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horrid cockney phrase in Mrs Bartholomew's refined cockney accents as she
drank - but no, she detested the mild fluid - her tea. It was in this very
room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace
with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on the table
when Lord Burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of the
subjunctive. "Little man, little man," - Orlando could hear her say - "is
`must' a word to be addressed to princes?" And down came the flagon on the
table: there was the mark of it still.
But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great
Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her
arm-chair with a curse. Tomorrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more
of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. And then (here she
blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a
bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on...The blushes came and
went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. One
might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her cheeks.
And if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the crinoline being
blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous position must excuse her (even
her sex was still in dispute) and the irregular life she had lived before.
At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed
as if the spirit of the age - if such indeed it were - lay dormant for a
time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or
relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper,
sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained - the manuscript of her poem,
"The Oak Tree". She had carried this about with her for so many years now,
and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained,
some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when
with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the
lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most
conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the
date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for
close three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she
began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read,
how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy,
in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid;
and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried
prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she
had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same
brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same
passion for the country and the seasons.
"After all," she thought, getting up and going to the window, "nothing
has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a chair
has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the same
lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the same
carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth,
but what difference..."
No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the
door was flung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed by
Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just
dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the
eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which
spread and meandered round her pen. It was some infirmity of the quill, she
supposed; it was split or dirty. She dipped it again. The blot increased.
She tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came. Next she began
to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed
monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry
with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had
she said "Impossible" than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to
curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written
in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever
read in her life:
I am myself but a vile link
Amid life's weary chain,
But I have spoken hallow'd words,
Oh, do not say in vain!
Will the young maiden, when her tears,
Alone in moonlight shine,
Tears for the absent and the loved,
Murmur?
she wrote without a stop as Bartholomew and Basket grunted and groaned
about the room, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.
Again she dipped her pen and off it went:
She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve
Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
Had faded into paleness, broken by
Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,
but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page and
blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all
of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink
flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. What had happened to
her? Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she
demanded. But the room was empty. No one answered her, unless the dripping
of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an
extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a
thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales.
Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about
the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and
twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years
or so. But all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands;
and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally
to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the
second finger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see what caused
this agitation, she saw nothing - nothing but the vast solitary emerald
which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It
was of the finest water. It was worth ten thousand pounds at least. The
vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some
of the darkest manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not
enough; and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were
asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight - till poor
Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand
without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask
which dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were
much quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly
perceived what she had never noticed before - a thick ring of rather
jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.
"Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew," she said, stretching her hand
to take it.
At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a
rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it away
from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. "No," she said, with
resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but as for taking
off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor Queen Victoria on
her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had put it on her finger
twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked
in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact,
Orlando understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with emotion;
that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her
station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she
let it out of her keeping for a second.
"Heaven help us," said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the
pigeons at their pranks, "what a world we live in! What a world to be sure!"
Its complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole world was
ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to
church. Wedding rings were everywhere. She drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck,
thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. Rings filled
the jewellers' shops, not the flashing pastes and diamonds of Orlando's
recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. At the same time,
she began to notice a new habit among the town people. In the old days, one
would meet a boy trifling with a girl under a hawthorn hedge frequently
enough. Orlando had flicked many a couple with the tip of her whip and
laughed and passed on. Now, all that was changed. Couples trudged and
plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman's
right hand was invariably passed through the man's left and her fingers were
firmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the horses' noses were on them
that they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one piece,
heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only suppose that some new
discovery had been made about the race; that they were somehow stuck
together, couple after couple, but who had made it and when, she could not
guess. It did not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits
and the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or
mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no indissoluble
alliance among the brutes that she could see. Could it be Queen Victoria
then, or Lord Melbourne? Was it from them that the great discovery of
marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of
dogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. It
was strange - it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this
indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and
sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were accompanied by such a tingling
and twanging of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas
in order. They were languishing and ogling like a housemaid's fancies. They
made her blush. There was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands
and wear it like the rest. This she did, slipping it, overcome with shame,
upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. The tingling
persisted more violently, more indignantly than ever. She did not sleep a
wink that night. Next morning when she took up the pen to write, either she
could think of nothing, and the pen made one large lachrymose blot after
another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies
about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the
fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds
itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel
herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider
the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and
submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.
That this was much against her natural temperament has been
sufficiently made plain. When the sound of the Archduke's chariot wheels
died away, the cry that rose to her lips was "Life! A Lover!" not "Life! A
Husband!" and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and
run about the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. Such is the
indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down
anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those
who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the
Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the
eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change
from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and
she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For
it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it;
some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a
woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were
fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so
christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which
she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress
she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could
she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high
mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp
leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were
quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became
nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the
first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things
inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen
Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has another allotted
to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them
do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie
down; never, never, never to get up again. Thus did the spirit work upon
her, for all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of
emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those twangings and
tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the
sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if angels were plucking harp-strings
with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the wild
autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he
had married a very great lady and had hunted hares in Roumania these many
years now; nor Mr M.; he was become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he
made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for fishes.
One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the
Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean
upon.
"Whom," she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping
her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of
appealing womanhood as she did so, "can I lean upon?" Her words formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had
written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of
the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling
pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had stopped at last
and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her
plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
"Everyone is mated except myself," she mused, as she trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and Pippin
even - transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to
have a partner. "Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all," Orlando thought,
glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned windows of the hall,
"am single, am mateless, am alone."
Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down
unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved
hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One must lean on someone, she
thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and help
him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid to ask
it. So she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and
apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys
to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.
At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be
hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss
her. But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume
from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers. She
had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.
The air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. As the rooks went
whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming
through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind
her, over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so far for years. Six
feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn between her fingers and
pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw,
gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, mysterious as the lake into which
Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur. A single feather quivered in the air
and fell into the middle of it. Then, some strange ecstasy came over her.
Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and
flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while
the rooks' hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she
ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle
was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the
bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks' hoarse
laughter was in her ears. "I have found my mate," she murmured. "It is the
moor. I am nature's bride," she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the
cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by
the pool. "Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a
greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild
birds' feathers - the owl's, the nightjar's. I shall dream wild dreams. My
hands shall wear no wedding ring," she continued, slipping it from her
finger. "The roots shall twine about them. Ah!" she sighed, pressing her
head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, "I have sought happiness through many
ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life - and
behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women," she
continued; "none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace
here with only the sky above me - as the gipsy told me years ago. That was
in Turkey." And she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into
which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it,
and camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of
red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only mountains,
very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she
heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields of
irises and gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered
themselves down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw
the great hump of the South Downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and
where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with ships passing; and
she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and thought at first, "That's
the Armada," and then thought "No, it's Nelson," and then remembered how
those wars were over and the ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails
on the winding river were those of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle
sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming
here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle
as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out
and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. Indeed, she was
falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the
ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a
heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil,
or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought
it changed to the trot of a horse's hoofs; one, two, three, four, she
counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she
could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The
horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the
yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him,
she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
"Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!"
"I'm dead, sir!" she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It
was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous,
passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild,
dark-plumed name - a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of
rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting
descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things
which will be described presently.
"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship
in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the
Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he
explained.
In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed,
as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each
other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such
unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether
they were beggars or people of substance. He had a castle in the Hebrides,
but it was ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting hall. He
had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the East. He was on his
way now to join his brig at Falmouth, but the wind had fallen and it was
only when the gale blew from the South-west that he could put out to sea.
Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on
the weather vane. Mercifully its tail pointed due east and was steady as a
rock. "Oh! Shel, don't leave me!" she cried. "I'm passionately in love with
you," she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful
suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
"You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then
took place since the world began. When it was over and they were seated
again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west gale? Where was he
bound for?
"For the Horn," he said briefly, and blushed. (For a man had to blush
as a woman had, only at rather different things.) It was only by dint of
great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she gathered
that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures -
which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale. Masts had been
snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him).
Sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a
raft with a biscuit.
"It's about all a fellow can do nowadays," he said sheepishly, and
helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision which she
had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for
which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he
roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the
tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than any she had
cried before: "I am a woman," she thought, "a real woman, at last." She
thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare
and unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left foot, she would
have sat upon his knee.
"Shel, my darling," she began again, "tell me..." and so they talked
two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would
profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well
that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or
saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy
the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their
setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come
about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost
dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions
do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the
most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which
reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that
the space is filled to repletion.
After some days more of this kind of talk,
"Orlando, my dearest," Shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling
outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there was a
couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.
"Show 'em up," said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck,
taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the
fireplace. Two officers in bottlegreen uniforms with truncheons at their
hips then entered the room and stood at attention. Formalities being over,
they gave into Orlando's own hands, as their commission was, a legal
document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs of sealing wax,
the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest
importance.
Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her
right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to
the matter.
"The lawsuits are settled," she read out..."some in my favour, as for
example...others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in
Constantinople, Shel," she explained) "Children pronounced illegitimate,
(they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don't
inherit, which is all to the good...Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex," she
read out with some solemnity, "is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The
estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed
and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage" -
but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, "but there
won't be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be
taken as read." Whereupon she appended her own signature beneath Lord
Palmerston's and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of
her titles, her house, and her estate - which was now so much shrunk, for
the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was
infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much
quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was
filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken
out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street
incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the
Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass
cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded.
Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were
burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys
with the label "I am a base Pretender", lolling from their mouths. The
Queen's cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a
command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night.
Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from
the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs
W.E. Gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding
her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] - all of
which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason
that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando's life. She
skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bonfires were blazing in
the marketplace, she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine
was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above
them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one
could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest
at last, on Orlando's foot.
"Tell me, Mar," she would say (and here it must be explained, that when
she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy,
amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs
were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet
perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might
be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant
farms, a cock crowing - all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)
- "Tell me, Mar," she would say, "about Cape Horn." Then Shelmerdine would
make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and
an empty snail shell or two.
"Here's the north," he would say. "There's the south. The wind's coming
from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we've just lowered the
top-boom mizzen: and so you see - here, where this bit of grass is, she
enters the current which you'll find marked - where's my map and compasses,
Bo'sun? Ah! thanks, that'll do, where the snail shell is. The current
catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall
be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf is, - for you
must understand my dear" - and so he would go on, and she would listen to
every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without
his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles
clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there
reflected on the destiny of man; came down again; had a whisky and soda;
went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read
Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true
end of life; decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a
thousand other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied,
Yes, negresses are seductive, aren't they? he having told her that the
supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how
well she had taken his meaning.
"Are you positive you aren't a man?" he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,
"Can it be possible you're not a woman?" and then they must put it to
the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of
the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman
could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and
subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.
And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has
become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so
scanty in comparison with ideas that "the biscuits ran out" has to stand for
kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's
philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most
profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple
one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the
poor man is lying.)
So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with
spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart of
the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there among the snail
shells, making models of Cape Horn. "Bonthrop," she would say, "I'm off,"
and when she called him by his second name, "Bonthrop", it should signify to
the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks on a
desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily,
die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and
with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby asking her out
every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so
saying "Bonthrop", she said in effect, "I'm dead", and pushed her way as a
spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep
into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and movement were over and
she were free now to take her way - all of which the reader should hear in
her voice when she said "Bonthrop", and should also add, the better to
illumine the word, that for him too the same word signified, mystically,
separation and isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in
unfathomable seas.
After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked "Shelmerdine", and
stooping, she picked up one of those autumn crocuses which to some people
signify that very word, and put it with the jay's feather that came tumbling
blue through the beech woods, in her breast. Then she called "Shelmerdine"
and the word went shooting this way and that way through the woods and
struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells in the grass. He
saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay's feather
in her breast, and cried "Orlando", which meant (and it must be remembered
that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes,
some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken
as if something were breaking through; which proved to be a ship in full
sail, heaving and tossing a little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole
year of summer days to make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down,
heaving this way, heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the
crest of this wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly
stands over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at
her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap
on deck - as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the
26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine recited
Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which had started
to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across Orlando's foot.
A second leaf followed and then a third. Orlando shivered and turned pale.
It was the wind. Shelmerdine - but it would be more proper now to call him
Bonthrop - leapt to his feet.
"The wind!" he cried.
Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with
leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts,
frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after
till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as
fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that
taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr Dupper
catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book.
And they thrust Queen Mary's prayer book in his hands and he searched,
hastily fluttering the pages, and said, "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and
Lady Orlando, kneel down"; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and
now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter
through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and
a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud
and faint alternately, and Mr Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried
now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all
was quiet for a moment, and one word - it might be "the jaws of death" -
rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes
and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang loud and others
prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap
of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a
golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. All was movement and
confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing
and the rain pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger,
went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for
the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for
her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt
forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out "Marmaduke Bonthrop
Shelmerdine!" and he answered her "Orlando!" and the words went dashing and
circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher,
further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and
fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent.
There was the ink pot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her
poem, broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about
to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing
changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had
changed - she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.
There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that
she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had proved
worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with
superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of
her finger.
"The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand,"
she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, "for it to be of any
use at all."
She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as
if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her.
Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able to collect her
thoughts, the effect that her behaviour would have had upon the spirit of
the age. She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had
taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met
with its approval. She was certainly feeling more herself. Her finger had
not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet,
she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but if
one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one
liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And
finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to
write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at
the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could not.
What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt better
in her life.
"Hang it all!" she cried, with a touch of her old spirit. "Here goes!"
And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise,
there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping.
She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did. Ah!
but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over her lest the pen
might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again. She read,
And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls:
As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with the most
obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder, and
when she had written "Egyptian girls", the power told her to stop. Grass,
the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as governesses use to
the beginning, is all right; the hanging cups of fritillaries - admirable;
the snaky flower - a thought, strong from a lady's pen, perhaps, but
Wordsworth no doubt, sanctions it; but - girls? Are girls necessary? You
have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that'll do.
And so the spirit passed on.
Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a
deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as - to compare great things
with small - a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the
corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obligingly
made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful
whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it
would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have
had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She
had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by
putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no
satirist, cynic, or psychologist - any one of which goods would have been
discovered at once - to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a
deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between
a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a
nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends.
Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she
need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained
herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She
wrote. She wrote.
It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January,
February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August
follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at
November again, with a whole year accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little
bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may complain that he
could recite the calendar for himself and so save his pocket whatever sum
the Hogarth Press may think proper to charge for this book. But what can the
biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into which
Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion
is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer;
life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with
sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles
asunder. Therefore - since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what
Orlando is doing now - there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar,
tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window,
until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin
drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a
kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her
chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a
wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would
be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is
life. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a
man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere
wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with
a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects,
we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration
drank - but no, she detested the mild fluid - her tea. It was in this very
room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace
with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on the table
when Lord Burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of the
subjunctive. "Little man, little man," - Orlando could hear her say - "is
`must' a word to be addressed to princes?" And down came the flagon on the
table: there was the mark of it still.
But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great
Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her
arm-chair with a curse. Tomorrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more
of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. And then (here she
blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a
bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on...The blushes came and
went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. One
might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her cheeks.
And if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the crinoline being
blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous position must excuse her (even
her sex was still in dispute) and the irregular life she had lived before.
At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed
as if the spirit of the age - if such indeed it were - lay dormant for a
time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or
relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper,
sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained - the manuscript of her poem,
"The Oak Tree". She had carried this about with her for so many years now,
and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained,
some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when
with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the
lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most
conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the
date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for
close three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she
began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read,
how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy,
in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid;
and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried
prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she
had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same
brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same
passion for the country and the seasons.
"After all," she thought, getting up and going to the window, "nothing
has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a chair
has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the same
lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the same
carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth,
but what difference..."
No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the
door was flung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed by
Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just
dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the
eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which
spread and meandered round her pen. It was some infirmity of the quill, she
supposed; it was split or dirty. She dipped it again. The blot increased.
She tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came. Next she began
to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed
monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry
with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had
she said "Impossible" than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to
curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written
in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever
read in her life:
I am myself but a vile link
Amid life's weary chain,
But I have spoken hallow'd words,
Oh, do not say in vain!
Will the young maiden, when her tears,
Alone in moonlight shine,
Tears for the absent and the loved,
Murmur?
she wrote without a stop as Bartholomew and Basket grunted and groaned
about the room, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.
Again she dipped her pen and off it went:
She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve
Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
Had faded into paleness, broken by
Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,
but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page and
blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all
of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink
flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. What had happened to
her? Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she
demanded. But the room was empty. No one answered her, unless the dripping
of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an
extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a
thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales.
Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about
the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and
twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years
or so. But all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands;
and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally
to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the
second finger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see what caused
this agitation, she saw nothing - nothing but the vast solitary emerald
which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It
was of the finest water. It was worth ten thousand pounds at least. The
vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some
of the darkest manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not
enough; and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were
asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight - till poor
Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand
without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask
which dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were
much quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly
perceived what she had never noticed before - a thick ring of rather
jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.
"Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew," she said, stretching her hand
to take it.
At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a
rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it away
from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. "No," she said, with
resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but as for taking
off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor Queen Victoria on
her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had put it on her finger
twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked
in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact,
Orlando understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with emotion;
that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her
station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she
let it out of her keeping for a second.
"Heaven help us," said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the
pigeons at their pranks, "what a world we live in! What a world to be sure!"
Its complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole world was
ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to
church. Wedding rings were everywhere. She drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck,
thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. Rings filled
the jewellers' shops, not the flashing pastes and diamonds of Orlando's
recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. At the same time,
she began to notice a new habit among the town people. In the old days, one
would meet a boy trifling with a girl under a hawthorn hedge frequently
enough. Orlando had flicked many a couple with the tip of her whip and
laughed and passed on. Now, all that was changed. Couples trudged and
plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman's
right hand was invariably passed through the man's left and her fingers were
firmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the horses' noses were on them
that they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one piece,
heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only suppose that some new
discovery had been made about the race; that they were somehow stuck
together, couple after couple, but who had made it and when, she could not
guess. It did not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits
and the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or
mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no indissoluble
alliance among the brutes that she could see. Could it be Queen Victoria
then, or Lord Melbourne? Was it from them that the great discovery of
marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of
dogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. It
was strange - it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this
indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and
sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were accompanied by such a tingling
and twanging of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas
in order. They were languishing and ogling like a housemaid's fancies. They
made her blush. There was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands
and wear it like the rest. This she did, slipping it, overcome with shame,
upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. The tingling
persisted more violently, more indignantly than ever. She did not sleep a
wink that night. Next morning when she took up the pen to write, either she
could think of nothing, and the pen made one large lachrymose blot after
another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies
about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the
fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds
itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel
herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider
the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and
submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.
That this was much against her natural temperament has been
sufficiently made plain. When the sound of the Archduke's chariot wheels
died away, the cry that rose to her lips was "Life! A Lover!" not "Life! A
Husband!" and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and
run about the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. Such is the
indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down
anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those
who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the
Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the
eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change
from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and
she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For
it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it;
some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a
woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were
fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so
christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which
she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress
she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could
she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high
mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp
leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were
quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became
nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the
first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things
inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen
Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has another allotted
to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them
do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie
down; never, never, never to get up again. Thus did the spirit work upon
her, for all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of
emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those twangings and
tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the
sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if angels were plucking harp-strings
with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the wild
autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he
had married a very great lady and had hunted hares in Roumania these many
years now; nor Mr M.; he was become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he
made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for fishes.
One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the
Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean
upon.
"Whom," she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping
her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of
appealing womanhood as she did so, "can I lean upon?" Her words formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had
written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of
the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling
pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had stopped at last
and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her
plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
"Everyone is mated except myself," she mused, as she trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and Pippin
even - transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to
have a partner. "Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all," Orlando thought,
glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned windows of the hall,
"am single, am mateless, am alone."
Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down
unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved
hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One must lean on someone, she
thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and help
him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid to ask
it. So she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and
apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys
to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.
At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be
hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss
her. But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume
from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers. She
had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.
The air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. As the rooks went
whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming
through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind
her, over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so far for years. Six
feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn between her fingers and
pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw,
gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, mysterious as the lake into which
Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur. A single feather quivered in the air
and fell into the middle of it. Then, some strange ecstasy came over her.
Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and
flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while
the rooks' hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she
ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle
was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the
bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks' hoarse
laughter was in her ears. "I have found my mate," she murmured. "It is the
moor. I am nature's bride," she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the
cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by
the pool. "Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a
greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild
birds' feathers - the owl's, the nightjar's. I shall dream wild dreams. My
hands shall wear no wedding ring," she continued, slipping it from her
finger. "The roots shall twine about them. Ah!" she sighed, pressing her
head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, "I have sought happiness through many
ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life - and
behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women," she
continued; "none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace
here with only the sky above me - as the gipsy told me years ago. That was
in Turkey." And she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into
which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it,
and camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of
red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only mountains,
very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she
heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields of
irises and gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered
themselves down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw
the great hump of the South Downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and
where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with ships passing; and
she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and thought at first, "That's
the Armada," and then thought "No, it's Nelson," and then remembered how
those wars were over and the ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails
on the winding river were those of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle
sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming
here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle
as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out
and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. Indeed, she was
falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the
ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a
heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil,
or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought
it changed to the trot of a horse's hoofs; one, two, three, four, she
counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she
could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The
horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the
yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him,
she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
"Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!"
"I'm dead, sir!" she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It
was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous,
passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild,
dark-plumed name - a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of
rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting
descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things
which will be described presently.
"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship
in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the
Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he
explained.
In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed,
as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each
other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such
unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether
they were beggars or people of substance. He had a castle in the Hebrides,
but it was ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting hall. He
had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the East. He was on his
way now to join his brig at Falmouth, but the wind had fallen and it was
only when the gale blew from the South-west that he could put out to sea.
Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on
the weather vane. Mercifully its tail pointed due east and was steady as a
rock. "Oh! Shel, don't leave me!" she cried. "I'm passionately in love with
you," she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful
suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
"You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then
took place since the world began. When it was over and they were seated
again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west gale? Where was he
bound for?
"For the Horn," he said briefly, and blushed. (For a man had to blush
as a woman had, only at rather different things.) It was only by dint of
great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she gathered
that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures -
which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale. Masts had been
snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him).
Sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a
raft with a biscuit.
"It's about all a fellow can do nowadays," he said sheepishly, and
helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision which she
had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for
which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he
roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the
tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than any she had
cried before: "I am a woman," she thought, "a real woman, at last." She
thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare
and unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left foot, she would
have sat upon his knee.
"Shel, my darling," she began again, "tell me..." and so they talked
two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would
profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well
that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or
saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy
the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their
setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come
about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost
dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions
do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the
most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which
reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that
the space is filled to repletion.
After some days more of this kind of talk,
"Orlando, my dearest," Shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling
outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there was a
couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.
"Show 'em up," said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck,
taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the
fireplace. Two officers in bottlegreen uniforms with truncheons at their
hips then entered the room and stood at attention. Formalities being over,
they gave into Orlando's own hands, as their commission was, a legal
document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs of sealing wax,
the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest
importance.
Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her
right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to
the matter.
"The lawsuits are settled," she read out..."some in my favour, as for
example...others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in
Constantinople, Shel," she explained) "Children pronounced illegitimate,
(they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don't
inherit, which is all to the good...Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex," she
read out with some solemnity, "is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The
estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed
and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage" -
but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, "but there
won't be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be
taken as read." Whereupon she appended her own signature beneath Lord
Palmerston's and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of
her titles, her house, and her estate - which was now so much shrunk, for
the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was
infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much
quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was
filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken
out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street
incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the
Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass
cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded.
Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were
burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys
with the label "I am a base Pretender", lolling from their mouths. The
Queen's cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a
command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night.
Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from
the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs
W.E. Gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding
her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] - all of
which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason
that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando's life. She
skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bonfires were blazing in
the marketplace, she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine
was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above
them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one
could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest
at last, on Orlando's foot.
"Tell me, Mar," she would say (and here it must be explained, that when
she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy,
amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs
were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet
perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might
be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant
farms, a cock crowing - all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)
- "Tell me, Mar," she would say, "about Cape Horn." Then Shelmerdine would
make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and
an empty snail shell or two.
"Here's the north," he would say. "There's the south. The wind's coming
from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we've just lowered the
top-boom mizzen: and so you see - here, where this bit of grass is, she
enters the current which you'll find marked - where's my map and compasses,
Bo'sun? Ah! thanks, that'll do, where the snail shell is. The current
catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall
be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf is, - for you
must understand my dear" - and so he would go on, and she would listen to
every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without
his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles
clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there
reflected on the destiny of man; came down again; had a whisky and soda;
went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read
Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true
end of life; decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a
thousand other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied,
Yes, negresses are seductive, aren't they? he having told her that the
supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how
well she had taken his meaning.
"Are you positive you aren't a man?" he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,
"Can it be possible you're not a woman?" and then they must put it to
the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of
the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman
could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and
subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.
And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has
become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so
scanty in comparison with ideas that "the biscuits ran out" has to stand for
kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's
philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most
profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple
one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the
poor man is lying.)
So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with
spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart of
the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there among the snail
shells, making models of Cape Horn. "Bonthrop," she would say, "I'm off,"
and when she called him by his second name, "Bonthrop", it should signify to
the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks on a
desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily,
die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and
with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby asking her out
every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so
saying "Bonthrop", she said in effect, "I'm dead", and pushed her way as a
spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep
into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and movement were over and
she were free now to take her way - all of which the reader should hear in
her voice when she said "Bonthrop", and should also add, the better to
illumine the word, that for him too the same word signified, mystically,
separation and isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in
unfathomable seas.
After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked "Shelmerdine", and
stooping, she picked up one of those autumn crocuses which to some people
signify that very word, and put it with the jay's feather that came tumbling
blue through the beech woods, in her breast. Then she called "Shelmerdine"
and the word went shooting this way and that way through the woods and
struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells in the grass. He
saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay's feather
in her breast, and cried "Orlando", which meant (and it must be remembered
that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes,
some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken
as if something were breaking through; which proved to be a ship in full
sail, heaving and tossing a little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole
year of summer days to make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down,
heaving this way, heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the
crest of this wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly
stands over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at
her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap
on deck - as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the
26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine recited
Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which had started
to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across Orlando's foot.
A second leaf followed and then a third. Orlando shivered and turned pale.
It was the wind. Shelmerdine - but it would be more proper now to call him
Bonthrop - leapt to his feet.
"The wind!" he cried.
Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with
leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts,
frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after
till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as
fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that
taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr Dupper
catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book.
And they thrust Queen Mary's prayer book in his hands and he searched,
hastily fluttering the pages, and said, "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and
Lady Orlando, kneel down"; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and
now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter
through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and
a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud
and faint alternately, and Mr Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried
now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all
was quiet for a moment, and one word - it might be "the jaws of death" -
rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes
and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang loud and others
prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap
of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a
golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. All was movement and
confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing
and the rain pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger,
went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for
the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for
her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt
forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out "Marmaduke Bonthrop
Shelmerdine!" and he answered her "Orlando!" and the words went dashing and
circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher,
further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and
fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent.
There was the ink pot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her
poem, broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about
to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing
changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had
changed - she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.
There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that
she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had proved
worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with
superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of
her finger.
"The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand,"
she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, "for it to be of any
use at all."
She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as
if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her.
Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able to collect her
thoughts, the effect that her behaviour would have had upon the spirit of
the age. She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had
taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met
with its approval. She was certainly feeling more herself. Her finger had
not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet,
she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but if
one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one
liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And
finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to
write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at
the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could not.
What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt better
in her life.
"Hang it all!" she cried, with a touch of her old spirit. "Here goes!"
And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise,
there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping.
She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did. Ah!
but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over her lest the pen
might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again. She read,
And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls:
As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with the most
obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder, and
when she had written "Egyptian girls", the power told her to stop. Grass,
the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as governesses use to
the beginning, is all right; the hanging cups of fritillaries - admirable;
the snaky flower - a thought, strong from a lady's pen, perhaps, but
Wordsworth no doubt, sanctions it; but - girls? Are girls necessary? You
have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that'll do.
And so the spirit passed on.
Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a
deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as - to compare great things
with small - a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the
corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obligingly
made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful
whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it
would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have
had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She
had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by
putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no
satirist, cynic, or psychologist - any one of which goods would have been
discovered at once - to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a
deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between
a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a
nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends.
Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she
need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained
herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She
wrote. She wrote.
It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January,
February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August
follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at
November again, with a whole year accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little
bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may complain that he
could recite the calendar for himself and so save his pocket whatever sum
the Hogarth Press may think proper to charge for this book. But what can the
biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into which
Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion
is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer;
life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with
sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles
asunder. Therefore - since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what
Orlando is doing now - there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar,
tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window,
until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin
drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a
kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her
chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a
wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would
be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is
life. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a
man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere
wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with
a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects,
we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration