing in the
courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more
stepped from her chariot.
"The house is at your service, Ma'am," she cried, curtseying deeply.
"Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in".
As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of
the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked
anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her
ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming
nearer and nearer.
"Here! Shel, here! she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now
showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon
spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It
hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the
darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured,
and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild
bird.
"It is the goose!" Orlando cried. "The wild goose..."
And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of
midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty
Eight.
drops of scalding water. Light swayed up and down like thin stuffs puffed
out by a summer breeze. She took a list from her bag and began reading in a
curious stiff voice at first, as if she were holding the words - boy's
boots, bath salts, sardines - under a tap of many-coloured water. She
watched them change as the light fell on them. Bath and boots became blunt,
obtuse; sardines serrated itself like a saw. So she stood in the
ground-floor department of Messrs Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way
and that; snuffed this smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then she
got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was
shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose,
is magic. In the eighteenth century we knew how everything was done; but
here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying
- but how it's done I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic
returns. Now the lift gave a little jerk as it stopped at the first floor;
and she had a vision of innumerable coloured stuffs flaunting in a breeze
from which came distinct, strange smells; and each time the lift stopped and
flung its doors open, there was another slice of the world displayed with
all the smells of that world clinging to it. She was reminded of the river
off Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where the treasure ships and the
merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and curiously they had smelt! How
well she remembered the feel of rough rubies running through her fingers
when she dabbled them in a treasure sack! And then lying with Sukey - or
whatever her name was - and having Cumberland's lantern flashed on them! The
Cumberlands had a house in Portland Place now and she had lunched with them
the other day and ventured a little joke with the old man about alms-houses
in the Sheen Road. He had winked. But here as the lift could go no higher,
she must get out - Heaven knows into what "department" as they called it.
She stood still to consult her shopping list, but was blessed if she could
see, as the list bade her, bath salts, or boy's boots anywhere about. And
indeed, she was about to descend again, without buying anything, but was
saved from that outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her
list; which happened to be "sheets for a double bed".
"Sheets for a double bed," she said to a man at a counter and, by a
dispensation of Providence, it was sheets that the man at that particular
counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch, no, Grimsditch was dead;
Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was dead; Louise then - Louise had come to her
in a great taking the other day, for she had found a hole in the bottom of
the sheet in the royal bed. Many kings and queens had slept there -
Elizabeth; James; Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the sheet had
a hole in it. But Louise was positive she knew who had done it. It was the
Prince Consort.
"Sale bosch!" she said (for there had been another war; this time
against the Germans).
"Sheets for a double bed," Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double bed
with a silver counterpane in a room fitted in a taste which she now thought
perhaps a little vulgar - all in silver; but she had furnished it when she
had a passion for that metal. While the man went to get sheets for a double
bed, she took out a little looking-glass and a powder puff. Women were not
nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering herself with the
greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself first turned woman and
lay on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". She gave her nose the right tint
deliberately. She never touched her cheeks. Honestly, though she was now
thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. She looked just as pouting, as
sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha
had said) as she had done that day on the ice, when the Thames was frozen
and they had gone skating -
"The best Irish linen, Ma'am," said the shopman, spreading the sheets
on the counter, - and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here, as
she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between the
departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-goods department,
a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles, and the scent
curved like a shell round a figure - was it a boy's or was it a girl's -
young, slender, seductive - a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in Russian
trousers; but faithless, faithless!
"Faithless!" cried Orlando (the man had gone) and all the shop seemed
to pitch and toss with yellow water and far off she saw the masts of the
Russian ship standing out to sea, and then, miraculously (perhaps the door
opened again) the conch which the scent had made became a platform, a dais,
off which stepped a fat, furred woman, marvellously well preserved,
seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke's mistress; she who, leaning over the
banks of the Volga, eating sandwiches, had watched men drown; and began
walking down the shop towards her.
"Oh Sasha!" Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should have
come to this; she had grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowed her head
over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in fur, and a girl in
Russian trousers, with all these smells of wax candles, white flowers, and
old ships that it brought with it might pass behind her back unseen.
"Any napkins, towels, dusters today, Ma'am?" the shopman persisted. And
it is enormously to the credit of the shopping list, which Orlando now
consulted, that she was able to reply with every appearance of composure,
that there was only one thing in the world she wanted and that was bath
salts; which was in another department.
But descending in the lift again - so insidious is the repetition of
any scene - she was again sunk far beneath the present moment; and thought
when the lift bumped on the ground, that she heard a pot broken against a
river bank. As for finding the right department, whatever it might be, she
stood engrossed among the handbags, deaf to the suggestions of all the
polite, black, combed, sprightly shop assistants, who descending as they did
equally and some of them, perhaps, as proudly, even from such depths of the
past as she did, chose to let down the impervious screen of the present so
that today they appeared shop assistants in Marshall & Snelgrove's
merely. Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great glass doors she
could see the traffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to pile itself upon
omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice blocks had pitched and
tossed that day on the Thames. An old nobleman in furred slippers had sat
astride one of them. There he went - she could see him now - calling down
maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood.
"Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself;
"this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer
one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in
the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers.
When I step out of doors - as I do now," here she stepped on to the pavement
of Oxford Street, "what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells.
I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?" Her eyes filled with tears.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will,
perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her
motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And
indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the
art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to
synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously
in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime
in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely
forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely
the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the
rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet
born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years
old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's
life, whatever the "Dictionary of National Biography" may say, is always a
matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business - this time-keeping;
nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it
may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose
her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or
the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the
present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently
assaulted.
"Confound it all!" she cried, for it is a great shock to the nervous
system, hearing a clock strike - so much so that for some time now there is
nothing to be said of her save that she frowned slightly, changed her gears
admirably, and cried out, as before, "Look where you're going!" "Don't you
know your own mind?" "Why didn't you say so then?" while the motor-car shot,
swung, squeezed, and slid, for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street,
down Haymarket, down Northumberland Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to the
left, straight on, to the right, straight on again...
The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October
1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags.
Children ran out. There were sales at drapers' shops. Streets widened and
narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a
funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written "Ra - Un",
but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost
had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin - that was over a porch. A woman looked
out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn
and Applebed, Undert - . Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to
finish. What was seen begun - like two friends starting to meet each other
across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and
mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the
process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up
small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself
that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have
existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given her over for a
person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at last, one green
screen was held out on the right, against which the little bits of paper
fell more slowly; and then another was held out on the left so that one
could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and
then green screens were held continuously on either side, so that her mind
regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage,
a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.
When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette,
and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as
if the person she wanted might not be there, "Orlando?" For if there are (at
a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how
many different people are there not - Heaven help us - all having lodgment
at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and
fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to
call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one's name) meaning by
that, Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not
altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said
(being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando?
still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built
up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have
attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their
own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name)
so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green
curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it
a glass of wine - and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own
experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him
- and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.
So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called "Orlando?" with a note of
interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.
"All right then," Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on
these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to
call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a
biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven
selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing then, only
those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy
who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who
sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the
bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in
love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the
Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the woman to come to
her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the
Patroness of Letters; the woman who called Mar (meaning hot baths and
evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop
(meaning the death we die daily) or all three together - which meant more
things than we have space to write out - all were different and she may have
called upon any one of them.
Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are now in the region of
"perhaps" and "appears") was that the one she needed most kept aloof, for
she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove -
there was a new one at every corner - as happens when, for some
unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has
the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some
people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we
have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key
self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking
this self as the reader can judge from overhearing her talk as she drove
(and if it is rambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes
unintelligible, it is the reader's fault for listening to a lady talking to
herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding in brackets which
self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may well be wrong).
"What then? Who then?" she said. "Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman.
Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? The garter in the
hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious,
vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don't care a damn if I am.
Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don't count (here a new self
came in). Lying in bed of a morning listening to the pigeons on fine linen;
silver dishes; wine; maids; footmen. Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many things for
nothing. Hence my books (here she mentioned fifty classical titles; which
represented, so we think, the early romantic works that she tore up).
Facile, glib, romantic. But (here another self came in) a duffer, a fumbler.
More clumsy I couldn't be. And - and - (here she hesitated for a word and if
we suggest "Love" we may be wrong, but certainly she laughed and blushed and
then cried out ) - A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles
on the ceiling! (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was
sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over
crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was
passing a clump) growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a
tumbledown barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came
trotting across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night. But
people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.)
I don't know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here she turned
into the High Street of her native town, which was crowded, for it was
market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and old women with hens in
baskets.) I like peasants. I understand crops. But (here another self came
skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a lighthouse). Fame!
(She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening
papers (here she alluded to the "Oak Tree" and "The Burdett Coutts" Memorial
Prize which she had won; and we must snatch space to remark how discomposing
it is for her biographer that this culmination to which the whole book
moved, this peroration with which the book was to end, should be dashed from
us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a
woman, everything is out of place - culminations and perorations; the accent
never falls where it does with a man). Fame! she repeated. A poet - a
charlatan; both every morning as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to
meet; to meet, to dine; fame - fame! (She had here to slow down to pass
through the crowd of market people. But no one noticed her. A porpoise in a
fishmonger's shop attracted far more attention than a lady who had won a
prize and might, had she chosen, have worn three coronets one on top of
another on her brow.) Driving very slowly she now hummed as if it were part
of an old song, "With my guineas I'll buy flowering trees, flowering trees,
flowering trees and walk among my flowering trees and tell my sons what fame
is". So she hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and there like a
barbaric necklace of heavy beads. "And walk among my flowering trees," she
sang, accenting the words strongly, "and see the moon rise slow, the waggons
go..." Here she stopped short and looked ahead of her intently at the bonnet
of the car in profound meditation.
"He sat at Twitchett's table," she mused, "with a dirty ruff on...Was
it old Mr Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh-p-re? (for when we
speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole.) She
gazed for ten minutes ahead of her, letting the car come almost to a
standstill.
"Haunted!" she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. "Haunted! ever
since I was a child. There flies the wild goose. It flies past the window
out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the steering-wheel tighter) and
stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. I've seen it, here - there
- there - England, Persia, Italy. Always it flies fast out to sea and always
I fling after it words like nets (here she flung her hand out) which shrivel
as I've seen nets shrivel drawn on deck with only sea-weed in them; and
sometimes there's an inch of silver - six words - in the bottom of the net.
But never the great fish who lives in the coral groves." Here she bent her
head, pondering deeply.
And it was at this moment, when she had ceased to call "Orlando" and
was deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom she had called
came of its own accord; as was proved by the change that now came over her
(she had passed through the lodge gates and was entering the park).
The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition
makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow
becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is
contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and
become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or
wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable
that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two
thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but
when communication is established they fall silent.
Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curving drive between the elms
and oaks through the falling turf of the park whose fall was so gentle that
had it been water it would have spread the beach with a smooth green tide.
Planted here and in solemn groups were beech trees and oak trees. The deer
stepped among them, one white as snow, another with its head on one side,
for some wire netting had caught in its horns. All this, the trees, deer,
and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if her mind had
become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely. Next
minute she drew up in the courtyard where, for so many hundred years she had
come, on horseback or in coach and six, with men riding before or coming
after; where plumes had tossed, torches flashed, and the same flowering
trees that let their leaves drop now had shaken their blossoms. Now she was
alone. The autumn leaves were falling. The porter opened the great gates.
"Morning, James," she said, "there're some things in the car. Will you bring
'em in?" words of no beauty, interest, or significance themselves, it will
be conceded, but now so plumped out with meaning that they fell like ripe
nuts from a tree, and proved that when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary
is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true
indeed of every movement and action now, usual though they were; so that to
see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather
jacket, which she did in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with
the beauty of movement as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art.
Then she strode into the dining-room where her old friends Dryden, Pope,
Swift, Addison regarded her demurely at first as who should say Here's the
prize winner! but when they reflected that two hundred guineas was in
question, they nodded their heads approvingly. Two hundred guineas, they
seemed to say; two hundred guineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herself
a slice of bread and ham, clapped the two together and began to eat,
striding up and down the room, thus shedding her company habits in a second,
without thinking. After five or six such turns, she tossed off a glass of
red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her hand, strode
down the long corridor and through a dozen drawing-rooms and so began a
perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and spaniels as
chose to follow her.
This, too, was all in the day's routine. As soon would she come home
and leave her own grandmother without a kiss as come back and leave the
house unvisited. She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in;
stirred, opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence. She
fancied, too, that, hundreds and thousands of times as she had seen them,
they never looked the same twice, as if so long a life as theirs had stored
in them a myriad moods which changed with winter and summer, bright weather
and dark, and her own fortunes and the people's characters who visited them.
Polite, they always were to strangers, but a little weary: with her, they
were entirely open and at their ease. Why not indeed? They had known each
other for close on four centuries now. They had nothing to conceal. She knew
their sorrows and joys. She knew what age each part of them was and its
little secrets - a hidden drawer, a concealed cupboard, or some deficiency
perhaps, such as a part made up, or added later. They, too, knew her in all
her moods and changes. She had hidden nothing from them; had come to them as
boy and woman, crying and dancing, brooding and gay. In this window-seat,
she had written her first verses; in that chapel, she had been married. And
she would be buried here, she reflected, kneeling on the window-sill in the
long gallery and sipping her Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it,
the body of the heraldic leopard would be making yellow pools on the floor
the day they lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in no
immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever
with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the room - she
had strolled into the Ambassador's bedroom - shone like a shell that has
lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and
painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and
sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty. No
Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of
the house still beat. Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so
that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry
rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move
it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. The heart still beat, she
thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail indomitable heart
of the immense building.
Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery whose
floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of chairs with all
their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out for
Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who never
came. The sight made her gloomy. She unhooked the rope that fenced them off.
She sat on the Queen's chair; she opened a manuscript book lying on Lady
Betty's table; she stirred her fingers in the aged rose leaves; she brushed
her short hair with King James' silver brushes: she bounced up and down upon
his bed (but no King would ever sleep there again, for all Louise's new
sheets) and pressed her cheek against the worn silver counterpane that lay
upon it. But everywhere were little lavender bags to keep the moth out and
printed notices, "Please do not touch", which, though she had put them there
herself, seemed to rebuke her. The house was no longer hers entirely, she
sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past the touch and control
of the living. Never would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was
in the bedroom that had been old Nick Greene's), or holes burnt in the
carpet. Never two hundred servants come running and brawling down the
corridors with warming pans and great branches for the great fireplaces.
Never would ale be brewed and candles made and saddles fashioned and stone
shaped in the workshops outside the house. Hammers and mallets were silent
now. Chairs and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in
glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.
So she sat at the end of the gallery with her dogs couched round her,
in Queen Elizabeth's hard armchair. The gallery stretched far away to a
point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into the
past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking;
the great men she had known; Dryden, Swift, and Pope; and statesmen in
colloquy; and lovers dallying in the window-seats; and people eating and
drinking at the long tables; and the wood smoke curling round their heads
and making them sneeze and cough. Still further down, she saw sets of
splendid dancers formed for the quadrille. A fluty, frail, but nevertheless
stately music began to play. An organ boomed. A coffin was borne into the
chapel. A marriage procession came out of it. Armed men with helmets left
for the wars. They brought banners back from Flodden and Poitiers and stuck
them on the wall. The long gallery filled itself thus, and still peering
further, she thought she could make out at the very end, beyond the
Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older, further, darker, a cowled
figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with his hands clasped, and a
book in them, murmuring -
Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so
demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder. Her
own face, that had been dark and sombre as she gazed, was lit as by an
explosion of gunpowder. In this same light everything near her showed with
extreme distinctness. She saw two flies circling round and noticed the blue
sheen on their bodies; she saw a knot in the wood where her foot was, and
her dog's ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a bough creaking in the
garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift screaming past the window. Her
own body quivered and tingled as if suddenly stood naked in a hard frost.
Yet, she kept, as she had not done when the clock struck ten in London,
complete composure (for she was now one and entire, and presented, it may
be, a larger surface to the shock of time). She rose, but without
precipitation, called her dogs, and went firmly but with great alertness of
movement down the staircase and out into the garden. Here the shadows of the
plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of earth
in the flower beds as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the
intricacy of the twigs of every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and
the marking of veins and petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along
the path, and every button on his gaiters was visible; she saw Betty and
Prince, the cart horses, and never had she marked so clearly the white star
on Betty's forehead, and the three long hairs that fell down below the rest
on Prince's tail. Out in the quadrangle the old grey walls of the house
looked like a scraped new photograph; she heard the loud speaker condensing
on the terrace a dance tune that people were listening to in the red velvet
opera house at Vienna. Braced and strung up by the present moment she was
also strangely afraid, as if whenever the gulf of time gaped and let a
second through some unknown danger might come with it. The tension was too
relentless and too rigorous to be endured long without discomfort. She
walked more briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her,
through the garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself, by a
great effort, to stop by the carpenter's shop, and to stand stock-still
watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with her eye
fixed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled through her like a
meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. She saw with disgusting
vividness that the thumb on Joe's right hand was without a finger nail and
there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The
sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that
moment's darkness, when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the
pressure of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the
flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by
looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present - whence its
terror, its nondescript character - something one trembles to pin through
the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow
without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change
whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now, while she flickered her eye in
her faintness in the carpenter's shop, stole out, and attaching itself to
the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something
tolerable, comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. Yes, she
thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter's
shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by the Serpentine,
she thought, the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a
thousand deaths. I am about to understand...
Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot conceal
the fact that she was now a very indifferent witness to the truth of what
was before her and might easily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an old
man called Smith for one who was called Jones and was no relation of his
whatever. For the shadow of faintness which the thumb without a nail had
cast had deepened now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest
from sight), into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what
they are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in
which everything is reflected - and, indeed, some say that all our most
violent passions, and art and religion, are the reflections which we see in
the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured
for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and
immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became
not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were
partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes;
the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something
else, as if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and
there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated and made
the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant chequer of light
and shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound, chased a rabbit and so
reminded her that it must be about half past four - it was indeed
twenty-three minutes to six - she forgot the time.
The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to
the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier,
and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but
it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were
still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground,
she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way
and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the
world. She liked to attach herself to something hard. As she flung herself
down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of her
leather jacket - her poem "The Oak Tree". "I should have brought a trowel,"
she reflected. The earth was so shallow over the roots that it seemed
doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book here. Besides, the
dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations,
she thought. Perhaps it would be as well then to do without them. She had a
little speech on the tip of her tongue which she meant to speak over the
book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author
and artist.) "I bury this as a tribute," she was going to have said, "a
return to the land of what the land has given me," but Lord! once one began
mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene
getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for
his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had
thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do
with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry?
What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do
with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice
answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting
people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill
suited as could be to the thing itself - a voice answering a voice. What
could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the
intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these
years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown
horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen
and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden
blowing irises and fritillaries?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and
watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun
lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a
church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of
light burning on some glass-house; a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The
fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched
long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In
the far distance Snowdon's crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the
far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She
listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No - only the wind blew.
There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. "And there," she
thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances,
drop once more to the land beneath her, "was my land once: that Castle
between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was
mine." Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light)
shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses, castles,
and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were
before her. It was blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side.
Goats cropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above. The
raucous voice of old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, "What is your
antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do
you need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and
housemaids dusting?"
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like
landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once
more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into
view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages with
lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing
the darkness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or
eleven, she could not say. Night had come - night that she loved of all
times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine
more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look
deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to see in the pool
of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat
on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great
waves past Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness. There was her husband's
brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white
arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always
sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig
was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
"Ecstasy!" she cried, "ecstasy!" And then the wind sank, the waters
grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.
"Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!" she cried, standing by the oak tree.
The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue
feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow
that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in
moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell
slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the
moon was on the waters, and nothing moved in between sky and sea. Then he
came.
All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the
weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great
house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was
none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a
dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing in the
courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more
stepped from her chariot.
"The house is at your service, Ma'am," she cried, curtseying deeply.
"Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in".
As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of
the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked
anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her
ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming
nearer and nearer.
"Here! Shel, here! she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now
showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon
spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It
hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the
darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured,
and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild
bird.
"It is the goose!" Orlando cried. "The wild goose..."
And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of
midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty
Eight.