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for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on
whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp
altogether and indulging - witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her
palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns - what is more
humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone
through before our eyes when we know that what causes it - thought and
imagination - are of no importance whatsoever?
But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when
we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand
for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's
whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her
table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that
calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in
the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and
thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she
thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will
write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody
objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk
and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window
- all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible
subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things?
Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be
admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love?
She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen
starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists
define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority - has nothing
whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is
slipping off one's petticoat and - But we all know what love is. Did Orlando
do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of
one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine,
we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were
sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two
rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a snail.
One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf. Then a
servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is
engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no
visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best
and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the
colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers the hour in its usual
cryptic way. One's mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,
about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a
hob. Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of the
under-footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring
the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the
starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on
the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of
scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we
meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and
out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they
don't know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me
what life is; Life, Life, Life!
We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue
purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see
there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he
says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life's
labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant
agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when
they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will
breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in
snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men
tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them
speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is- having asked them
all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once
in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it
was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who
waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is - alas, we don't know.
At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction,
Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to
the window, and exclaimed, "Done!"
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which
now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going
on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
"And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that
she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually attacked
her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent spectacle with
staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way. The manuscript
which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a
living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was
between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was
that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in
her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned
with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes were about her in
profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can none of them read. It is a
lamentable oversight on the part of Providence which had never struck her
before. Human beings alone are thus gifted. Human beings had become
necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London
at once.
"There's just time to catch the eleven forty five, M'Lady," said
Basket. Orlando had not yet realized the invention of the steam engine, but
such was her absorption in the sufferings of a being, who, though not
herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for the
first time, took her seat in a railway carriage, and had the rug arranged
about her knees without giving a thought to"that stupendous invention, which
had (the historians say) completely changed the face of Europe in the past
twenty years" (as, indeed, happens much more frequently than historians
suppose). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty; rattled horribly;
and the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled up to London in
something less than an hour and stood on the platform at Charing Cross, not
knowing where to go.
The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days
in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part to
an umbrella factory. She had bought another in Mayfair which was sanitary,
convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair
that her poem would be relieved of its desire? Pray God, she thought,
remembering the brightness of their ladyships' eyes and the symmetry of
their lordship's legs, they haven't taken to reading there. For that would
be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.'s. The same sort of talk would
be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might have shifted from
the General's left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr L. might have stayed ten
days with R. instead of T. Then Mr Pope would come in. Oh! but Mr Pope was
dead. Who were the wits now, she wondered - but that was not a question one
could put to a porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by
the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets
of the strangest little boxes on wheels were drawn up by the pavement. She
walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all
sizes, drawn by blood horses and by dray horses, conveying one solitary
dowager or crowded to the top by whiskered men in silk hats, were
inextricably mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so
long used to the look of a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at
loggerheads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the
street sounded violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the
pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their
own bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility,
poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood men,
holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside great
baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses'
noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster!
Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of
national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She
looked anxiously at people's faces. But that confused her still more. Here
would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as if he knew some
terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering
his way along as if it were a festival for all the world. Indeed, she came
to the conclusion that there was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each
man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?
She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast
windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing gowns, and flowers,
and fishing rods, and luncheon baskets; while stuff of every hue and
pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and festooned and ballooned
across and across. Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate mansions,
soberly numbered "one", "two", "three", and so on right up to two or three
hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and six steps and a
pair of curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid on tables, and a
parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out of another, until her
mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open squares with
black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle, and war
horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons
fluttering. So she walked and walked along pavements between houses until
she felt very hungry, and something fluttering above her heart rebuked her
with having forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript. "The Oak Tree".
She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where she
stood. No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and handsome, was
singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was approaching. There was
something vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she felt
certain that she had met him at some time or other. But where? Could it be
that this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane in his
hand and a flower in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed
white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was! - her old, her very old
friend, Nick Greene!
At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognized her. "The
Lady Orlando!" he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.
"Sir Nicholas!" she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively by
something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who had
lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen
in the world and become certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine
things into the bargain.
With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was correct; he
was a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was the author of a
score of volumes. He was, in short, the most influential critic of the
Victorian age.
A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who had
caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy, restless
fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the Italian
fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest that they had
seen the sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now sprucely dressed in a
grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his button-hole, and grey suede
gloves to match. But even as she marvelled, he made another bow, and asked
her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow was a thought
overdone perhaps, but the imitation of fine breeding was creditable. She
followed him, wondering, into a superb restaurant, all red plush, white
table-cloths, and silver cruets, as unlike as could be the old tavern or
coffee house with its sanded floor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch
and chocolate, and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly
on the table beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same
man. His nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin was
shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links; where
his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he had
ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her of his taste in
Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same man. "Ah!" he said,
heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, "ah! my dear lady,
the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson -
those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison - those were the heroes. All,
all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!"
- he threw an immense amount of scorn into his voice. "The truth of it is,"
he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, "that all our young writers are in
the pay of the booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their
tailor's bills. It is an age," he said, helping himself to hors-d'oeuvres,
"marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - none of which the
Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant."
"No, my dear lady," he continued, passing with approval the turbot au
gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, "the great days are
over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the past; honour those
writers - there are still a few left of 'em - who take antiquity for their
model and write, not for pay but - " Here Orlando almost shouted "Glawr!"
Indeed she could have sworn that she had heard him say the very same things
three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but the spirit
was the same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,
some change there was. For while he ran on about taking Addison as one's
model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and lying in bed of a morning
(which she was proud to think her pension paid quarterly enabled him to do)
rolling the best works of the best authors round and round on one's tongue
for an hour, at least, before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of
the present time and the deplorable condition of our native tongue (he had
lived long in America, she believed) might be purified - while he ran on in
much the same way that Greene had run on three hundred years ago, she had
time to ask herself, how was it then that he had changed? He had grown
plump; but he was a man verging on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature
had been a prosperous pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless,
uneasy vivacity had gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no
longer quite so free and easy. He mentioned, it is true, "my dear friend
Pope" or "my illustrious friend Addison" every other second, but he had an
air of respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it
seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own blood
relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the poets.
Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature
all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as
something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something
errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly
gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her
disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper part
of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell "The Oak Tree", a poem.
"A manuscript!" said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez. "How
interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it." And once
more, after an interval of some three hundred years, Nicholas Greene took
Orlando's poem and, laying it down among the coffee cups and the liqueur
glasses, began to read it. But now his verdict was very different from what
it had been then. It reminded him, he said as he turned over the pages, of
Addison's "Cato". It compared favourably with Thomson's "Seasons". There was
no trace in it, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit. It was
composed with a regard to truth, to nature, to the dictates of the human
heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It
must, of course, be published instantly.
Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her
manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress. The idea tickled Sir
Nicholas considerably.
"But what about royalties?" he asked.
Orlando's mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who
happened to be staying there.
Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to
the fact that Messrs - (here he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers)
would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book on their list.
He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten per cent on all copies up to
two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would
himself write a line to Mr -, who was the most influential; then a
compliment - say a little puff of her own poems - addressed to the wife of
the editor of the - never did any harm. He would call -. So he ran on.
Orlando understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not
altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit
to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So
Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it
into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with
many compliments on both sides, they parted.
Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone, - and she
felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it - she
had nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked - the extraordinary
chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St James's Street; a
married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee
house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in the
afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier
dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought
popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow
the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable,
as the reader chooses to consider it upon her relations with her husband
(who was at the Horn), that whenever anything popped violently into her
head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired to him.
There was one, as it happened, close at hand. "My God Shel," she wired;
"life literature Greene toady" - here she dropped into a cypher language
which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the
utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph
clerk being any wiser, and added the words "Rattigan Glumphoboo", which
summed it up precisely. For not only had the events of the morning made a
deep impression on her, but it cannot have escaped the reader's attention
that Orlando was growing up - which is not necessarily growing better - and
"Rattigan Glumphoboo" described a very complicated spiritual state - which
if the reader puts all his intelligence at our service he may discover for
himself.
There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was
probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper clouds raced
swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that her husband would
be at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cutting away some tattered spar,
or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving the post office, she
turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which was a shop so common in
our day that it needs no description, yet, to her eyes, strange in the
extreme; a shop where they sold books. All her life long Orlando had known
manuscripts; she had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which
Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare's
script and Milton's. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios,
often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But
these innumerable little volumes, bright, identical, ephemeral, for they
seemed bound in cardboard and printed on tissue paper, surprised her
infinitely. The whole works of Shakespeare cost half a crown, and could be
put in your pocket. One could hardly read them, indeed, the print was so
small, but it was a marvel, none the less. "Works" - the works of every
writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of
the long shelves. On tables and chairs, more "works" were piled and tumbled,
and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often works about other works
by Sir Nicholas and a score of others whom, in her ignorance, she supposed,
since they were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave
an astounding order to the bookseller to send her everything of any
importance in the shop and left.
She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath that
cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through the body
by Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often to blame in the matter, began
framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life literature
Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her
with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity
by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She had carried off a sheaf
of papers and critical journals from the book shop, and at length, flinging
herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she spread these pages round her and
did her best to fathom the noble art of prose composition as these masters
practised it. For still the old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred
type of a weekly newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying
on her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she
had once known - John Donne. But she had pitched herself, without knowing
it, not far from the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in
her ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed
overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers
crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball
bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through
the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She
read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked up at the sky and
looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to be made into the
other? But how monstrously difficult! For - here came by a pair of tight
scarlet trousers - how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs
dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading
Sir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in the intervals of looking about
her), she somehow got the impression - here she rose and walked - they made
one feel - it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling - one must never, never
say what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a
bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made
one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody
else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought,
pushing a little boat off with her toe, I don't think I could (here the
whole of Sir Nicholas' article came before her as articles do, ten minutes
after they are read, with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his
writing-table, and the time of the day thrown in), I don't think I could,
she continued, considering the article from this point of view, sit in a
study, no, it's not a study, it's a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day
long, and talk to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which
they mustn't repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she
continued, weeping bitterly, they're all so manly; and then, I do detest
Duchesses; and I don't like cake; and though I'm spiteful enough, I could
never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and
write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed,
launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost
sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses
call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much
more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the
Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the
waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean
liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and the wave
she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she
watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop's ship
climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a
thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it
went and disappeared. "It's sunk!" she cried out in an agony - and then,
behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on
the other side of the Atlantic.
"Ecstasy!" she cried. "Ecstasy! Where's the post office?" she wondered.
"For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him..." And repeating "A toy boat
on the Serpentine", and "Ecstasy", alternately, for the thoughts were
interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing, she hurried towards Park
Lane.
"A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat," she repeated, thus enforcing upon
herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor
eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's something
useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a
spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them);
free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind;
something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop:
that's what it is -a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy - it's ecstasy that
matters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope
Gate, for the consequence of not living with one's husband, except when the
wind is sunk, is that one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would no
doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen
Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in a
flash. She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did
not care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it
might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene's article had plunged her in the
depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she
repeated: "Ecstasy, ecstasy", as she stood waiting to cross.
But the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her standing
there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine, while
the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in
four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a golden river had
coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies
held card-cases between their fingers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted
canes between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One
thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great
elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is: how do these
leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant,
propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando thought, looking at the stately,
still faces, their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is
the consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and
splendid there they sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the
stream became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved,
dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.
So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street, where,
when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember curlew calling and one
very old man with a gun.
She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of her
house, how Lord Chesterfield had said - but her memory was checked. Her
discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see Lord Chesterfield
putting his hat down here and his coat down there with an elegance of
deportment which it was a pleasure to watch, was now completely littered
with parcels. While she had been sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had
delivered her order, and the house was crammed - there were parcels slipping
down the staircase - with the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey
paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of these packets as
she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the others, and, rapidly
cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by innumerable volumes.
Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order.
For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not
merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and
embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles,
Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons - all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and
requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's reverence for print
had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the
benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she
tried to come to a conclusion.
And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a
conclusion upon Victorian literature - one is to write it out in sixty
volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of
this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to
choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion
(opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a
single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile
of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as
her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound
note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next
(here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that
literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent;
next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon
that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the
same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures
must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a
peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing
very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at
Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very
delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the
highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit
of six lines, we must omit.
Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the
window for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes to a
conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and must wait
for the unseen antagonist to return it to them. What would be sent her next
from the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her
hands clasped, she stood for a considerable space of time wondering.
Suddenly she started - and here we could only wish that, as on a former
occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and
provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up
what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no! Having
thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen it fall short by
several inches, these ladies had given up all intercourse with her these
many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen
this pale March morning to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to
shroud this undeniable event whatever it may be? For after giving that
sudden, violent start, Orlando - but Heaven be praised, at this very moment
there struck up outside one of these frail, reedy, fluty, jerky,
old-fashioned barrel-organs which are still sometimes played by Italian
organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the intervention, humble
though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with all
its gasps and groans, to fill this page with sound until the moment comes
when it is impossible to deny its coming; which the footman has seen coming
and the maid-servant; and the reader will have to see too; for Orlando
herself is clearly unable to ignore it any longer - let the barrel-organ
sound and transport us on thought, which is no more than a little boat, when
music sounds, tossing on the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers,
the most clumsy, the most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens
where washing is hanging to - what is this place? Do you recognize the Green
and in the middle the steeple, and the gate with a lion couchant on either
side? Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here we are at Kew, and I
will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape
hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk
there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in
October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said,
and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging
a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the
kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from
bank to bank.
Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.
Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys and their smoke; behold the
city clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her
dog for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time
not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though Heaven has mercifully
decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on
for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist; still through
our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid fulfilment of
natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw
blazing - such silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this
all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays - saw blazing a fire in a
field against minarets near Constantinople.
Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure
of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates;
and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark
chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and
confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of
links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows
on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink
and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from
bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether it is what the
male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it
comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream
- would it were true, as the rhyme hints "like a dream" - but duller and
worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent,
habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the
wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.
Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which
bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn
parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us
and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so
deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of
dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth,
prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.
But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind
land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he
flies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods
back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling,
dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us
safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on - (here the
barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).
"It's a very fine boy, M'Lady," said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting
her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In other words Orlando was safely
delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the
morning.
Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage;
nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by any
means, the same day. No - for if we look out of the window, as Orlando was
doing at the moment, we shall see that Park Lane itself has considerably
changed. Indeed one might stand there ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood
now, without seeing a single barouche landau. "Look at that!" she exclaimed,
some days later when an absurd truncated carriage without any horses began
to glide about of its own accord. A carriage without any horses indeed! She
was called away just as she said that, but came back again after a time and
had another look out of the window. It was odd sort of weather nowadays. The
sky itself, she could not help thinking, had changed. It was no longer so
thick, so watery, so prismatic now that King Edward - see, there he was,
stepping out of his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady opposite -
had succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky
seemed made of metal, which in hot weather tarnished verdigris, copper
colour or orange as metal does in a fog. It was a little alarming- this
shrinkage. Everything seemed to have shrunk. Driving past Buckingham Palace
last night, there was not a trace of that vast erection which she had
thought everlasting; top hats, widows' weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths,
all had vanished and left not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement.
But it was now - after another interval she had come back again to her
favourite station in the window - now, in the evening, that the change was
most remarkable. Look at the lights in the houses! At a touch, a whole room
was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was precisely the same as the
other. One could see everything in the little square-shaped boxes; there was
no privacy; none of those lingering shadows and odd corners that there used
to be; none of those women in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put
down carefully on this table and on that. At a touch, the whole room was
bright. And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavements were
bright; everything was bright. She came back again at mid-day. How narrow
women have grown lately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight, shining,
identical. And men's faces were as bare as the palm of one's hand. The
dryness of the atmosphere brought out the colour in everything and seemed to
stiffen the muscles of the cheeks. It was harder to cry now. Water was hot
in two seconds. Ivy had perished or been scraped off houses. Vegetables were
less fertile; families were much smaller. Curtains and covers had been
frizzled up and the walls were bare so that new brilliantly coloured
pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas, apples, were hung in
frames, or painted upon the wood. There was something definite and distinct
about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that
there was a distraction, a desperation - as she was thinking this, the
immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for
hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became
mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in
her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing
quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the
clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds
the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything
more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was
a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been
violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten
o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was
the present moment.
No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart,
and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that
it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible
because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we
have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already. She ran
downstairs, she jumped into her motorcar, she pressed the self-starter and
was off. Vast blue blocks of building rose into the air; the red cowls of
chimneys were spotted irregularly across the sky; the road shone like
silver-headed nails; omnibuses bore down upon her with sculptured
white-faced drivers; she noticed sponges, bird-cages, boxes of green
American cloth. But she did not allow these sights to sink into her mind
even the fraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow plank of the present,
lest she should fall into the raging torrent beneath. "Why don't you look
where you're going to?...Put your hand out, can't you?" - that was all she
said sharply, as if the words were jerked out of her. For the streets were
immensely crowded; people crossed without looking where they were going.
People buzzed and hummed round the plate-glass windows within which one
could see a glow of red, a blaze of yellow, as if they were bees, Orlando
thought - but her thought that they were bees was violently snipped off and
she saw, regaining perspective with one flick of her eye, that they were
bodies. "Why don't you look where you're going?" she snapped out.
At last, however, she drew up at Marshall & Snelgrove's and went
whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp
altogether and indulging - witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her
palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns - what is more
humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone
through before our eyes when we know that what causes it - thought and
imagination - are of no importance whatsoever?
But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when
we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand
for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's
whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her
table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that
calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in
the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and
thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she
thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will
write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody
objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk
and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window
- all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible
subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things?
Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be
admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love?
She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen
starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists
define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority - has nothing
whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is
slipping off one's petticoat and - But we all know what love is. Did Orlando
do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of
one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine,
we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were
sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two
rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a snail.
One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf. Then a
servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is
engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no
visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best
and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the
colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers the hour in its usual
cryptic way. One's mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,
about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a
hob. Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of the
under-footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring
the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the
starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on
the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of
scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we
meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and
out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they
don't know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me
what life is; Life, Life, Life!
We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue
purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see
there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he
says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life's
labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant
agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when
they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will
breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in
snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men
tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them
speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is- having asked them
all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once
in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it
was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who
waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is - alas, we don't know.
At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction,
Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to
the window, and exclaimed, "Done!"
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which
now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going
on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
"And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that
she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually attacked
her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent spectacle with
staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way. The manuscript
which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a
living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was
between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was
that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in
her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned
with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes were about her in
profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can none of them read. It is a
lamentable oversight on the part of Providence which had never struck her
before. Human beings alone are thus gifted. Human beings had become
necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London
at once.
"There's just time to catch the eleven forty five, M'Lady," said
Basket. Orlando had not yet realized the invention of the steam engine, but
such was her absorption in the sufferings of a being, who, though not
herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for the
first time, took her seat in a railway carriage, and had the rug arranged
about her knees without giving a thought to"that stupendous invention, which
had (the historians say) completely changed the face of Europe in the past
twenty years" (as, indeed, happens much more frequently than historians
suppose). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty; rattled horribly;
and the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled up to London in
something less than an hour and stood on the platform at Charing Cross, not
knowing where to go.
The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days
in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part to
an umbrella factory. She had bought another in Mayfair which was sanitary,
convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair
that her poem would be relieved of its desire? Pray God, she thought,
remembering the brightness of their ladyships' eyes and the symmetry of
their lordship's legs, they haven't taken to reading there. For that would
be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.'s. The same sort of talk would
be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might have shifted from
the General's left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr L. might have stayed ten
days with R. instead of T. Then Mr Pope would come in. Oh! but Mr Pope was
dead. Who were the wits now, she wondered - but that was not a question one
could put to a porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by
the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets
of the strangest little boxes on wheels were drawn up by the pavement. She
walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all
sizes, drawn by blood horses and by dray horses, conveying one solitary
dowager or crowded to the top by whiskered men in silk hats, were
inextricably mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so
long used to the look of a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at
loggerheads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the
street sounded violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the
pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their
own bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility,
poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood men,
holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside great
baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses'
noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster!
Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of
national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She
looked anxiously at people's faces. But that confused her still more. Here
would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as if he knew some
terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering
his way along as if it were a festival for all the world. Indeed, she came
to the conclusion that there was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each
man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?
She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast
windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing gowns, and flowers,
and fishing rods, and luncheon baskets; while stuff of every hue and
pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and festooned and ballooned
across and across. Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate mansions,
soberly numbered "one", "two", "three", and so on right up to two or three
hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and six steps and a
pair of curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid on tables, and a
parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out of another, until her
mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open squares with
black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle, and war
horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons
fluttering. So she walked and walked along pavements between houses until
she felt very hungry, and something fluttering above her heart rebuked her
with having forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript. "The Oak Tree".
She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where she
stood. No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and handsome, was
singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was approaching. There was
something vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she felt
certain that she had met him at some time or other. But where? Could it be
that this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane in his
hand and a flower in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed
white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was! - her old, her very old
friend, Nick Greene!
At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognized her. "The
Lady Orlando!" he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.
"Sir Nicholas!" she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively by
something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who had
lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen
in the world and become certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine
things into the bargain.
With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was correct; he
was a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was the author of a
score of volumes. He was, in short, the most influential critic of the
Victorian age.
A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who had
caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy, restless
fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the Italian
fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest that they had
seen the sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now sprucely dressed in a
grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his button-hole, and grey suede
gloves to match. But even as she marvelled, he made another bow, and asked
her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow was a thought
overdone perhaps, but the imitation of fine breeding was creditable. She
followed him, wondering, into a superb restaurant, all red plush, white
table-cloths, and silver cruets, as unlike as could be the old tavern or
coffee house with its sanded floor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch
and chocolate, and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly
on the table beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same
man. His nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin was
shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links; where
his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he had
ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her of his taste in
Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same man. "Ah!" he said,
heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, "ah! my dear lady,
the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson -
those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison - those were the heroes. All,
all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!"
- he threw an immense amount of scorn into his voice. "The truth of it is,"
he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, "that all our young writers are in
the pay of the booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their
tailor's bills. It is an age," he said, helping himself to hors-d'oeuvres,
"marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - none of which the
Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant."
"No, my dear lady," he continued, passing with approval the turbot au
gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, "the great days are
over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the past; honour those
writers - there are still a few left of 'em - who take antiquity for their
model and write, not for pay but - " Here Orlando almost shouted "Glawr!"
Indeed she could have sworn that she had heard him say the very same things
three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but the spirit
was the same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,
some change there was. For while he ran on about taking Addison as one's
model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and lying in bed of a morning
(which she was proud to think her pension paid quarterly enabled him to do)
rolling the best works of the best authors round and round on one's tongue
for an hour, at least, before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of
the present time and the deplorable condition of our native tongue (he had
lived long in America, she believed) might be purified - while he ran on in
much the same way that Greene had run on three hundred years ago, she had
time to ask herself, how was it then that he had changed? He had grown
plump; but he was a man verging on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature
had been a prosperous pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless,
uneasy vivacity had gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no
longer quite so free and easy. He mentioned, it is true, "my dear friend
Pope" or "my illustrious friend Addison" every other second, but he had an
air of respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it
seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own blood
relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the poets.
Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature
all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as
something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something
errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly
gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her
disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper part
of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell "The Oak Tree", a poem.
"A manuscript!" said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez. "How
interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it." And once
more, after an interval of some three hundred years, Nicholas Greene took
Orlando's poem and, laying it down among the coffee cups and the liqueur
glasses, began to read it. But now his verdict was very different from what
it had been then. It reminded him, he said as he turned over the pages, of
Addison's "Cato". It compared favourably with Thomson's "Seasons". There was
no trace in it, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit. It was
composed with a regard to truth, to nature, to the dictates of the human
heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It
must, of course, be published instantly.
Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her
manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress. The idea tickled Sir
Nicholas considerably.
"But what about royalties?" he asked.
Orlando's mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who
happened to be staying there.
Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to
the fact that Messrs - (here he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers)
would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book on their list.
He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten per cent on all copies up to
two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would
himself write a line to Mr -, who was the most influential; then a
compliment - say a little puff of her own poems - addressed to the wife of
the editor of the - never did any harm. He would call -. So he ran on.
Orlando understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not
altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit
to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So
Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it
into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with
many compliments on both sides, they parted.
Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone, - and she
felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it - she
had nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked - the extraordinary
chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St James's Street; a
married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee
house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in the
afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier
dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought
popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow
the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable,
as the reader chooses to consider it upon her relations with her husband
(who was at the Horn), that whenever anything popped violently into her
head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired to him.
There was one, as it happened, close at hand. "My God Shel," she wired;
"life literature Greene toady" - here she dropped into a cypher language
which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the
utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph
clerk being any wiser, and added the words "Rattigan Glumphoboo", which
summed it up precisely. For not only had the events of the morning made a
deep impression on her, but it cannot have escaped the reader's attention
that Orlando was growing up - which is not necessarily growing better - and
"Rattigan Glumphoboo" described a very complicated spiritual state - which
if the reader puts all his intelligence at our service he may discover for
himself.
There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was
probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper clouds raced
swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that her husband would
be at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cutting away some tattered spar,
or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving the post office, she
turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which was a shop so common in
our day that it needs no description, yet, to her eyes, strange in the
extreme; a shop where they sold books. All her life long Orlando had known
manuscripts; she had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which
Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare's
script and Milton's. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios,
often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But
these innumerable little volumes, bright, identical, ephemeral, for they
seemed bound in cardboard and printed on tissue paper, surprised her
infinitely. The whole works of Shakespeare cost half a crown, and could be
put in your pocket. One could hardly read them, indeed, the print was so
small, but it was a marvel, none the less. "Works" - the works of every
writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of
the long shelves. On tables and chairs, more "works" were piled and tumbled,
and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often works about other works
by Sir Nicholas and a score of others whom, in her ignorance, she supposed,
since they were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave
an astounding order to the bookseller to send her everything of any
importance in the shop and left.
She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath that
cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through the body
by Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often to blame in the matter, began
framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life literature
Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her
with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity
by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She had carried off a sheaf
of papers and critical journals from the book shop, and at length, flinging
herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she spread these pages round her and
did her best to fathom the noble art of prose composition as these masters
practised it. For still the old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred
type of a weekly newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying
on her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she
had once known - John Donne. But she had pitched herself, without knowing
it, not far from the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in
her ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed
overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers
crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball
bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through
the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She
read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked up at the sky and
looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to be made into the
other? But how monstrously difficult! For - here came by a pair of tight
scarlet trousers - how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs
dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading
Sir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in the intervals of looking about
her), she somehow got the impression - here she rose and walked - they made
one feel - it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling - one must never, never
say what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a
bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made
one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody
else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought,
pushing a little boat off with her toe, I don't think I could (here the
whole of Sir Nicholas' article came before her as articles do, ten minutes
after they are read, with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his
writing-table, and the time of the day thrown in), I don't think I could,
she continued, considering the article from this point of view, sit in a
study, no, it's not a study, it's a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day
long, and talk to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which
they mustn't repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she
continued, weeping bitterly, they're all so manly; and then, I do detest
Duchesses; and I don't like cake; and though I'm spiteful enough, I could
never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and
write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed,
launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost
sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses
call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much
more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the
Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the
waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean
liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and the wave
she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she
watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop's ship
climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a
thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it
went and disappeared. "It's sunk!" she cried out in an agony - and then,
behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on
the other side of the Atlantic.
"Ecstasy!" she cried. "Ecstasy! Where's the post office?" she wondered.
"For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him..." And repeating "A toy boat
on the Serpentine", and "Ecstasy", alternately, for the thoughts were
interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing, she hurried towards Park
Lane.
"A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat," she repeated, thus enforcing upon
herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor
eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's something
useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a
spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them);
free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind;
something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop:
that's what it is -a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy - it's ecstasy that
matters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope
Gate, for the consequence of not living with one's husband, except when the
wind is sunk, is that one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would no
doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen
Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in a
flash. She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did
not care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it
might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene's article had plunged her in the
depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she
repeated: "Ecstasy, ecstasy", as she stood waiting to cross.
But the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her standing
there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine, while
the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in
four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a golden river had
coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies
held card-cases between their fingers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted
canes between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One
thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great
elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is: how do these
leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant,
propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando thought, looking at the stately,
still faces, their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is
the consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and
splendid there they sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the
stream became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved,
dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.
So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street, where,
when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember curlew calling and one
very old man with a gun.
She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of her
house, how Lord Chesterfield had said - but her memory was checked. Her
discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see Lord Chesterfield
putting his hat down here and his coat down there with an elegance of
deportment which it was a pleasure to watch, was now completely littered
with parcels. While she had been sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had
delivered her order, and the house was crammed - there were parcels slipping
down the staircase - with the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey
paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of these packets as
she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the others, and, rapidly
cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by innumerable volumes.
Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order.
For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not
merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and
embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles,
Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons - all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and
requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's reverence for print
had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the
benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she
tried to come to a conclusion.
And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a
conclusion upon Victorian literature - one is to write it out in sixty
volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of
this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to
choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion
(opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a
single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile
of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as
her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound
note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next
(here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that
literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent;
next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon
that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the
same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures
must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a
peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing
very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at
Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very
delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the
highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit
of six lines, we must omit.
Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the
window for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes to a
conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and must wait
for the unseen antagonist to return it to them. What would be sent her next
from the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her
hands clasped, she stood for a considerable space of time wondering.
Suddenly she started - and here we could only wish that, as on a former
occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and
provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up
what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no! Having
thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen it fall short by
several inches, these ladies had given up all intercourse with her these
many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen
this pale March morning to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to
shroud this undeniable event whatever it may be? For after giving that
sudden, violent start, Orlando - but Heaven be praised, at this very moment
there struck up outside one of these frail, reedy, fluty, jerky,
old-fashioned barrel-organs which are still sometimes played by Italian
organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the intervention, humble
though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with all
its gasps and groans, to fill this page with sound until the moment comes
when it is impossible to deny its coming; which the footman has seen coming
and the maid-servant; and the reader will have to see too; for Orlando
herself is clearly unable to ignore it any longer - let the barrel-organ
sound and transport us on thought, which is no more than a little boat, when
music sounds, tossing on the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers,
the most clumsy, the most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens
where washing is hanging to - what is this place? Do you recognize the Green
and in the middle the steeple, and the gate with a lion couchant on either
side? Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here we are at Kew, and I
will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape
hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk
there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in
October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said,
and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging
a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the
kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from
bank to bank.
Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.
Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys and their smoke; behold the
city clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her
dog for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time
not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though Heaven has mercifully
decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on
for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist; still through
our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid fulfilment of
natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw
blazing - such silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this
all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays - saw blazing a fire in a
field against minarets near Constantinople.
Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure
of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates;
and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark
chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and
confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of
links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows
on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink
and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from
bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether it is what the
male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it
comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream
- would it were true, as the rhyme hints "like a dream" - but duller and
worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent,
habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the
wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.
Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which
bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn
parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us
and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so
deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of
dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth,
prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.
But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind
land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he
flies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods
back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling,
dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us
safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on - (here the
barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).
"It's a very fine boy, M'Lady," said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting
her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In other words Orlando was safely
delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the
morning.
Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage;
nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by any
means, the same day. No - for if we look out of the window, as Orlando was
doing at the moment, we shall see that Park Lane itself has considerably
changed. Indeed one might stand there ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood
now, without seeing a single barouche landau. "Look at that!" she exclaimed,
some days later when an absurd truncated carriage without any horses began
to glide about of its own accord. A carriage without any horses indeed! She
was called away just as she said that, but came back again after a time and
had another look out of the window. It was odd sort of weather nowadays. The
sky itself, she could not help thinking, had changed. It was no longer so
thick, so watery, so prismatic now that King Edward - see, there he was,
stepping out of his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady opposite -
had succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky
seemed made of metal, which in hot weather tarnished verdigris, copper
colour or orange as metal does in a fog. It was a little alarming- this
shrinkage. Everything seemed to have shrunk. Driving past Buckingham Palace
last night, there was not a trace of that vast erection which she had
thought everlasting; top hats, widows' weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths,
all had vanished and left not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement.
But it was now - after another interval she had come back again to her
favourite station in the window - now, in the evening, that the change was
most remarkable. Look at the lights in the houses! At a touch, a whole room
was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was precisely the same as the
other. One could see everything in the little square-shaped boxes; there was
no privacy; none of those lingering shadows and odd corners that there used
to be; none of those women in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put
down carefully on this table and on that. At a touch, the whole room was
bright. And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavements were
bright; everything was bright. She came back again at mid-day. How narrow
women have grown lately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight, shining,
identical. And men's faces were as bare as the palm of one's hand. The
dryness of the atmosphere brought out the colour in everything and seemed to
stiffen the muscles of the cheeks. It was harder to cry now. Water was hot
in two seconds. Ivy had perished or been scraped off houses. Vegetables were
less fertile; families were much smaller. Curtains and covers had been
frizzled up and the walls were bare so that new brilliantly coloured
pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas, apples, were hung in
frames, or painted upon the wood. There was something definite and distinct
about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that
there was a distraction, a desperation - as she was thinking this, the
immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for
hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became
mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in
her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing
quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the
clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds
the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything
more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was
a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been
violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten
o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was
the present moment.
No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart,
and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that
it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible
because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we
have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already. She ran
downstairs, she jumped into her motorcar, she pressed the self-starter and
was off. Vast blue blocks of building rose into the air; the red cowls of
chimneys were spotted irregularly across the sky; the road shone like
silver-headed nails; omnibuses bore down upon her with sculptured
white-faced drivers; she noticed sponges, bird-cages, boxes of green
American cloth. But she did not allow these sights to sink into her mind
even the fraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow plank of the present,
lest she should fall into the raging torrent beneath. "Why don't you look
where you're going to?...Put your hand out, can't you?" - that was all she
said sharply, as if the words were jerked out of her. For the streets were
immensely crowded; people crossed without looking where they were going.
People buzzed and hummed round the plate-glass windows within which one
could see a glow of red, a blaze of yellow, as if they were bees, Orlando
thought - but her thought that they were bees was violently snipped off and
she saw, regaining perspective with one flick of her eye, that they were
bodies. "Why don't you look where you're going?" she snapped out.
At last, however, she drew up at Marshall & Snelgrove's and went