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combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace. As he stood
there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave
the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity,
and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and
threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell
short by several inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long
looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went,
presumably, to his bath.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain
statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in
every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change
of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their
identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the
same. His memory - but in future we must, for convention's sake, say "her"
for "his", and "she" for "he" - her memory then, went back through all the
events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight
haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the
clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that
was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and
completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.
Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex
is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had
always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let
biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the
simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a
woman and has remained so ever since.
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious
subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed herself in
those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either
sex; and was forced to consider her position. That it was precarious and
embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who
has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken
to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate
for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung the
bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of
perturbation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and might
indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation. First, she
carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as seemed to be
written in poetry, and secreted them in her bosom; next she called her
Seleuchi hound, which had never left her bed all these days, though half
famished with hunger, fed and combed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in
her belt; finally wound about her person several strings of emeralds and
pearls of the finest orient which had formed part of her Ambassadorial
wardrobe. This done, she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and
descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the
litter of waste-paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax,
etc., and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant fig
tree, waited an old gipsy on a donkey. He led another by the bridle. Orlando
swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in
company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the
Sultan left Constantinople.
They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of
adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature, in all of
which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a week they reached the
high ground outside Broussa, which was then the chief camping ground of the
gipsy tribe to which Orlando had allied herself. Often she had looked at
those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be
there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a
reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too
well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of having
no documents to seal or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay, was
enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they
moved again. She washed in streams if she washed at all; no boxes, red,
blue, or green, were presented to her; there was not a key, let alone a
golden key, in the whole camp; as for "visiting", the word was unknown. She
milked the goats; she collected brushwood; she stole a hen's egg now and
then, but always put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle;
she stripped vines; she trod the grape; she filled the goat-skin and drank
from it; and when she remembered how, at about this time of day, she should
have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over an empty
coffee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed aloud, cut herself
another hunch of bread, and begged for a puff from old Rustum's pipe, filled
though it was with cow dung.
The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret
communication before the revolution, seem to have looked upon her as one of
themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay), and
her dark hair and dark complexion bore out the belief that she was, by
birth, one of them and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree
when she was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in
houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air. Thus,
though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing to help her to
become more like them; taught her their arts of cheese-making and
basket-weaving, their science of stealing and bird-snaring, and were even
prepared to consider letting her marry among them.
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases
(whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled.
One evening, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset
was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:
"How good to eat!"
(The gipsies have no word for "beautiful". This is the nearest.)
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky
good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners
than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for
whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they
would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no
matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect
that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women
thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and
cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The
English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature
was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its
hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has
been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very
briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She
climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams.
She likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks
of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn
thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in
fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost
threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when,
from the mountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Sea of Marmara, the
plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with
a white streak or two, which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul
expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the majesty
of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such
believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought
her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her
eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made
them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each
watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung
herself upon her mat in the gipsies' tent, she could not help bursting out
again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that
though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they
can only say "good to eat" when they mean "beautiful" and the other way
about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep
any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies laughed. But Rustum el
Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando out of Constantinople on his
donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed
as if from the age-long descent of iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed,
and as he sat tugging at his hookah he observed Orlando narrowly. He had the
deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day he found her in tears.
Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her that he
was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by
the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen.
This, he said, was what her God did to men. When she said, "But so
beautiful", using the English word, he shook his head; and when she repeated
it he was angry. He saw that she did not believe what he believed, and that
was enough, wise and ancient as he was, to enrage him.
This difference of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been perfectly
happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then
she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things themselves,
or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her
to truth, which in its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days
on the high mound at home); which meditations, since she could impart no
word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and
ink.
"Oh! if only I could write!" she cried (for she had the odd conceit of
those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but
little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few
margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of "The Oak Tree", managed by
writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the scenery in a long, blank
version poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and
Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But
the gipsies became suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept
than before at milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before
replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling
her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would be felt by the whole
tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the
sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their
vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their
hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be
singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into
the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need
not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we
make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone
who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking's
sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but
sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a
vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the
old woman. They broke their withys; they cut their fingers. A great rage
filled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent and never come near
them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned;
and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa.
Slowly, she began to feel that there was some difference between her
and the gipsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down
among them for ever. At first she tried to account for it by saying that she
came of an ancient and civilized race, whereas these gipsies were an
ignorant people, not much better than savages. One night when they were
questioning her about England she could not help with some pride describing
the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the
possession of her family for four or five hundred years. Her ancestors were
earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the gipsies
were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised the beauty of
nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as people of fine breeding
are when a stranger has been made to reveal his low birth or poverty. Rustum
followed her out of the tent alone and said that she need not mind if her
father were a Duke, and possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she
described. They would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she
was seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that
Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years
only the meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or
three thousand years. To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids
centuries before Christ was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets
was no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both
were negligible. Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such
antiquity, there was nothing specially memorable or desirable in ancient
birth; vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then, though he was too
courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that there
was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they
were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around
them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view,
a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who
snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth,
and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and
sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one.
She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field;
house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or
heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the
argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she
understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or
four hundred years ago would be denounced - and by her own family most
loudly - for a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.
She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique method
of finding the gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a short
time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such differences of
opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked
for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield
an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the
breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing
so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense
that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party
and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is
not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter
and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and
subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue -
but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they
are as dull as ditch water.
"Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them," sighed
Orlando.
"She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats," said the gipsies.
What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and
become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally
impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper,
neither reverence for the Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of
bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount
Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either
played her a trick or worked a miracle - again, opinions differ too much for
it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at
the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must
compare the landscape to anything, it would have been to a dry bone; to a
sheep's skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures.
The heat was intense, and the little fig tree under which Orlando lay only
served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.
Suddenly a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared
on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green
hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the
hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank
of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could
see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping
among the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade to
shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle sighs and
shivers of a summer's day in England. After she had gazed entranced for some
time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked
with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts
coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she
knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then appeared the roofs and belfries and
towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and
she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the
roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All
was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the
snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts
and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there
was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was
only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked
bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and striding back to the
gipsies' camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day.
It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had plotted
her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not think as they
did. Yet they would have been sorry to cut her throat; and welcomed the news
of her departure. An English merchant ship, as luck would have it, was
already under sail in the harbour about to return to England; and Orlando,
by breaking off another pearl from her necklace, not only paid her passage
but had some banknotes left over in her wallet. These she would have liked
to present to the gipsies. But they despised wealth she knew; and she had to
content herself with embraces, which on her part were sincere.
With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl on her
string, Orlando bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women
then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she
now sat on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". It is a strange fact, but a
true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought.
Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had done something
to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two
important particulars, differ very little from the gipsy men. At any rate,
it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain
offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on
deck, that she realized with a start the penalties and the privileges of her
position. But that start was not of the kind that might have been expected.
It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought of
her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal circumstances a lovely
young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of
female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their
jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die when
ravished of. But if one has been a man for thirty years or so, and an
Ambassador into the bargain, if one has held a Queen in one's arms and one
or two other ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one has
married a Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a very
great start about that. Orlando's start was of a very complicated kind, and
not to be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed, ever accused her of being
one of those quick wits who run to the end of things in a minute. It took
her the entire length of the voyage to moralize out the meaning of her
start, and so, at her own pace, we will follow her.
"Lord," she thought, when she had recovered from her start, stretching
herself out at length under her awning, "this is a pleasant, lazy way of
life, to be sure. But," she thought, giving her legs a kick, "these skirts
are plaguey things to have about one's heels. Yet the stuff (flowered
paduasoy) is the loveliest in the world. Never have I seen my own skin (here
she laid her hand on her knee) look to such advantage as now. Could I,
however, leap overboard and swim in clothes like these? No! Therefore, I
should have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to
that? Now do I?" she wondered, here encountering the first knot in the
smooth skein of her argument.
Dinner came before she had untied it, and then it was the Captain
himself - Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain of distinguished
aspect, who did it for her as he helped her to a slice of corned beef.
"A little of the fat, Ma'm?" he asked. "Let me cut you just the tiniest
little slice the size of your fingernail." At those words a delicious tremor
ran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrents rushed. It recalled the
feeling of indescribable pleasure with which she had first seen Sasha,
hundreds of years ago. Then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the
greater ecstasy? The man's or the woman's? And are they not perhaps the
same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but
refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it,
have the very thinnest, smallest shiver in the world. This was the most
delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. "For nothing," she thought,
regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the argument, "is more heavenly
than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the
spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can. So that I'm not sure," she
continued, "that I won't throw myself overboard, for the mere pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket after all."
(It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into
possession of a pleasaunce or toy cupboard; her arguments would not commend
themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)
"But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the "Marie Rose" to
say about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of being
rescued by a blue-jacket?" she said. "We had a word for them. Ah! I have
it..." (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and
passing strange on a lady's lips.) "Lord! Lord!" she cried again at the
conclusion of her thoughts, "must I then begin to respect the opinion of the
other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can't swim,
if I have to be rescued by a blue-jacket, by God!" she cried, "I must!" Upon
which a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of
equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of
going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered paduasoy - the pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket - if these were only to be obtained by
roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She remembered how,
as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste,
scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own
person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my
own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely
apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they
may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline.
There's the hairdressing," she thought, "that alone will take an hour of my
morning, there's looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there's staying
and lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to
lace and from lace to paduasoy; there's being chaste year in year out..."
Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A
sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so
violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of
his teeth. "If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who,
no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep
them covered," Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest
beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all
a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a
mast-head. "A pox on them!" she said, realizing for the first time what, in
other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say,
the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.
"And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear," she thought;
"once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man
over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run
him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in
procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down
Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast.
All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my
lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream?" And mincing out
the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming
of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.
"To fall from a mast-head," she thought, "because you see a woman's ankles;
to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may
praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the
slave of the frailest chit in petticoats. and yet to go about as if you were
the Lords of creation. Heavens!" she thought, "what fools they make of us -
what fools we are!" And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms
that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither;
and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she
was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a
most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of
ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.
Thus it is no great wonder, as she pitted one sex against the other, and
found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not
sure to which she belonged - it was no great wonder that she was about to
cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again when the
anchor fell with a great splash into the sea; the sails came tumbling on
deck, and she perceived (so sunk had she been in thought that she had seen
nothing for several days) that the ship was anchored off the coast of Italy.
The Captain at once sent to ask the honour of her company ashore with him in
the longboat.
When she returned the next morning, she stretched herself on her couch
under the awning and arranged her draperies with the greatest decorum about
her ankles.
"Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex," she thought,
continuing the sentence which she had left unfinished the other day,
"armoured with every weapon as they are, while they debar us even from a
knowledge of the alphabet" (and from these opening words it is plain that
something had happened during the night to give her a push towards the
female sex, for she was speaking more as a woman speaks than as a man, yet
with a sort of content after all), "still - they fall from the mast-head."
Here she gave a great yawn and fell asleep. When she woke, the ship was
sailing before a fair breeze so near the shore that towns on the cliffs'
edge seemed only kept from slipping into the water by the interposition of
some great rock or the twisted roots of some ancient olive tree. The scent
of oranges wafted from a million trees, heavy with the fruit, reached her on
deck. A score of blue dolphins, twisting their tails, leapt high now and
again into the air. Stretching her arms out (arms, she had learnt already,
have no such fatal effects as legs), she thanked Heaven that she was not
prancing down Whitehall on a warhorse, nor even sentencing a man to death.
"Better is it," she thought, "to be clothed with poverty and ignorance,
which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and
discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the
love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully
enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are," she
said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, "contemplation, solitude,
love."
"Praise God that I'm a woman!" she cried, and was about to run into
extreme folly - than which none is more distressing in woman or man either -
of being proud of her sex, when she paused over the singular word, which,
for all we can do to put it in its place, has crept in at the end of the
last sentence: Love. "Love," said Orlando. Instantly - such is its
impetuosity - love took a human shape - such is its pride. For where other
thoughts are content to remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this one but
to put on flesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and jerkin. And as
all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of
the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a
woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of
the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those
feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries
became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides
the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed,
and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this
affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she
knew Sasha as she was, and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the
pursuit of all those treasures which were now revealed, she was so rapt and
enchanted that it was as if a cannon ball had exploded at her ear when a
man's voice said, "Permit me, Madam," a man's hand raised her to her feet;
and the fingers of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the
middle finger pointed to the horizon.
"The cliffs of England, Ma'am," said the Captain, and he raised the
hand which had pointed at the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave a second
start, even more violent than the first.
"Christ Jesus!" she cried.
Happily, the sight of her native land after long absence excused both
start and exclamation, or she would have been hard put to it to explain to
Captain Bartolus the raging and conflicting emotions which now boiled within
her. How tell him that she, who now trembled on his arm, had been a Duke and
an Ambassador? How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily
in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among
treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on summer nights when the tulips
were abloom and the bees buzzing off Wapping Old Stairs? Not even to herself
could she explain the giant start she gave, as the resolute right hand of
the sea-captain indicated the cliffs of the British Islands.
"To refuse and to yield," she murmured, "how delightful; to pursue and
conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how sublime." Not one of
these words so coupled together seemed to her wrong; nevertheless, as the
chalky cliffs loomed nearer, she felt culpable; dishonoured; unchaste,
which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange. Closer
and closer they drew, till the samphire gatherers, hanging half-way down the
cliff, were plain to the naked eye. And watching them, she felt, scampering
up and down within her, like some derisive ghost who in another instant will
pick up her skirts and flaunt out of sight, Sasha the lost, Sasha the
memory, whose reality she had proved just now so surprisingly - Sasha, she
felt, mopping and mowing and making all sorts of disrespectful gestures
towards the cliffs and the samphire gatherers; and when the sailors began
chanting, "So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain", the words echoed
in Orlando's sad heart, and she felt that however much landing there meant
comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would
doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort, over half
Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit,
meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and
restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail
once more for the gipsies.
Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome
of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so
impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has
seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon
the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable. The form of it, by the
hazard of fancy, recalled that earliest, most persistent memory - the man
with the big forehead in Twitchett's sitting-room, the man who sat writing,
or rather looking, but certainly not at her, for he never seemed to see her
poised there in all her finery, lovely boy though she must have been, she
could not deny it - and whenever she thought of him, the thought spread
round it, like the risen moon on turbulent waters, a sheet of silver calm.
Now her hand went to her bosom (the other was still in the Captain's
keeping), where the pages of her poem were hidden safe. It might have been a
talisman that she kept there. The distraction of sex, which hers was, and
what it meant, subsided; she thought now only of the glory of poetry, and
the great lines of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton began booming
and reverberating, as if a golden clapper beat against a golden bell in the
cathedral tower which was her mind. The truth was that the image of the
marble dome which her eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested
a poet's forehead and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no
figment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a
favouring gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth,
and revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast
cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.
"St Paul's," said Captain Bartolus, who stood by her side. "The Tower
of London," he continued. "Greenwich Hospital, erected in memory of Queen
Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William the Third. Westminster Abbey.
The Houses of Parliament." As he spoke, each of these famous buildings rose
to view. It was a fine September morning. A myriad of little water-craft
plied from bank to bank. Rarely has a gayer, or more interesting, spectacle
presented itself to the gaze of a returned traveller. Orlando hung over the
prow, absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had been used too long to savages and
nature not to be entranced by these urban glories. That, then, was the dome
of St Paul's which Mr Wren had built during her absence. Near by, a shock of
golden hair burst from a pillar - Captain Bartolus was at her side to inform
her that that was the Monument; there had been a plague and a fire during
her absence, he said. Do what she could to restrain them, the tears came to
her eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep, she let
them flow. Here, she thought, had been the great carnival. Here, where the
waves slapped briskly, had stood the Royal Pavilion. Here she had first met
Sasha. About here (she looked down into the sparkling waters) one had been
used to see the frozen bumboat woman with her apples on her lap. All that
splendour and corruption was gone. Gone, too, was the dark night, the
monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood. Here, where yellow
icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken wretches on top,
a covey of swans floated, orgulous, undulant, superb. London itself had
completely changed since she had last seen it. Then, she remembered, it had
been a huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses. The heads of rebels had
grinned on pikes at Temple Bar. The cobbled pavements had reeked of garbage
and ordure. Now, as the ship sailed past Wapping, she caught glimpses of
broad and orderly thoroughfares. Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-fed
horses stood at the doors of houses whose bow windows, whose plate glass,
whose polished knockers, testified to the wealth and modest dignity of the
dwellers within. Ladies in flowered silk (she put the Captain's glass to her
eye) walked on raised footpaths. Citizens in broidered coats took snuff at
street corners under lamp-posts. She caught sight of a variety of painted
signs swinging in the breeze and could form a rapid notion from what was
painted on them of the tobacco, of the stuff, of the silk, of the gold, of
the silver ware, of the gloves, of the perfumes, and of a thousand other
articles which were sold within. Nor could she do more as the ship sailed to
its anchorage by London Bridge than glance at coffee-house windows where, on
balconies, since the weather was fine, a great number of decent citizens sat
at ease, with china dishes in front of them, clay pipes by their sides,
while one among them read from a news sheet, and was frequently interrupted
by the laughter or the comments of the others. Were these taverns, were
these wits, were these poets? she asked of Captain Bartolus, who obligingly
informed her that even now - if she turned her head a little to the left and
looked along the line of his first finger - so - they were passing the Cocoa
Tree, where, - yes, there he was - one might see Mr Addison taking his
coffee; the other two gentlemen - "there, Ma'am, a little to the right of
the lamp-post, one of 'em humped, t'other much the same as you or me" - were
Mr Dryden and Mr Pope. "Sad dogs," said the Captain, by which he meant that
they were Papists, "but men of parts, none the less," he added, hurrying aft
to superintend the arrangements for landing. (The Captain must have been
mistaken, as a reference to any textbook of literature will show; but the
mistake was a kindly one, and so we let it stand.)
"Addison, Dryden, Pope," Orlando repeated as if the words were an
incantation. For one moment she saw the high mountains above Broussa, the
next, she had set her foot upon her native shore.
But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous flutter of
excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law; how harder than
the stones of London Bridge it is, and than the lips of a cannon more
severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was
made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries
from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been
preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor
litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief
charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold
any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the
same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina
Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring
that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to
them. Such grave charges as these would, of course, take time and money to
dispose of. All her estates were put in Chancery and her titles pronounced
in abeyance while the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly
ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman,
Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending
the legal judgment, she had the Law's permission to reside in a state of
incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be.
It was a fine evening in December when she arrived and the snow was
falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had seen them from
the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a house,
brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimneys smoking
busily as if inspired with a life of their own. She could not restrain a cry
as she saw it there tranquil and massive, couched upon the meadows. As the
yellow coach entered the park and came bowling along the drive between the
trees, the red deer raised their heads as if expectantly, and it was
observed that instead of showing the timidity natural to their kind, they
followed the coach and stood about the courtyard when it drew up. Some
tossed their antlers, others pawed the ground as the step was let down and
Orlando alighted. One, it is said, actually knelt in the snow before her.
She had not time to reach her hand towards the knocker before both wings of
the great door were flung open, and there, with lights and torches held
above their heads, were Mrs Grimsditch, Mr Dupper, and a whole retinue of
servants come to greet her. But the orderly procession was interrupted first
by the impetuosity of Canute, the elk-hound, who threw himself with such
ardour upon his mistress that he almost knocked her to the ground; next, by
the agitation of Mrs Grimsditch, who, making as if to curtsey, was overcome
with emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!
until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kiss upon both her cheeks. After
that, Mr Dupper began to read from a parchment, but the dogs barking, the
huntsmen winding their horns, and the stags, who had come into the courtyard
in the confusion, baying the moon, not much progress was made, and the
company dispersed within after crowding about their Mistress, and testifying
in every way to their great joy at her return.
No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando
they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of the
deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb
creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and
character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs Grimsditch, over her dish of china
tea, to Mr Dupper that night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen
a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was
as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two peaches on one
there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave
the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity,
and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and
threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell
short by several inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long
looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went,
presumably, to his bath.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain
statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in
every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change
of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their
identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the
same. His memory - but in future we must, for convention's sake, say "her"
for "his", and "she" for "he" - her memory then, went back through all the
events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight
haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the
clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that
was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and
completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.
Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex
is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had
always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let
biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the
simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a
woman and has remained so ever since.
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious
subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed herself in
those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either
sex; and was forced to consider her position. That it was precarious and
embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who
has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken
to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate
for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung the
bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of
perturbation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and might
indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation. First, she
carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as seemed to be
written in poetry, and secreted them in her bosom; next she called her
Seleuchi hound, which had never left her bed all these days, though half
famished with hunger, fed and combed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in
her belt; finally wound about her person several strings of emeralds and
pearls of the finest orient which had formed part of her Ambassadorial
wardrobe. This done, she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and
descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the
litter of waste-paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax,
etc., and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant fig
tree, waited an old gipsy on a donkey. He led another by the bridle. Orlando
swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in
company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the
Sultan left Constantinople.
They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of
adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature, in all of
which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a week they reached the
high ground outside Broussa, which was then the chief camping ground of the
gipsy tribe to which Orlando had allied herself. Often she had looked at
those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be
there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a
reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too
well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of having
no documents to seal or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay, was
enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they
moved again. She washed in streams if she washed at all; no boxes, red,
blue, or green, were presented to her; there was not a key, let alone a
golden key, in the whole camp; as for "visiting", the word was unknown. She
milked the goats; she collected brushwood; she stole a hen's egg now and
then, but always put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle;
she stripped vines; she trod the grape; she filled the goat-skin and drank
from it; and when she remembered how, at about this time of day, she should
have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over an empty
coffee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed aloud, cut herself
another hunch of bread, and begged for a puff from old Rustum's pipe, filled
though it was with cow dung.
The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret
communication before the revolution, seem to have looked upon her as one of
themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay), and
her dark hair and dark complexion bore out the belief that she was, by
birth, one of them and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree
when she was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in
houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air. Thus,
though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing to help her to
become more like them; taught her their arts of cheese-making and
basket-weaving, their science of stealing and bird-snaring, and were even
prepared to consider letting her marry among them.
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases
(whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled.
One evening, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset
was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:
"How good to eat!"
(The gipsies have no word for "beautiful". This is the nearest.)
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky
good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners
than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for
whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they
would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no
matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect
that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women
thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and
cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The
English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature
was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its
hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has
been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very
briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She
climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams.
She likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks
of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn
thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in
fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost
threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when,
from the mountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Sea of Marmara, the
plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with
a white streak or two, which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul
expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the majesty
of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such
believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought
her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her
eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made
them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each
watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung
herself upon her mat in the gipsies' tent, she could not help bursting out
again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that
though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they
can only say "good to eat" when they mean "beautiful" and the other way
about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep
any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies laughed. But Rustum el
Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando out of Constantinople on his
donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed
as if from the age-long descent of iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed,
and as he sat tugging at his hookah he observed Orlando narrowly. He had the
deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day he found her in tears.
Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her that he
was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by
the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen.
This, he said, was what her God did to men. When she said, "But so
beautiful", using the English word, he shook his head; and when she repeated
it he was angry. He saw that she did not believe what he believed, and that
was enough, wise and ancient as he was, to enrage him.
This difference of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been perfectly
happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then
she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things themselves,
or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her
to truth, which in its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days
on the high mound at home); which meditations, since she could impart no
word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and
ink.
"Oh! if only I could write!" she cried (for she had the odd conceit of
those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but
little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few
margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of "The Oak Tree", managed by
writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the scenery in a long, blank
version poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and
Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But
the gipsies became suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept
than before at milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before
replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling
her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would be felt by the whole
tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the
sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their
vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their
hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be
singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into
the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need
not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we
make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone
who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking's
sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but
sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a
vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the
old woman. They broke their withys; they cut their fingers. A great rage
filled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent and never come near
them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned;
and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa.
Slowly, she began to feel that there was some difference between her
and the gipsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down
among them for ever. At first she tried to account for it by saying that she
came of an ancient and civilized race, whereas these gipsies were an
ignorant people, not much better than savages. One night when they were
questioning her about England she could not help with some pride describing
the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the
possession of her family for four or five hundred years. Her ancestors were
earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the gipsies
were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised the beauty of
nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as people of fine breeding
are when a stranger has been made to reveal his low birth or poverty. Rustum
followed her out of the tent alone and said that she need not mind if her
father were a Duke, and possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she
described. They would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she
was seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that
Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years
only the meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or
three thousand years. To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids
centuries before Christ was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets
was no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both
were negligible. Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such
antiquity, there was nothing specially memorable or desirable in ancient
birth; vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then, though he was too
courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that there
was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they
were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around
them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view,
a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who
snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth,
and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and
sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one.
She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field;
house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or
heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the
argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she
understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or
four hundred years ago would be denounced - and by her own family most
loudly - for a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.
She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique method
of finding the gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a short
time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such differences of
opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked
for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield
an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the
breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing
so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense
that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party
and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is
not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter
and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and
subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue -
but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they
are as dull as ditch water.
"Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them," sighed
Orlando.
"She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats," said the gipsies.
What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and
become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally
impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper,
neither reverence for the Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of
bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount
Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either
played her a trick or worked a miracle - again, opinions differ too much for
it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at
the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must
compare the landscape to anything, it would have been to a dry bone; to a
sheep's skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures.
The heat was intense, and the little fig tree under which Orlando lay only
served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.
Suddenly a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared
on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green
hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the
hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank
of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could
see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping
among the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade to
shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle sighs and
shivers of a summer's day in England. After she had gazed entranced for some
time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked
with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts
coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she
knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then appeared the roofs and belfries and
towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and
she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the
roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All
was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the
snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts
and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there
was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was
only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked
bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and striding back to the
gipsies' camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day.
It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had plotted
her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not think as they
did. Yet they would have been sorry to cut her throat; and welcomed the news
of her departure. An English merchant ship, as luck would have it, was
already under sail in the harbour about to return to England; and Orlando,
by breaking off another pearl from her necklace, not only paid her passage
but had some banknotes left over in her wallet. These she would have liked
to present to the gipsies. But they despised wealth she knew; and she had to
content herself with embraces, which on her part were sincere.
With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl on her
string, Orlando bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women
then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she
now sat on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". It is a strange fact, but a
true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought.
Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had done something
to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two
important particulars, differ very little from the gipsy men. At any rate,
it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain
offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on
deck, that she realized with a start the penalties and the privileges of her
position. But that start was not of the kind that might have been expected.
It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought of
her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal circumstances a lovely
young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of
female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their
jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die when
ravished of. But if one has been a man for thirty years or so, and an
Ambassador into the bargain, if one has held a Queen in one's arms and one
or two other ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one has
married a Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a very
great start about that. Orlando's start was of a very complicated kind, and
not to be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed, ever accused her of being
one of those quick wits who run to the end of things in a minute. It took
her the entire length of the voyage to moralize out the meaning of her
start, and so, at her own pace, we will follow her.
"Lord," she thought, when she had recovered from her start, stretching
herself out at length under her awning, "this is a pleasant, lazy way of
life, to be sure. But," she thought, giving her legs a kick, "these skirts
are plaguey things to have about one's heels. Yet the stuff (flowered
paduasoy) is the loveliest in the world. Never have I seen my own skin (here
she laid her hand on her knee) look to such advantage as now. Could I,
however, leap overboard and swim in clothes like these? No! Therefore, I
should have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to
that? Now do I?" she wondered, here encountering the first knot in the
smooth skein of her argument.
Dinner came before she had untied it, and then it was the Captain
himself - Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain of distinguished
aspect, who did it for her as he helped her to a slice of corned beef.
"A little of the fat, Ma'm?" he asked. "Let me cut you just the tiniest
little slice the size of your fingernail." At those words a delicious tremor
ran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrents rushed. It recalled the
feeling of indescribable pleasure with which she had first seen Sasha,
hundreds of years ago. Then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the
greater ecstasy? The man's or the woman's? And are they not perhaps the
same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but
refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it,
have the very thinnest, smallest shiver in the world. This was the most
delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. "For nothing," she thought,
regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the argument, "is more heavenly
than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the
spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can. So that I'm not sure," she
continued, "that I won't throw myself overboard, for the mere pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket after all."
(It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into
possession of a pleasaunce or toy cupboard; her arguments would not commend
themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)
"But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the "Marie Rose" to
say about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of being
rescued by a blue-jacket?" she said. "We had a word for them. Ah! I have
it..." (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and
passing strange on a lady's lips.) "Lord! Lord!" she cried again at the
conclusion of her thoughts, "must I then begin to respect the opinion of the
other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can't swim,
if I have to be rescued by a blue-jacket, by God!" she cried, "I must!" Upon
which a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of
equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of
going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered paduasoy - the pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket - if these were only to be obtained by
roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She remembered how,
as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste,
scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own
person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my
own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely
apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they
may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline.
There's the hairdressing," she thought, "that alone will take an hour of my
morning, there's looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there's staying
and lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to
lace and from lace to paduasoy; there's being chaste year in year out..."
Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A
sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so
violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of
his teeth. "If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who,
no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep
them covered," Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest
beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all
a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a
mast-head. "A pox on them!" she said, realizing for the first time what, in
other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say,
the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.
"And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear," she thought;
"once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man
over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run
him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in
procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down
Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast.
All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my
lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream?" And mincing out
the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming
of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.
"To fall from a mast-head," she thought, "because you see a woman's ankles;
to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may
praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the
slave of the frailest chit in petticoats. and yet to go about as if you were
the Lords of creation. Heavens!" she thought, "what fools they make of us -
what fools we are!" And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms
that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither;
and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she
was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a
most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of
ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.
Thus it is no great wonder, as she pitted one sex against the other, and
found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not
sure to which she belonged - it was no great wonder that she was about to
cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again when the
anchor fell with a great splash into the sea; the sails came tumbling on
deck, and she perceived (so sunk had she been in thought that she had seen
nothing for several days) that the ship was anchored off the coast of Italy.
The Captain at once sent to ask the honour of her company ashore with him in
the longboat.
When she returned the next morning, she stretched herself on her couch
under the awning and arranged her draperies with the greatest decorum about
her ankles.
"Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex," she thought,
continuing the sentence which she had left unfinished the other day,
"armoured with every weapon as they are, while they debar us even from a
knowledge of the alphabet" (and from these opening words it is plain that
something had happened during the night to give her a push towards the
female sex, for she was speaking more as a woman speaks than as a man, yet
with a sort of content after all), "still - they fall from the mast-head."
Here she gave a great yawn and fell asleep. When she woke, the ship was
sailing before a fair breeze so near the shore that towns on the cliffs'
edge seemed only kept from slipping into the water by the interposition of
some great rock or the twisted roots of some ancient olive tree. The scent
of oranges wafted from a million trees, heavy with the fruit, reached her on
deck. A score of blue dolphins, twisting their tails, leapt high now and
again into the air. Stretching her arms out (arms, she had learnt already,
have no such fatal effects as legs), she thanked Heaven that she was not
prancing down Whitehall on a warhorse, nor even sentencing a man to death.
"Better is it," she thought, "to be clothed with poverty and ignorance,
which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and
discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the
love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully
enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are," she
said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, "contemplation, solitude,
love."
"Praise God that I'm a woman!" she cried, and was about to run into
extreme folly - than which none is more distressing in woman or man either -
of being proud of her sex, when she paused over the singular word, which,
for all we can do to put it in its place, has crept in at the end of the
last sentence: Love. "Love," said Orlando. Instantly - such is its
impetuosity - love took a human shape - such is its pride. For where other
thoughts are content to remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this one but
to put on flesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and jerkin. And as
all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of
the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a
woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of
the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those
feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries
became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides
the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed,
and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this
affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she
knew Sasha as she was, and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the
pursuit of all those treasures which were now revealed, she was so rapt and
enchanted that it was as if a cannon ball had exploded at her ear when a
man's voice said, "Permit me, Madam," a man's hand raised her to her feet;
and the fingers of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the
middle finger pointed to the horizon.
"The cliffs of England, Ma'am," said the Captain, and he raised the
hand which had pointed at the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave a second
start, even more violent than the first.
"Christ Jesus!" she cried.
Happily, the sight of her native land after long absence excused both
start and exclamation, or she would have been hard put to it to explain to
Captain Bartolus the raging and conflicting emotions which now boiled within
her. How tell him that she, who now trembled on his arm, had been a Duke and
an Ambassador? How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily
in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among
treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on summer nights when the tulips
were abloom and the bees buzzing off Wapping Old Stairs? Not even to herself
could she explain the giant start she gave, as the resolute right hand of
the sea-captain indicated the cliffs of the British Islands.
"To refuse and to yield," she murmured, "how delightful; to pursue and
conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how sublime." Not one of
these words so coupled together seemed to her wrong; nevertheless, as the
chalky cliffs loomed nearer, she felt culpable; dishonoured; unchaste,
which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange. Closer
and closer they drew, till the samphire gatherers, hanging half-way down the
cliff, were plain to the naked eye. And watching them, she felt, scampering
up and down within her, like some derisive ghost who in another instant will
pick up her skirts and flaunt out of sight, Sasha the lost, Sasha the
memory, whose reality she had proved just now so surprisingly - Sasha, she
felt, mopping and mowing and making all sorts of disrespectful gestures
towards the cliffs and the samphire gatherers; and when the sailors began
chanting, "So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain", the words echoed
in Orlando's sad heart, and she felt that however much landing there meant
comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would
doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort, over half
Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit,
meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and
restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail
once more for the gipsies.
Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome
of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so
impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has
seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon
the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable. The form of it, by the
hazard of fancy, recalled that earliest, most persistent memory - the man
with the big forehead in Twitchett's sitting-room, the man who sat writing,
or rather looking, but certainly not at her, for he never seemed to see her
poised there in all her finery, lovely boy though she must have been, she
could not deny it - and whenever she thought of him, the thought spread
round it, like the risen moon on turbulent waters, a sheet of silver calm.
Now her hand went to her bosom (the other was still in the Captain's
keeping), where the pages of her poem were hidden safe. It might have been a
talisman that she kept there. The distraction of sex, which hers was, and
what it meant, subsided; she thought now only of the glory of poetry, and
the great lines of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton began booming
and reverberating, as if a golden clapper beat against a golden bell in the
cathedral tower which was her mind. The truth was that the image of the
marble dome which her eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested
a poet's forehead and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no
figment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a
favouring gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth,
and revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast
cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.
"St Paul's," said Captain Bartolus, who stood by her side. "The Tower
of London," he continued. "Greenwich Hospital, erected in memory of Queen
Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William the Third. Westminster Abbey.
The Houses of Parliament." As he spoke, each of these famous buildings rose
to view. It was a fine September morning. A myriad of little water-craft
plied from bank to bank. Rarely has a gayer, or more interesting, spectacle
presented itself to the gaze of a returned traveller. Orlando hung over the
prow, absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had been used too long to savages and
nature not to be entranced by these urban glories. That, then, was the dome
of St Paul's which Mr Wren had built during her absence. Near by, a shock of
golden hair burst from a pillar - Captain Bartolus was at her side to inform
her that that was the Monument; there had been a plague and a fire during
her absence, he said. Do what she could to restrain them, the tears came to
her eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep, she let
them flow. Here, she thought, had been the great carnival. Here, where the
waves slapped briskly, had stood the Royal Pavilion. Here she had first met
Sasha. About here (she looked down into the sparkling waters) one had been
used to see the frozen bumboat woman with her apples on her lap. All that
splendour and corruption was gone. Gone, too, was the dark night, the
monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood. Here, where yellow
icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken wretches on top,
a covey of swans floated, orgulous, undulant, superb. London itself had
completely changed since she had last seen it. Then, she remembered, it had
been a huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses. The heads of rebels had
grinned on pikes at Temple Bar. The cobbled pavements had reeked of garbage
and ordure. Now, as the ship sailed past Wapping, she caught glimpses of
broad and orderly thoroughfares. Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-fed
horses stood at the doors of houses whose bow windows, whose plate glass,
whose polished knockers, testified to the wealth and modest dignity of the
dwellers within. Ladies in flowered silk (she put the Captain's glass to her
eye) walked on raised footpaths. Citizens in broidered coats took snuff at
street corners under lamp-posts. She caught sight of a variety of painted
signs swinging in the breeze and could form a rapid notion from what was
painted on them of the tobacco, of the stuff, of the silk, of the gold, of
the silver ware, of the gloves, of the perfumes, and of a thousand other
articles which were sold within. Nor could she do more as the ship sailed to
its anchorage by London Bridge than glance at coffee-house windows where, on
balconies, since the weather was fine, a great number of decent citizens sat
at ease, with china dishes in front of them, clay pipes by their sides,
while one among them read from a news sheet, and was frequently interrupted
by the laughter or the comments of the others. Were these taverns, were
these wits, were these poets? she asked of Captain Bartolus, who obligingly
informed her that even now - if she turned her head a little to the left and
looked along the line of his first finger - so - they were passing the Cocoa
Tree, where, - yes, there he was - one might see Mr Addison taking his
coffee; the other two gentlemen - "there, Ma'am, a little to the right of
the lamp-post, one of 'em humped, t'other much the same as you or me" - were
Mr Dryden and Mr Pope. "Sad dogs," said the Captain, by which he meant that
they were Papists, "but men of parts, none the less," he added, hurrying aft
to superintend the arrangements for landing. (The Captain must have been
mistaken, as a reference to any textbook of literature will show; but the
mistake was a kindly one, and so we let it stand.)
"Addison, Dryden, Pope," Orlando repeated as if the words were an
incantation. For one moment she saw the high mountains above Broussa, the
next, she had set her foot upon her native shore.
But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous flutter of
excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law; how harder than
the stones of London Bridge it is, and than the lips of a cannon more
severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was
made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries
from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been
preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor
litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief
charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold
any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the
same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina
Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring
that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to
them. Such grave charges as these would, of course, take time and money to
dispose of. All her estates were put in Chancery and her titles pronounced
in abeyance while the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly
ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman,
Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending
the legal judgment, she had the Law's permission to reside in a state of
incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be.
It was a fine evening in December when she arrived and the snow was
falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had seen them from
the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a house,
brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimneys smoking
busily as if inspired with a life of their own. She could not restrain a cry
as she saw it there tranquil and massive, couched upon the meadows. As the
yellow coach entered the park and came bowling along the drive between the
trees, the red deer raised their heads as if expectantly, and it was
observed that instead of showing the timidity natural to their kind, they
followed the coach and stood about the courtyard when it drew up. Some
tossed their antlers, others pawed the ground as the step was let down and
Orlando alighted. One, it is said, actually knelt in the snow before her.
She had not time to reach her hand towards the knocker before both wings of
the great door were flung open, and there, with lights and torches held
above their heads, were Mrs Grimsditch, Mr Dupper, and a whole retinue of
servants come to greet her. But the orderly procession was interrupted first
by the impetuosity of Canute, the elk-hound, who threw himself with such
ardour upon his mistress that he almost knocked her to the ground; next, by
the agitation of Mrs Grimsditch, who, making as if to curtsey, was overcome
with emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!
until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kiss upon both her cheeks. After
that, Mr Dupper began to read from a parchment, but the dogs barking, the
huntsmen winding their horns, and the stags, who had come into the courtyard
in the confusion, baying the moon, not much progress was made, and the
company dispersed within after crowding about their Mistress, and testifying
in every way to their great joy at her return.
No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando
they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of the
deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb
creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and
character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs Grimsditch, over her dish of china
tea, to Mr Dupper that night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen
a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was
as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two peaches on one