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branch; which, said Mrs Grimsditch, becoming confidential, she had always
had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very mysteriously), which it
was no surprise to her (here she nodded her head very knowingly), and for
her part, a very great comfort; for what with the towels wanting mending and
the curtains in the chaplain's parlour being moth-eaten round the fringes,
it was time they had a Mistress among them.
"And some little masters and mistresses to come after her," Mr Dupper
added, being privileged by virtue of his holy office to speak his mind on
such delicate matters as these.
So, while the old servants gossiped in the servants' hall, Orlando took
a silver candle in her hand and roamed once more through the halls, the
galleries, the courts, the bedrooms; saw loom down at her again the dark
visage of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain, among her ancestors; sat
now in this chair of state, now reclined on that canopy of delight; observed
the arras, how it swayed; watched the huntsmen riding and Daphne flying;
bathed her hand, as she had loved to do as a child, in the yellow pool of
light which the moonlight made falling through the heraldic Leopard in the
window; slid along the polished planks of the gallery, the other side of
which was rough timber; touched this silk, that satin; fancied the carved
dolphins swam; brushed her hair with King James' silver brush; buried her
face in the potpourri, which was made as the Conqueror had taught them many
hundred years ago and from the same roses; looked at the garden and imagined
the sleeping crocuses, the dormant dahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming
white in the snow and the great yew hedges, thick as a house, black behind
them; saw the orangeries and the giant medlars; all this she saw, and each
sight and sound, rudely as we write it down, filled her heart with such a
lust and balm of joy, that at length, tired out, she entered the Chapel and
sank into the old red arm-chair in which her ancestors used to hear service.
There she lit a cheroot ('twas a habit she had brought back from the East)
and opened the Prayer Book.
It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had
been held by Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye of faith could
detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the Royal blood. But
what pious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what evil passions it soothed
asleep, who dare say, seeing that of all communions this with the deity is
the most inscrutable? Novelist, poet, historian all falter with their hand
on that door; nor does the believer himself enlighten us, for is he more
ready to die than other people, or more eager to share his goods? Does he
not keep as many maids and carriage horses as the rest? and yet with it all,
holds a faith he says which should make goods a vanity and death desirable.
In the Queen's prayer book, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of
hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of
tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them
all - the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco - to such a mood of
contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances,
though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however,
can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods
there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's. Orlando, it
seemed, had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world,
she now reflected upon her sins and the imperfections that had crept into
her spiritual state. The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the
poet's Eden. Do what she would there were still too many of these sinful
reptiles in the first stanzas of "The Oak Tree". But "S" was nothing, in her
opinion, compared with the termination "ing". The present participle is the
Devil himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in
Devils. To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she
concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can
adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then,
is the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others
fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the
wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No time, no
devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our
message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest
integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine, etc. Thus it is obvious
that she was back in the confines of her own religion which time had only
strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of
belief.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper at last. "I am losing
some illusions," she said, shutting Queen Mary's book, "perhaps to acquire
others," and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her ancestors
lay.
But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and the
rest, had lost something of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi had waved
his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the fact that only three
or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their way to
make in the world like any modern upstart, and that they had made it by
acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other upstart
does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred
the quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the penalty by
extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or herded sheep
in the fields, filled her with remorse. She thought of the Egyptian pyramids
and what bones lie beneath them as she stood in the crypt; and the vast,
empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmara seemed, for the moment, a
finer dwelling-place than this many-roomed mansion in which no bed lacked
its quilt and no silver dish its silver cover.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper. "I am losing my
illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones," and she paced down the long gallery
to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was
interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire
(for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of
great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.
How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of
tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then - it was
the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps - into this high frenzy
was let fall some black drop, which turned her rhapsody into sluggishness.
Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered,
which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she
remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne,
whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude after her
affair with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows these growths are
agelong in coming, a spirit capable of resistance. "I will write," she had
said, "what I enjoy writing"; and so had scratched out twenty-six volumes.
Yet still, for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and
turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the
future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change
perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had
seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind
and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it. Here she went to the
window, and in spite of the cold could not help unlatching it. She leant out
into the damp night air. She heard a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter
of a pheasant trailing through the branches. She heard the snow slither and
flop from the roof to the ground. "By my life," she exclaimed, "this is a
thousand times better than Turkey. Rustum," she cried, as if she were
arguing with the gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind
and continuing it with someone who was not there to contradict she showed
again the development of her soul), "you were wrong. This is better than
Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco - of what odds and ends are we compounded,"
she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). "What a phantasmagoria the
mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our
birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are
overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes
sing." And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for
explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as to their
meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed.
Next morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had out her pen and
paper and started afresh upon "The Oak Tree", for to have ink and paper in
plenty when one has made do with berries and margins is a delight not to be
conceived. Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of despair,
now in the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when a shadow darkened the
page. She hastily hid her manuscript.
As her window gave on to the most central of the courts, as she had
given orders that she would see no one, as she knew no one and was herself
legally unknown, she was first surprised at the shadow, then indignant at
it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused it) overcome with
merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadow of
no less a personage than the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn
and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She was loping across the
court in her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of her
head was changed. This then was the woman who had chased her from England!
This was the eyrie of that obscene vulture - this the fatal fowl herself! At
the thought that she had fled all the way to Turkey to avoid her seductions
(now become excessively flat), Orlando laughed aloud. There was something
inexpressibly comic in the sight. She resembled, as Orlando had thought
before, nothing so much as a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes, the
lank cheeks, the high headdress of that animal. She stopped now, much as a
hare sits erect in the corn when thinking itself unobserved, and stared at
Orlando, who stared back at her from the window. After they had stared like
this for a certain time, there was nothing for it but to ask her in, and
soon the two ladies were exchanging compliments while the Archduchess struck
the snow from her mantle.
"A plague on women," said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to
fetch a glass of wine, "they never leave one a moment's peace. A more
ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying set of people don't exist. It was to
escape this Maypole that I left England, and now" - here she turned to
present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold - in her place stood a
tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone
with a man.
Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had
completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally
upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.
"La!" she cried, putting her hand to her side, "how you frighten me!"
"Gentle creature," cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at
the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando's lips, "forgive me for the
deceit I have practised on you!"
Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.
In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with
great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The Archduchess (but she
must in future be known as the Archduke) told his story - that he was a man
and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen
hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a
woman and lodged at the Baker's shop; that he was desolated when he fled to
Turkey; that he had heard of her change and hastened to offer his services
(here he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said the Archduke Harry,
she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex.
The three p's would have been more persuasive if they had not been
interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind. "If this is
love," said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of
the fender, and now from the woman's point of view, "there is something
highly ridiculous about it."
Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate
declaration of his suit. He told her that he had something like twenty
million ducats in a strong box at his castle. He had more acres than any
nobleman in England. The shooting was excellent: he could promise her a
mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no English moor, or Scotch either,
could rival. True, the pheasants had suffered from the gape in his absence,
and the does had slipped their young, but that could be put right, and would
be with her help when they lived in Roumania together.
As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran
down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.
That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew
from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that
women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so,
shocked she was.
The Archduke apologized. He commanded himself sufficiently to say that
he would leave her now, but would return on the following day for his
answer.
That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednesday; he came on Thursday; he came
on Friday; and he came on Saturday. It is true that each visit began,
continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there was
much room for silence. They sat on either side of the fireplace and
sometimes the Archduke knocked over the fire-irons and Orlando picked them
up again. Then the Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk in
Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke would
say that it was not as big as the reindeer which he shot in Norway; and
Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would say he
had shot an albatross, and Orlando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an
albatross as big as an elephant, and the Archduke would say - something very
sensible, no doubt, but Orlando heard it not, for she was looking at her
writing-table, out of the window, at the door. Upon which the Archduke would
say, "I adore you", at the very same moment that Orlando said "Look, it's
beginning to rain", at which they were both much embarrassed, and blushed
scarlet, and could neither of them think what to say next. Indeed, Orlando
was at her wit's end what to talk about and had she not bethought her of a
game called Fly Loo, at which great sums of money can be lost with very
little expense of spirit, she would have had to marry him, she supposed; for
how else to get rid of him she knew not. By this device, however, and it was
a simple one, needing only three lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies,
the embarrassment of conversation was overcome and the necessity of marriage
avoided. For now, the Archduke would bet her five hundred pounds to a tester
that a fly would settle on this lump and not on that. Thus, they would have
occupation for a whole morning watching the flies (who were naturally
sluggish at this season and often spent an hour or so circling round the
ceiling) until at length some fine blue-bottle made his choice and the match
was won. Many hundreds of pounds changed hands between them at this game,
which the Archduke, who was a born gambler, swore was every bit as good as
horse racing, and vowed he could play at for ever. But Orlando soon began to
weary.
"What's the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life," she
asked, "if I have to pass all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an
Archduke?"
She began to detest the sight of sugar; flies made her dizzy. Some way
out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward
in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head
or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think of no better
method than this. She caught a blue-bottle, gently pressed the life out of
it (it was half dead already; or her kindness for the dumb creatures would
not have permitted it) and secured it by a drop of gum arabic to a lump of
sugar. While the Archduke was gazing at the ceiling, she deftly substituted
this lump for the one she had laid her money on, and crying "Loo Loo!"
declared that she had won her bet. Her reckoning was that the Archduke, with
all his knowledge of sport and horseracing, would detect the fraud and, as
to cheat at Loo is the most heinous of crimes, and men have been banished
from the society of mankind to that of apes in the tropics for ever because
of it, she calculated that he would be manly enough to refuse to have
anything further to do with her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the
amiable nobleman. He was no nice judge of flies. A dead fly looked to him
much the same as a living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and
he paid her over 17,250 pounds (which is about 40,885 pounds 6 shillings and
8 pence of our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he
could be deceived no longer. When he realized the truth at last, a painful
scene ensued. The Archduke rose to his full height. He coloured scarlet.
Tears rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won a fortune from him
was nothing - she was welcome to it; that she had deceived him was something
- it hurt him to think her capable of it; but that she had cheated at Loo
was everything. To love a woman who cheated at play was, he said,
impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said, recovering
slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, after all, only a woman, he
said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her
and had bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his language, when she
cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a small toad
between his skin and his shirt.
In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have
preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one's person a
whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden; one must have recourse to
toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel
cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed.
She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.
"Heaven be praised!" cried Orlando still laughing. She heard the sound
of chariot wheels driven at a furious pace down the courtyard. She heard
them rattle along the road. Fainter and fainter the sound became. Now it
faded away altogether.
"I am alone," said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.
That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation
of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been
made love to, many women would take their oath. As the sound of the
Archduke's chariot wheels died away, Orlando felt drawing further from her
and further from her an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune (she did
not mind that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and circumstance
of married life (she did not mind that), but life she heard going from her,
and a lover. "Life and a lover," she murmured; and going to her
writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:
"Life and a lover" - a line which did not scan and made no sense with
what went before - something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid
the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,
"Life and a lover." Then laying her pen aside she went into her
bedroom, stood in front of her mirror, and arranged her pearls about her
neck. Then since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown of
sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of peach
bloom; thence to a wine-coloured brocade. Perhaps a dash of powder was
needed, and if her hair were disposed - so - about her brow, it might become
her. Then she slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and drew an emerald
ring upon her finger. "Now," she said when all was ready and lit the silver
sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to
see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow - for all about the
looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and
the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was
green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave,
singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to
embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly
seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put
it in plain English, and say outright, "Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness
incarnate," which was the truth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her
person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when
their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a
fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass - this smile
she smiled and then she listened for a moment and heard only the leaves
blowing and the sparrows twittering, and then she sighed, "Life, a lover,"
and then she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity; whipped her
pearls from her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect in the
neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman, and rang the bell.
When the servant came, she told him to order a coach and six to be in
readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent affairs to London. Within an
hour of the Archduke's departure, off she drove.
And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was
of a simple English kind which needs no description, to draw the reader's
attention more particularly than we could at the moment to one or two
remarks which have slipped in here and there in the course of the narrative.
For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when
interrupted. Next, that she looked long and intently in the glass; and now,
as she drove to London, one might notice her starting and suppressing a cry
when the horses galloped faster than she liked. Her modesty as to her
writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seems to
hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in
Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true.
She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a
little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were
asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes
had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they
seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us
warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For
example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning
stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef,
and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments
would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing,
been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid
compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she
complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done
had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's
satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes
that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was
visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at above,
even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of
Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the
same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize
his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her
shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for
his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at
it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same
clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.
That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole,
we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of
great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It
was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress
and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather
more openly than usual - openness indeed was the soul of her nature -
something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.
For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they
intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes
place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female
likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had
experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd
effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost
and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The
curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how
did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes
chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they
would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of
power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a
donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested
household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before
the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She
could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove
six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active
as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the
most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation.
She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some
caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to
travel south is to travel downhill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man or
woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. For her coach was
now rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in the city. The steps
were being let down; the iron gates were being opened. She was entering her
father's house at Blackfriars, which though fashion was fast deserting that
end of the town, was still a pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens running
down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.
Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her for
what she had come in search of - that is to say, life and a lover. About the
first there might be some doubt; the second she found without the least
difficulty two days after her arrival. It was a Tuesday that she came to
town. On Thursday she went for a walk in the Mall, as was then the habit of
persons of quality. She had not made more than a turn or two of the avenue
before she was observed by a little knot of vulgar people who go there to
spy upon their betters. As she came past them, a common woman carrying a
child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly into Orlando's face,
and cried out, "Lawk upon us, if it ain't the Lady Orlando!" Her companions
came crowding round, and Orlando found herself in a moment the centre of a
mob of staring citizens and tradesmen's wives, all eager to gaze upon the
heroine of the celebrated lawsuit. Such was the interest that the case
excited in the minds of the common people. She might, indeed, have found
herself gravely discommoded by the pressure of the crowd - she had forgotten
that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone - had not a tall
gentleman at once stepped forward and offered her the protection of his arm.
It was the Archduke. She was overcome with distress and yet with some
amusement at the sight. Not only had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her,
but in order to show that he took her levity with the toad in good part, he
had procured a jewel made in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon
her with a repetition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.
What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove
home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to go for a
walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad set in emeralds,
and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She took a kinder view of the case
next day when she found on her breakfast table half a dozen billets from
some of the greatest ladies in the land - Lady Suffolk, Lady Salisbury, Lady
Chesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her in the politest
manner of old alliances between their families and her own, and desired the
honour of her acquaintance. Next day, which was a Saturday, many of these
great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday, about noon, their footmen
brought cards of invitation to various routs, dinners, and assemblies in the
near future; so that Orlando was launched without delay, and with some
splash and foam at that, upon the waters of London society.
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any
other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only
those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets
and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases
where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma
- a mirage. To make our meaning plain - Orlando could come home from one of
these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas
tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of
times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun
would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself
to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and
sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all
this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a
reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack
her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word
to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A.
polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to
recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted,
she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a
thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the
excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that
society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about
Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of
a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid.
Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is
nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most
intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this
intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and
the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing.
Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no
existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can
deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to
prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content
to leave it.
Following the example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only say
that society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. To
have the entry there was the aim of every well-bred person. The graces were
supreme. Fathers instructed their sons, mothers their daughters. No
education was complete for either sex which did not include the science of
deportment, the art of bowing and curtseying, the management of the sword
and the fan, the care of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the flexibility
of the knee, the proper methods of entering and leaving the room, with a
thousand etceteras, such as will immediately suggest themselves to anybody
who has himself been in society. Since Orlando had won the praise of Queen
Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl of rose water as a boy, it must be
supposed that she was sufficiently expert to pass muster. Yet it is true
that there was an absentmindedness about her which sometimes made her
clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of
taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps,
and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Whether this slight disability was enough to counterbalance the
splendour of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop too much of that
black humour which ran in the veins of all her race, certain it is that she
had not been in the world more than a score of times before she might have
been heard to ask herself, had there been anybody but her spaniel Pippin to
hear her, "What the devil is the matter with me?" The occasion was Tuesday,
the 16th of June 1712; she had just returned from a great ball at Arlington
House; the dawn was in the sky, and she was pulling off her stockings. "I
don't care if I never meet another soul as long as I live," cried Orlando,
bursting into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is, after
all, of some importance in its way, escaped her. "Is this," she asked - but
there was none to answer, "is this," she finished her sentence all the same,
"what people call life?" The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of
sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the
spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips. In short,
there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its
mistress, and yet it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a
great impediment to the refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails;
they bow the front part of the body and elevate the hind; they roll, they
jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber, they have all sorts of
ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail,
since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog
gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlington House. They, too,
wag their tails, bow, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot.
"All these months that I've been out in the world," said Orlando, pitching
one stocking across the room, "I've heard nothing but what Pippin might have
said. I'm cold. I'm happy. I'm hungry. I've caught a mouse. I've buried a
bone. Please kiss my nose." And it was not enough.
How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we
will only seek to explain by supposing that this mysterious composition
which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself, but has
a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which either makes you drunk when you
think it, as Orlando thought it, delightful, or gives you a headache when
you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive. That the faculty of speech
has much to do with it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour
is the most ravishing of all; brilliant wit can be tedious beyond
description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.
Orlando threw the second stocking after the first and went to bed
dismally enough, determined that she would forswear society for ever. But
again as it turned out, she was too hasty in coming to her conclusions. For
the very next morning she woke to find, among the usual cards of invitation
upon her table, one from a certain great Lady, the Countess of R. Having
determined overnight that she would never go into society again, we can only
explain Orlando's behaviour - she sent a messenger hot-foot to R. House to
say that she would attend her Ladyship with all the pleasure in the world -
by the fact that she was still suffering from the effect of three honeyed
words dropped into her ear on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady" by Captain
Nicholas Benedict Bartolus as they sailed down the Thames. Addison, Dryden,
Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had
chimed in her head like an incantation ever since. Who can credit such
folly? but so it was. All her experience with Nick Greene had taught her
nothing. Such names still exercised over her the most powerful fascination.
Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no
belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men -
yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all.
But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief
that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one.
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. The little
glimpse she had of these great men from the deck of the ship was of the
nature of a vision. That the cup was china, or the gazette paper, she
doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he had dined with Dryden the night
before, she flatly disbelieved him. Now, the Lady R.'s reception room had
the reputation of being the antechamber to the presence room of genius; it
was the place where men and women met to swing censers and chant hymns to
the bust of genius in a niche in the wall. Sometimes the God himself
vouchsafed his presence for a moment. Intellect alone admitted the
suppliant, and nothing (so the report ran) was said inside that was not
witty.
It was thus with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room. She
found a company already assembled in a semicircle round the fire. Lady R.,
an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace mantilla on her head,
was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre. Thus being somewhat deaf, she
could control the conversation on both sides of her. On both sides of her
sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had
been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the
mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were
famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence...After three
hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.
But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in
between. In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the
profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem
indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious
characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that
the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty
years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty
sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said,
or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings
lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave
a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
The truth would seem to be - if we dare use such a word in such a
connection - that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment. The
hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a
spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third
profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions
are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create
one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that
illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no
real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This
serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no more than three witty things
in the course of fifty years. Had she said more, her circle would have been
destroyed. The witticism, as it left her lips, bowled over the current
conversation as a cannon ball lays low the violets and the daisies. When she
made her famous "mot de Saint Denis" the very grass was singed.
Disillusionment and desolation followed. Not a word was uttered. "Spare us
another such, for Heaven's sake, Madame!" her friends cried with one accord.
And she obeyed. For almost seventeen years she said nothing memorable and
all went well. The beautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbroken on her
circle as it lay unbroken on the circle of Lady R. The guests thought that
they were happy, thought that they were witty, thought that they were
profound, and, as they thought this, other people thought it still more
strongly; and so it got about that nothing was more delightful than one of
Lady R.'s assemblies; everyone envied those who were admitted; those who
were admitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and so
there seemed no end to it - except that which we have now to relate.
For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident
occurred. She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the
most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old
General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left
leg and gone to his right, while Mr L. interrupted when any proper name was
mentioned, "R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest
friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire" - which, such is the
force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the most searching
comment upon human life, and kept the company in a roar; when the door
opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon
a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their faces,
the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was a draught.
The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be under the sofa. It was as if
their eyes were being slowly opened after a pleasant dream and nothing met
them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It was as if the fumes
of some delicious wine were slowly leaving them. Still the General talked
and still Mr L. remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the
General's neck was, how bald Mr L.'s head was. As for what they said -
nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted and
those who had fans yawned behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon
the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.
Then the little gentleman said, He said next, He said finally (These
sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all
to be found in his published works.),
Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity.
The company was thrown into complete dismay. One such saying was bad enough;
but three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive
it.
"Mr Pope," said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic fury,
"you are pleased to be witty." Mr Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke a word.
They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose
and slunk from the room. That they would ever come back after such an
had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very mysteriously), which it
was no surprise to her (here she nodded her head very knowingly), and for
her part, a very great comfort; for what with the towels wanting mending and
the curtains in the chaplain's parlour being moth-eaten round the fringes,
it was time they had a Mistress among them.
"And some little masters and mistresses to come after her," Mr Dupper
added, being privileged by virtue of his holy office to speak his mind on
such delicate matters as these.
So, while the old servants gossiped in the servants' hall, Orlando took
a silver candle in her hand and roamed once more through the halls, the
galleries, the courts, the bedrooms; saw loom down at her again the dark
visage of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain, among her ancestors; sat
now in this chair of state, now reclined on that canopy of delight; observed
the arras, how it swayed; watched the huntsmen riding and Daphne flying;
bathed her hand, as she had loved to do as a child, in the yellow pool of
light which the moonlight made falling through the heraldic Leopard in the
window; slid along the polished planks of the gallery, the other side of
which was rough timber; touched this silk, that satin; fancied the carved
dolphins swam; brushed her hair with King James' silver brush; buried her
face in the potpourri, which was made as the Conqueror had taught them many
hundred years ago and from the same roses; looked at the garden and imagined
the sleeping crocuses, the dormant dahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming
white in the snow and the great yew hedges, thick as a house, black behind
them; saw the orangeries and the giant medlars; all this she saw, and each
sight and sound, rudely as we write it down, filled her heart with such a
lust and balm of joy, that at length, tired out, she entered the Chapel and
sank into the old red arm-chair in which her ancestors used to hear service.
There she lit a cheroot ('twas a habit she had brought back from the East)
and opened the Prayer Book.
It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had
been held by Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye of faith could
detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the Royal blood. But
what pious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what evil passions it soothed
asleep, who dare say, seeing that of all communions this with the deity is
the most inscrutable? Novelist, poet, historian all falter with their hand
on that door; nor does the believer himself enlighten us, for is he more
ready to die than other people, or more eager to share his goods? Does he
not keep as many maids and carriage horses as the rest? and yet with it all,
holds a faith he says which should make goods a vanity and death desirable.
In the Queen's prayer book, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of
hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of
tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them
all - the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco - to such a mood of
contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances,
though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however,
can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods
there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's. Orlando, it
seemed, had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world,
she now reflected upon her sins and the imperfections that had crept into
her spiritual state. The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the
poet's Eden. Do what she would there were still too many of these sinful
reptiles in the first stanzas of "The Oak Tree". But "S" was nothing, in her
opinion, compared with the termination "ing". The present participle is the
Devil himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in
Devils. To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she
concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can
adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then,
is the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others
fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the
wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No time, no
devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our
message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest
integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine, etc. Thus it is obvious
that she was back in the confines of her own religion which time had only
strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of
belief.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper at last. "I am losing
some illusions," she said, shutting Queen Mary's book, "perhaps to acquire
others," and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her ancestors
lay.
But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and the
rest, had lost something of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi had waved
his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the fact that only three
or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their way to
make in the world like any modern upstart, and that they had made it by
acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other upstart
does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred
the quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the penalty by
extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or herded sheep
in the fields, filled her with remorse. She thought of the Egyptian pyramids
and what bones lie beneath them as she stood in the crypt; and the vast,
empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmara seemed, for the moment, a
finer dwelling-place than this many-roomed mansion in which no bed lacked
its quilt and no silver dish its silver cover.
"I am growing up," she thought, taking her taper. "I am losing my
illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones," and she paced down the long gallery
to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was
interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire
(for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of
great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.
How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of
tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then - it was
the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps - into this high frenzy
was let fall some black drop, which turned her rhapsody into sluggishness.
Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered,
which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she
remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne,
whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude after her
affair with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows these growths are
agelong in coming, a spirit capable of resistance. "I will write," she had
said, "what I enjoy writing"; and so had scratched out twenty-six volumes.
Yet still, for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and
turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the
future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change
perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had
seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind
and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it. Here she went to the
window, and in spite of the cold could not help unlatching it. She leant out
into the damp night air. She heard a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter
of a pheasant trailing through the branches. She heard the snow slither and
flop from the roof to the ground. "By my life," she exclaimed, "this is a
thousand times better than Turkey. Rustum," she cried, as if she were
arguing with the gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind
and continuing it with someone who was not there to contradict she showed
again the development of her soul), "you were wrong. This is better than
Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco - of what odds and ends are we compounded,"
she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). "What a phantasmagoria the
mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our
birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are
overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes
sing." And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for
explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as to their
meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed.
Next morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had out her pen and
paper and started afresh upon "The Oak Tree", for to have ink and paper in
plenty when one has made do with berries and margins is a delight not to be
conceived. Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of despair,
now in the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when a shadow darkened the
page. She hastily hid her manuscript.
As her window gave on to the most central of the courts, as she had
given orders that she would see no one, as she knew no one and was herself
legally unknown, she was first surprised at the shadow, then indignant at
it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused it) overcome with
merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadow of
no less a personage than the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn
and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She was loping across the
court in her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of her
head was changed. This then was the woman who had chased her from England!
This was the eyrie of that obscene vulture - this the fatal fowl herself! At
the thought that she had fled all the way to Turkey to avoid her seductions
(now become excessively flat), Orlando laughed aloud. There was something
inexpressibly comic in the sight. She resembled, as Orlando had thought
before, nothing so much as a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes, the
lank cheeks, the high headdress of that animal. She stopped now, much as a
hare sits erect in the corn when thinking itself unobserved, and stared at
Orlando, who stared back at her from the window. After they had stared like
this for a certain time, there was nothing for it but to ask her in, and
soon the two ladies were exchanging compliments while the Archduchess struck
the snow from her mantle.
"A plague on women," said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to
fetch a glass of wine, "they never leave one a moment's peace. A more
ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying set of people don't exist. It was to
escape this Maypole that I left England, and now" - here she turned to
present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold - in her place stood a
tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone
with a man.
Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had
completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally
upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.
"La!" she cried, putting her hand to her side, "how you frighten me!"
"Gentle creature," cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at
the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando's lips, "forgive me for the
deceit I have practised on you!"
Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.
In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with
great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The Archduchess (but she
must in future be known as the Archduke) told his story - that he was a man
and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen
hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a
woman and lodged at the Baker's shop; that he was desolated when he fled to
Turkey; that he had heard of her change and hastened to offer his services
(here he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said the Archduke Harry,
she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex.
The three p's would have been more persuasive if they had not been
interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind. "If this is
love," said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of
the fender, and now from the woman's point of view, "there is something
highly ridiculous about it."
Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate
declaration of his suit. He told her that he had something like twenty
million ducats in a strong box at his castle. He had more acres than any
nobleman in England. The shooting was excellent: he could promise her a
mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no English moor, or Scotch either,
could rival. True, the pheasants had suffered from the gape in his absence,
and the does had slipped their young, but that could be put right, and would
be with her help when they lived in Roumania together.
As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran
down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.
That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew
from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that
women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so,
shocked she was.
The Archduke apologized. He commanded himself sufficiently to say that
he would leave her now, but would return on the following day for his
answer.
That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednesday; he came on Thursday; he came
on Friday; and he came on Saturday. It is true that each visit began,
continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there was
much room for silence. They sat on either side of the fireplace and
sometimes the Archduke knocked over the fire-irons and Orlando picked them
up again. Then the Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk in
Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke would
say that it was not as big as the reindeer which he shot in Norway; and
Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would say he
had shot an albatross, and Orlando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an
albatross as big as an elephant, and the Archduke would say - something very
sensible, no doubt, but Orlando heard it not, for she was looking at her
writing-table, out of the window, at the door. Upon which the Archduke would
say, "I adore you", at the very same moment that Orlando said "Look, it's
beginning to rain", at which they were both much embarrassed, and blushed
scarlet, and could neither of them think what to say next. Indeed, Orlando
was at her wit's end what to talk about and had she not bethought her of a
game called Fly Loo, at which great sums of money can be lost with very
little expense of spirit, she would have had to marry him, she supposed; for
how else to get rid of him she knew not. By this device, however, and it was
a simple one, needing only three lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies,
the embarrassment of conversation was overcome and the necessity of marriage
avoided. For now, the Archduke would bet her five hundred pounds to a tester
that a fly would settle on this lump and not on that. Thus, they would have
occupation for a whole morning watching the flies (who were naturally
sluggish at this season and often spent an hour or so circling round the
ceiling) until at length some fine blue-bottle made his choice and the match
was won. Many hundreds of pounds changed hands between them at this game,
which the Archduke, who was a born gambler, swore was every bit as good as
horse racing, and vowed he could play at for ever. But Orlando soon began to
weary.
"What's the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life," she
asked, "if I have to pass all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an
Archduke?"
She began to detest the sight of sugar; flies made her dizzy. Some way
out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward
in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head
or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think of no better
method than this. She caught a blue-bottle, gently pressed the life out of
it (it was half dead already; or her kindness for the dumb creatures would
not have permitted it) and secured it by a drop of gum arabic to a lump of
sugar. While the Archduke was gazing at the ceiling, she deftly substituted
this lump for the one she had laid her money on, and crying "Loo Loo!"
declared that she had won her bet. Her reckoning was that the Archduke, with
all his knowledge of sport and horseracing, would detect the fraud and, as
to cheat at Loo is the most heinous of crimes, and men have been banished
from the society of mankind to that of apes in the tropics for ever because
of it, she calculated that he would be manly enough to refuse to have
anything further to do with her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the
amiable nobleman. He was no nice judge of flies. A dead fly looked to him
much the same as a living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and
he paid her over 17,250 pounds (which is about 40,885 pounds 6 shillings and
8 pence of our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he
could be deceived no longer. When he realized the truth at last, a painful
scene ensued. The Archduke rose to his full height. He coloured scarlet.
Tears rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won a fortune from him
was nothing - she was welcome to it; that she had deceived him was something
- it hurt him to think her capable of it; but that she had cheated at Loo
was everything. To love a woman who cheated at play was, he said,
impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said, recovering
slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, after all, only a woman, he
said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her
and had bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his language, when she
cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a small toad
between his skin and his shirt.
In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have
preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one's person a
whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden; one must have recourse to
toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel
cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed.
She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.
"Heaven be praised!" cried Orlando still laughing. She heard the sound
of chariot wheels driven at a furious pace down the courtyard. She heard
them rattle along the road. Fainter and fainter the sound became. Now it
faded away altogether.
"I am alone," said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.
That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation
of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been
made love to, many women would take their oath. As the sound of the
Archduke's chariot wheels died away, Orlando felt drawing further from her
and further from her an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune (she did
not mind that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and circumstance
of married life (she did not mind that), but life she heard going from her,
and a lover. "Life and a lover," she murmured; and going to her
writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:
"Life and a lover" - a line which did not scan and made no sense with
what went before - something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid
the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,
"Life and a lover." Then laying her pen aside she went into her
bedroom, stood in front of her mirror, and arranged her pearls about her
neck. Then since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown of
sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of peach
bloom; thence to a wine-coloured brocade. Perhaps a dash of powder was
needed, and if her hair were disposed - so - about her brow, it might become
her. Then she slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and drew an emerald
ring upon her finger. "Now," she said when all was ready and lit the silver
sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to
see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow - for all about the
looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and
the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was
green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave,
singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to
embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly
seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put
it in plain English, and say outright, "Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness
incarnate," which was the truth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her
person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when
their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a
fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass - this smile
she smiled and then she listened for a moment and heard only the leaves
blowing and the sparrows twittering, and then she sighed, "Life, a lover,"
and then she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity; whipped her
pearls from her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect in the
neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman, and rang the bell.
When the servant came, she told him to order a coach and six to be in
readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent affairs to London. Within an
hour of the Archduke's departure, off she drove.
And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was
of a simple English kind which needs no description, to draw the reader's
attention more particularly than we could at the moment to one or two
remarks which have slipped in here and there in the course of the narrative.
For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when
interrupted. Next, that she looked long and intently in the glass; and now,
as she drove to London, one might notice her starting and suppressing a cry
when the horses galloped faster than she liked. Her modesty as to her
writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seems to
hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in
Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true.
She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a
little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were
asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes
had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they
seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us
warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For
example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning
stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef,
and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments
would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing,
been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid
compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she
complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done
had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's
satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes
that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was
visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at above,
even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of
Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the
same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize
his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her
shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for
his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at
it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same
clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.
That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole,
we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of
great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It
was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress
and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather
more openly than usual - openness indeed was the soul of her nature -
something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.
For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they
intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes
place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female
likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had
experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd
effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost
and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The
curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how
did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes
chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they
would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of
power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a
donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested
household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before
the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She
could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove
six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active
as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the
most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation.
She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some
caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to
travel south is to travel downhill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man or
woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. For her coach was
now rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in the city. The steps
were being let down; the iron gates were being opened. She was entering her
father's house at Blackfriars, which though fashion was fast deserting that
end of the town, was still a pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens running
down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.
Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her for
what she had come in search of - that is to say, life and a lover. About the
first there might be some doubt; the second she found without the least
difficulty two days after her arrival. It was a Tuesday that she came to
town. On Thursday she went for a walk in the Mall, as was then the habit of
persons of quality. She had not made more than a turn or two of the avenue
before she was observed by a little knot of vulgar people who go there to
spy upon their betters. As she came past them, a common woman carrying a
child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly into Orlando's face,
and cried out, "Lawk upon us, if it ain't the Lady Orlando!" Her companions
came crowding round, and Orlando found herself in a moment the centre of a
mob of staring citizens and tradesmen's wives, all eager to gaze upon the
heroine of the celebrated lawsuit. Such was the interest that the case
excited in the minds of the common people. She might, indeed, have found
herself gravely discommoded by the pressure of the crowd - she had forgotten
that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone - had not a tall
gentleman at once stepped forward and offered her the protection of his arm.
It was the Archduke. She was overcome with distress and yet with some
amusement at the sight. Not only had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her,
but in order to show that he took her levity with the toad in good part, he
had procured a jewel made in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon
her with a repetition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.
What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove
home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to go for a
walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad set in emeralds,
and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She took a kinder view of the case
next day when she found on her breakfast table half a dozen billets from
some of the greatest ladies in the land - Lady Suffolk, Lady Salisbury, Lady
Chesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her in the politest
manner of old alliances between their families and her own, and desired the
honour of her acquaintance. Next day, which was a Saturday, many of these
great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday, about noon, their footmen
brought cards of invitation to various routs, dinners, and assemblies in the
near future; so that Orlando was launched without delay, and with some
splash and foam at that, upon the waters of London society.
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any
other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only
those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets
and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases
where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma
- a mirage. To make our meaning plain - Orlando could come home from one of
these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas
tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of
times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun
would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself
to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and
sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all
this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a
reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack
her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word
to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A.
polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to
recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted,
she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a
thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the
excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that
society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about
Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of
a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid.
Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is
nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most
intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this
intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and
the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing.
Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no
existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can
deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to
prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content
to leave it.
Following the example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only say
that society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. To
have the entry there was the aim of every well-bred person. The graces were
supreme. Fathers instructed their sons, mothers their daughters. No
education was complete for either sex which did not include the science of
deportment, the art of bowing and curtseying, the management of the sword
and the fan, the care of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the flexibility
of the knee, the proper methods of entering and leaving the room, with a
thousand etceteras, such as will immediately suggest themselves to anybody
who has himself been in society. Since Orlando had won the praise of Queen
Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl of rose water as a boy, it must be
supposed that she was sufficiently expert to pass muster. Yet it is true
that there was an absentmindedness about her which sometimes made her
clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of
taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps,
and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Whether this slight disability was enough to counterbalance the
splendour of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop too much of that
black humour which ran in the veins of all her race, certain it is that she
had not been in the world more than a score of times before she might have
been heard to ask herself, had there been anybody but her spaniel Pippin to
hear her, "What the devil is the matter with me?" The occasion was Tuesday,
the 16th of June 1712; she had just returned from a great ball at Arlington
House; the dawn was in the sky, and she was pulling off her stockings. "I
don't care if I never meet another soul as long as I live," cried Orlando,
bursting into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is, after
all, of some importance in its way, escaped her. "Is this," she asked - but
there was none to answer, "is this," she finished her sentence all the same,
"what people call life?" The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of
sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the
spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips. In short,
there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its
mistress, and yet it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a
great impediment to the refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails;
they bow the front part of the body and elevate the hind; they roll, they
jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber, they have all sorts of
ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail,
since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog
gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlington House. They, too,
wag their tails, bow, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot.
"All these months that I've been out in the world," said Orlando, pitching
one stocking across the room, "I've heard nothing but what Pippin might have
said. I'm cold. I'm happy. I'm hungry. I've caught a mouse. I've buried a
bone. Please kiss my nose." And it was not enough.
How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we
will only seek to explain by supposing that this mysterious composition
which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself, but has
a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which either makes you drunk when you
think it, as Orlando thought it, delightful, or gives you a headache when
you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive. That the faculty of speech
has much to do with it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour
is the most ravishing of all; brilliant wit can be tedious beyond
description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.
Orlando threw the second stocking after the first and went to bed
dismally enough, determined that she would forswear society for ever. But
again as it turned out, she was too hasty in coming to her conclusions. For
the very next morning she woke to find, among the usual cards of invitation
upon her table, one from a certain great Lady, the Countess of R. Having
determined overnight that she would never go into society again, we can only
explain Orlando's behaviour - she sent a messenger hot-foot to R. House to
say that she would attend her Ladyship with all the pleasure in the world -
by the fact that she was still suffering from the effect of three honeyed
words dropped into her ear on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady" by Captain
Nicholas Benedict Bartolus as they sailed down the Thames. Addison, Dryden,
Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had
chimed in her head like an incantation ever since. Who can credit such
folly? but so it was. All her experience with Nick Greene had taught her
nothing. Such names still exercised over her the most powerful fascination.
Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no
belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men -
yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all.
But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief
that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one.
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. The little
glimpse she had of these great men from the deck of the ship was of the
nature of a vision. That the cup was china, or the gazette paper, she
doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he had dined with Dryden the night
before, she flatly disbelieved him. Now, the Lady R.'s reception room had
the reputation of being the antechamber to the presence room of genius; it
was the place where men and women met to swing censers and chant hymns to
the bust of genius in a niche in the wall. Sometimes the God himself
vouchsafed his presence for a moment. Intellect alone admitted the
suppliant, and nothing (so the report ran) was said inside that was not
witty.
It was thus with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room. She
found a company already assembled in a semicircle round the fire. Lady R.,
an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace mantilla on her head,
was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre. Thus being somewhat deaf, she
could control the conversation on both sides of her. On both sides of her
sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had
been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the
mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were
famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence...After three
hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.
But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in
between. In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the
profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem
indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious
characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that
the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty
years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty
sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said,
or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings
lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave
a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
The truth would seem to be - if we dare use such a word in such a
connection - that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment. The
hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a
spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third
profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions
are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create
one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that
illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no
real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This
serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no more than three witty things
in the course of fifty years. Had she said more, her circle would have been
destroyed. The witticism, as it left her lips, bowled over the current
conversation as a cannon ball lays low the violets and the daisies. When she
made her famous "mot de Saint Denis" the very grass was singed.
Disillusionment and desolation followed. Not a word was uttered. "Spare us
another such, for Heaven's sake, Madame!" her friends cried with one accord.
And she obeyed. For almost seventeen years she said nothing memorable and
all went well. The beautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbroken on her
circle as it lay unbroken on the circle of Lady R. The guests thought that
they were happy, thought that they were witty, thought that they were
profound, and, as they thought this, other people thought it still more
strongly; and so it got about that nothing was more delightful than one of
Lady R.'s assemblies; everyone envied those who were admitted; those who
were admitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and so
there seemed no end to it - except that which we have now to relate.
For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident
occurred. She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the
most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old
General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left
leg and gone to his right, while Mr L. interrupted when any proper name was
mentioned, "R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest
friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire" - which, such is the
force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the most searching
comment upon human life, and kept the company in a roar; when the door
opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon
a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their faces,
the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was a draught.
The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be under the sofa. It was as if
their eyes were being slowly opened after a pleasant dream and nothing met
them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It was as if the fumes
of some delicious wine were slowly leaving them. Still the General talked
and still Mr L. remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the
General's neck was, how bald Mr L.'s head was. As for what they said -
nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted and
those who had fans yawned behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon
the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.
Then the little gentleman said, He said next, He said finally (These
sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all
to be found in his published works.),
Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity.
The company was thrown into complete dismay. One such saying was bad enough;
but three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive
it.
"Mr Pope," said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic fury,
"you are pleased to be witty." Mr Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke a word.
They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose
and slunk from the room. That they would ever come back after such an