Вирджиния Вулф. Орландо (engl)
страница №2
...y;the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it,
or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into
the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says
that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from
melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other;
and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied
to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the
Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for
those tossed on this sea.
"All ends in death," Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face
clouded with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent
see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the
biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep
pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant
words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life
indulged.)
"All ends in death," Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice. But
Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where
the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left
unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them - Sasha stared at him,
perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said
nothing. But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked,
so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so
wisely (but unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its
flavour in translation) that he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or
the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her - plunging and
splashing among a thousand images which had gone as stale as the women who
inspired them - what she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster,
golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the
waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an
emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded - like nothing he
had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed
him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank,
too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however
open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did,
however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems
hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only
outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone
with the steady beam of an Englishwoman - here, however, remembering the
Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and
swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the
flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants
of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of
him by pain.
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she was a
fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the whole history
of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; how
they had come from Rome with the Caesars and had the right to walk down the
Corso (which is the chief street in Rome) under a tasselled palanquin, which
he said is a privilege reserved only for those of imperial blood (for there
was an orgulous credulity about him which was pleasant enough), he would
pause and ask her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had she
brothers? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she
answered readily enough, an awkwardness would come between them. He
suspected at first that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that
she was ashamed of the savage ways of her people, for he had heard that the
women in Muscovy wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist
down; that both sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear
meat with their fingers and live in huts where an English noble would
scruple to keep his cattle; so that he forbore to press her. But on
reflection, he concluded that her silence could not be for that reason; she
herself was entirely free from hair on the chin; she dressed in velvet and
pearls, and her manners were certainly not those of a woman bred in a
cattle-shed.
What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the tremendous
force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which shifts
suddenly and makes the whole pile shake. The agony would seize him suddenly.
Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how to quiet
him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her
and she provoked them purposely - such is the curious obliquity of the
Muscovitish temperament.
To continue the story - skating farther than their wont that day they
reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen
in midstream. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy flying its
double-headed black eagle from the main mast, which was hung with
many-coloured icicles several yards in length. Sasha had left some of her
clothing on board, and supposing the ship to be empty they climbed on deck
and went in search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own past,
Orlando would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this refuge
before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far when a fine
young man started up from some business of his own behind a coil of rope and
saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he was one of the crew and
would help the Princess to find what she wanted, lit a lump of candle and
disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought only of
the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means for making her
irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there were and hardships to
overcome. She was determined to live in Russia, where there were frozen
rivers and wild horses and men, she said, who gashed each other's throats
open. It is true that a landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and
slaughter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his pleasant
country ways of sport and tree-planting; relinquish his office; ruin his
career; shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka instead of
canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve - for what purpose, he knew not.
Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her sake. As for his
marriage to the Lady Margaret, fixed though it was for this day sennight,
the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave it a thought. Her
kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a great lady; his friends would deride
him for ruining the finest career in the world for a Cossack woman and a
waste of snow - it weighed not a straw in the balance compared with Sasha
herself. On the first dark night they would fly. They would take ship to
Russia. So he pondered; so he plotted as he walked up and down the deck.
He was recalled, turning westward, by the sight of the sun, slung like
an orange on the cross of St Paul's. It was blood-red and sinking rapidly.
It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this hour and more. Seized
instantly with those dark forebodings which shadowed even his most confident
thoughts of her, he plunged the way he had seen them go into the hold of the
ship; and, after stumbling among chests and barrels in the darkness, was
made aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they were seated there. For
one second, he had a vision of them; saw Sasha seated on the sailor's knee;
saw her bend towards him; saw them embrace before the light was blotted out
in a red cloud by his rage. He blazed into such a howl of anguish that the
whole ship echoed. Sasha threw herself between them, or the sailor would
have been stifled before he could draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sickness
came over Orlando, and they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy
to drink before he revived. And then, when he had recovered and was sat upon
a heap of sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before his dizzied
eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox that had bit him, now cajoling, now
denouncing, so that he came to doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle
guttered; had not the shadows moved? The box was heavy, she said; the man
was helping her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment - for who can be
sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to find? - the next
was the more violent with anger at her deceit. Then Sasha herself turned
white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go that night, and called
upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of
a common seaman. Indeed, looking at them together (which he could hardly
bring himself to do) Orlando was outraged by the foulness of his imagination
that could have painted so frail a creature in the paw of that hairy sea
brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his stockings, wore common
wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray horse upon which some wren or
robin has perched in its flight. So he yielded; believed her; and asked her
pardon. Yet when they were going down the ship's side, lovingly again, Sasha
paused with her hand on the ladder, and called back to this tawny
wide-cheeked monster a volley of Russian greetings, jests, or endearments,
not a word of which Orlando could understand. But there was something in her
tone (it might be the fault of the Russian consonants) that reminded Orlando
of a scene some nights since, when he had come upon her in secret gnawing a
candle-end in a corner, which she had picked from the floor. True, it was
pink; it was gilt; and it was from the King's table; but it was tallow, and
she gnawed it. Was there not, he thought, handing her on to the ice,
something rank in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant born?
And he fancied her at forty grown unwieldy though she was now slim as a
reed, and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again as they
skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast, and he felt as
if he had been hooked by a great fish through the nose and rushed through
the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent.
It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the
domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness
against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at
Charing; there the dome of St Paul's; there the massy square of the Tower
buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob at
the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows
were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando's
fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in
Orlando's fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually.
All the time they seemed to be skating in fathomless depths of air, so blue
the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they sped quicker and
quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about them, and cutting in
the air with their wings the very same sweeps that they cut on the ice with
their skates.
Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more
delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him
how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the
steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf. Upon which he told
her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the
great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket.
And then she praised him; for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his
legs. Ravished with her praises and shamed to think how he had maligned her
by fancying her on the knees of a common sailor and grown fat and lethargic
at forty, he told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet
instantly bethought him how she was like the spring and green grass and
rushing waters, and seizing her more tightly than ever, he swung her with
him half across the river so that the gulls and the cormorants swung too.
And halting at length, out of breath, she said, panting slightly, that he
was like a million-candled Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia) hung
with yellow globes; incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; (so one
might translate it) for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his
black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own
radiance, from a lamp lit within.
All the colour, save the red of Orlando's cheeks, soon faded. Night
came on. As the orange light of sunset vanished it was succeeded by an
astonishing white glare from the torches, bonfires, flaming cressets, and
other devices by which the river was lit up and the strangest transformation
took place. Various churches and noblemen's palaces, whose fronts were of
white stone showed in streaks and patches as if floating on the air. Of St
Paul's, in particular, nothing was left but a gilt cross. The Abbey appeared
like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything suffered emaciation and
transformation. As they approached the carnival, they heard a deep note like
that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed louder and louder until it became
an uproar. Every now and then a great shout followed a rocket into the air.
Gradually they could discern little figures breaking off from the vast crowd
and spinning hither and thither like gnats on the surface of a river. Above
and around this brilliant circle like a bowl of darkness pressed the deep
black of a winter's night. And then into this darkness there began to rise
with pauses, which kept the expectation alert and the mouth open, flowering
rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown. At one moment the woods and distant
hills showed green as on a summer's day; the next all was winter and
blackness again.
By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure
and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who were
pressing as near to the silken rope as they dared. Loth to end their privacy
and encounter the sharp eyes that were on the watch for them, the couple
lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse
dealers, cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their whimples;
orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little
ragamuffins such as always haunt the outskirts of a crowd, screaming and
scrambling among people's feet - all the riff-raff of the London streets
indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes,
shoving, tickling, pinching; here uproarious, there glum; some of them with
mouths gaping a yard wide; others as little reverent as daws on a house-top;
all as variously rigged out as their purse or stations allowed; here in fur
and broadcloth; there in tatters with their feet kept from the ice only by a
dishclout bound about them. The main press of people, it appeared, stood
opposite a booth or stage something like our Punch and Judy show upon which
some kind of theatrical performance was going forward. A black man was
waving his arms and vociferating. There was a woman in white laid upon a
bed. Rough though the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of
steps and sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and
whistling, or when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel on to the
ice which a dog would scramble for, still the astonishing, sinuous melody of
the words stirred Orlando like music. Spoken with extreme speed and a daring
agility of tongue which reminded him of the sailors singing in the beer
gardens at Wapping, the words even without meaning were as wine to him. But
now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if
torn from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his
own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha
he killed with his own hands.
At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down
his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too.
Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave.
Worms devour us.
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn?
Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The
night was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they
had waited for; it was on such a night as this that they had planned to fly.
He remembered everything. The time had come. With a burst of passion he
snatched Sasha to him, and hissed in her ear "Jour de ma vie!" It was their
signal. At midnight they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars. Horses
waited there. Everything was in readiness for their flight. So they parted,
she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hour of the time.
Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so inky a
blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen, which was all to
the good, but it was also of the most solemn stillness so that a horse's
hoof, or a child's cry, could be heard at a distance of half a mile. Many a
time did Orlando, pacing the little courtyard, hold his heart at the sound
of some nag's steady footfall on the cobbles, or at the rustle of a woman's
dress. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home belated; or
some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed,
and the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt
downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city lived
moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one, were extinguished. The
street lanterns in these purlieus were few at most; and the negligence of
the night watchman often suffered them to expire long before dawn. The
darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of
his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his
holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least till he could find
nothing more needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty
minutes to midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn
parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of
canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their
ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till
they toppled off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor. The
darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He
listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout
and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress
cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he
had no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would
come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her
footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a
blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation
was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated
a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that
it took him a minute to realize that these were raindrops falling; the blows
were the blows of the rain. At first, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by
one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then ran
themselves together in a steady spout of water. It was as if the hard and
consolidated sky poured itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space
of five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin.
Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath the
lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air was
thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the
downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it. The
roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and
perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight he
scarcely thought. All his senses were bent upon gazing along the cobbled
pathway - gleaming in the light of the lantern - for Sasha's coming.
Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain
strokes. But the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and ominous
voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish
in Orlando's soul, St Paul's struck the first stroke of midnight. Four times
more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had
made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth
stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his
apprehensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming
death and disaster. When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was
sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be
late; she might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate
and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling
one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her
deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him
rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes,
each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous
rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees.
The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge
noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were
also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Orlando stood there
immovable till Paul's clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful
irony, and all his teeth showing, "Jour de ma vie!" he dashed the lantern to
the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where.
Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to
take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the dawn broke,
which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and the
rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off
Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where,
for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that
it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had been stood on its
pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters. The river had gained
its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to which view many
philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst
the ice asunder with such vehemence that it swept the huge and massy
fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one
giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some
of these were as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no
bigger than a man's hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down
a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way.
Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to
be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank,
so that they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what
was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human
creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and
precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into
the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. Sometimes quite a
cluster of these poor creatures would come down together, some on their
knees, others suckling their babies. One old man seemed to be reading aloud
from a holy book. At other times, and his fate perhaps was the most
dreadful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrow tenement alone. As they
swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild
promises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and vowing altars and
wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so dazed with terror
that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before them. One crew
of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their liveries, roared and
shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado, and were dashed against
a tree and sunk with blasphemies on their lips. An old nobleman - for such
his furred gown and golden chain proclaimed him - went down not far from
where Orlando stood, calling vengeance upon the Irish rebels, who, he cried
with his last breath, had plotted this devilry. Many perished clasping some
silver pot or other treasure to their breasts; and at least a score of poor
wretches were drowned by their own cupidity, hurling themselves from the
bank into the flood rather than let a gold goblet escape them, or see before
their eyes the disappearance of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables,
possessions of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other
strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid
sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an
extraordinary number of cooking utensils.
Dazed and astounded, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch
the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming
to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard along
the river bank in the direction of the sea. Rounding a bend of the river, he
came opposite that reach where, not two days ago, the ships of the
Ambassadors had seemed immovably frozen. Hastily, he made count of them all;
the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still floated, though
the French had broken loose from her moorings, and the Turkish vessel had
taken a great rent in her side and was fast filling with water. But the
Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. For one moment Orlando thought it must
have foundered; but, raising himself in his stirrups and shading his eyes,
which had the sight of a hawk's, he could just make out the shape of a ship
on the horizon. The black eagles were flying from the mast head. The ship of
the Muscovite Embassy was standing out to sea.
Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would
breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless
woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless,
mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the
swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a
little straw.
CHAPTER 2.
The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better
perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story
of Orlando's life, documents, both private and historical, have made it
possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without
looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by
flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into
the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. But now we come
to an episode which lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring
it. Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no
explaining it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole
religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is
to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of
them what he may.
In the summer of that disastrous winter which saw the frost, the flood,
the deaths of many thousands, and the complete downfall of Orlando's hopes -
for he was exiled from Court; in deep disgrace with the most powerful nobles
of his time; the Irish house of Desmond was justly enraged; the King had
already trouble enough with the Irish not to relish this further addition -
in that summer Orlando retired to his great house in the country and there
lived in complete solitude. One June morning - it was Saturday the
18th - he failed to rise at his usual hour, and when his groom
went to call him he was found fast asleep. Nor could he be awakened. He lay
as if in a trance, without perceptible breathing; and though dogs were set
to bark under his window; cymbals, drums, bones beaten perpetually in his
room; a gorse bush put under his pillow; and mustard plasters applied to his
feet, still he did not wake, take food, or show any sign of life for seven
whole days. On the seventh day he woke at his usual time (a quarter before
eight, precisely) and turned the whole posse of caterwauling wives and
village soothsayers out of his room, which was natural enough; but what was
strange was that he showed no consciousness of any such trance, but dressed
himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a single night's
slumber. Yet some change, it was suspected, must have taken place in the
chambers of his brain, for though he was perfectly rational and seemed
graver and more sedate in his ways than before, he appeared to have an
imperfect recollection of his past life. He would listen when people spoke
of the great frost or the skating or the carnival, but he never gave any
sign, except by passing his hand across his brow as if to wipe away some
cloud, of having witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six
months were discussed, he seemed not so much distressed as puzzled, as if he
were troubled by confused memories of some time long gone or were trying to
recall stories told him by another. It was observed that if Russia was
mentioned or Princesses or ships, he would fall into a gloom of an uneasy
kind and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him,
or take a knife and carve a piece of cedar wood. But the doctors were hardly
wiser then than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise,
starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie in bed
all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, together with the
usual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as the fancy took them, with
possets of newt's slobber on rising, and draughts of peacock's gall on going
to bed, they left him to himself, and gave it as their opinion that he had
been asleep for a week.
But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from
asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures - trances in
which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for
ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds
them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the
finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it
rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses
daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what
strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our
most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by
the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life
again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having
waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none
coming, let us get on with the story.
Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace
at Court and the violence of his grief were partly the reason of it, but as
he made no effort to defend himself and seldom invited anyone to visit him
(though he had many friends who would willingly have done so) it appeared as
if to be alone in the great house of his fathers suited his temper. Solitude
was his choice. How he spent his time, nobody quite knew. The servants, of
whom he kept a full retinue, though much of their business was to dust empty
rooms and to smooth the coverlets of beds that were never slept in, watched,
in the dark of the evening, as they sat over their cakes and ale, a light
passing along the galleries, through the banqueting-halls, up the staircase,
into the bedrooms, and knew that their master was perambulating the house
alone. None dared follow him, for the house was haunted by a great variety
of ghosts, and the extent of it made it easy to lose one's way and either
fall down some hidden staircase or open a door which, should the wind blow
it to, would shut upon one for ever - accidents of no uncommon occurrence,
as the frequent discovery of the skeletons of men and animals in attitudes
of great agony made evident. Then the light would be lost altogether, and
Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr Dupper, the chaplain, how
she hoped his Lordship had not met with some bad accident. Mr Dupper would
opine that his Lordship was on his knees, no doubt, among the tombs of his
ancestors in the Chapel, which was in the Billiard Table Court, half a mile
away on the south side. For he had sins on his conscience, Mr Dupper was
afraid; upon which Mrs Grimsditch would retort, rather sharply, that so had
most of us; and Mrs Stewkley and Mrs Field and old Nurse Carpenter would all
raise their voices in his Lordship's praise; and the grooms and the stewards
would swear that it was a thousand pities to see so fine a nobleman moping
about the house when he might be hunting the fox or chasing the deer; and
even the little laundry maids and scullery maids, the Judys and the Faiths,
who were handing round the tankards and cakes, would pipe up their testimony
to his Lordship's gallantry; for never was there a kinder gentleman, or one
more free with those little pieces of silver which serve to buy a knot of
ribbon or put a posy in one's hair; until even the Blackamoor whom they
called Grace Robinson by way of making a Christian woman of her, understood
what they were at, and agreed that his Lordship was a handsome, pleasant,
darling gentleman in the only way she could, that is to say by showing all
her teeth at once in a broad grin. In short, all his serving men and women
held him in high respect, and cursed the foreign Princess (but they called
her by a coarser name than that) who had brought him to this pass.
But though it was probably cowardice, or love of hot ale, that led Mr
Dupper to imagine his Lordship safe among the tombs so that he need not go
in search of him, it may well have been that Mr Dupper was right. Orlando
now took a strange delight in thoughts of death and decay, and, after pacing
the long galleries and ballrooms with a taper in his hand, looking at
picture after picture as if he sought the likeness of somebody whom he could
not find, would mount into the family pew and sit for hours watching the
banners stir and the moonlight waver with a bat or death's head moth to keep
him company. Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend into the
crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations
together. The place was so seldom visited that the rats made free with the
lead work, and now a thigh bone would catch at his cloak as he passed, or he
would crack the skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot.
It was a ghastly sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as
if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the
Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how
the skeleton lies beneath the flesh: how we that dance and sing above must
lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring (here Orlando,
stooping his lantern, would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had
rolled into a corner) loses its ruby and the eye which was so lustrous
shines no more. "Nothing remains of all these Princes," Orlando would say,
indulging in some pardonable exaggeration of their rank, "except one digit,"
and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and
that. "Whose hand was it?" he went on to ask. "The right or the left? The
hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the war horse, or plied
the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold steel? Had it?" but
here either his invention failed him or, what is more likely, provided him
with so many instances of what a hand can do that he shrank, as his wont
was, from the cardinal labour of composition, which is excision, and he put
it with the other bones, thinking how there was a writer called Thomas
Browne, a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects took his fancy
amazingly.
So, taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order, for
though romantic, he was singularly methodical and detested nothing so much
as a ball of string on the floor, let alone the skull of an ancestor, he
returned to that curious, moody pacing down the galleries, looking for
something among the pictures, which was interrupted at length by a veritable
spasm of sobbing, at the sight of a Dutch snow scene by an unknown artist.
Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting
the bones of his ancestors and how life is founded on a grave, he stood
there shaken with sobs, all for the desire of a woman in Russian trousers,
with slanting eyes, a pouting mouth and pearls about her neck. She had gone.
She had left him. He was never to see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he
found his way back to his own rooms; and Mrs Grimsditch, seeing the light in
the window, put the tankard from her lips and said Praise be to God, his
Lordship was safe in his room again; for she had been thinking all this
while that he was foully murdered.
Orlando now drew his chair up to the table; opened the works of Sir
Thomas Browne and proceeded to investigate the delicate articulation of one
of the doctor's longest and most marvellously contorted cogitations.
For though these are not matters on which a biographer can profitably
enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a reader's part in making
up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and
circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living
voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked
like; know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought - and it
is for readers such as these that we write - it is plain then to such a
reader that Orlando was strangely compounded of many humours - of
melancholy, of indolence, of passion, of love of solitude, to say nothing of
all those contortions and subtleties of temper which were indicated on the
first page, when he slashed at a dead nigger's head; cut it down; hung it
chivalrously out of his reach again and then betook himself to the
windowseat with a book. The taste for books was an early one. As a child he
was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper
away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms
away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a
nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its
implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many
people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were
thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were
early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and
to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it
would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as it
sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was
the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so
that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift - plate, linen, houses,
men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion - had only to open a book for the
whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were
his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his
eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the
carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other
movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under
the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked
man.
The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He would read
often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about
the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away
his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This
was bad enough and wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the
groom, of Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr Dupper, the chaplain. A
fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave
books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For
once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that
it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and
festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad
enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath
a leaky roof - for he has not much to lose, after all - the plight of a rich
man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet
writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of
him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny
he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and
become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a
well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his
brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they
find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of
Hell.
Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for
reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has broken many of
his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when
he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag
and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and
all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and
unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner.
Within were some fifty drawers of cedar wood and upon each was a paper
neatly written in Orlando's hand. He paused, as if hesitating which to open.
One was inscribed "The Death of Ajax", another "The Birth of Pyramus",
another "Iphigenia in Aulis", another "The Death of Hippolytus", another
"Meleager", another "The Return of Odysseus", - in fact there was scarcely a
single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a
crisis of his career. In each drawer lay a document of considerable size all
written over in Orlando's hand. The truth was that Orlando had been
afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando
begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and
games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the
cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and
smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in
another, and on his knee a roll of paper. Thus had been written, before he
was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems;
some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic,
and all long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and
Coronet opposite St Paul's Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of it gave
him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his mother, since to
write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable
disgrace.
Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he chose
from this repository one thick document called "Xenophila a Tragedy" or some
such title, and one thin one, called simply "The Oak Tree" (this was the
only monosyllabic title among the lot), and then he approached the inkhorn,
fingered the quill, and made other such passes as those addicted to this
vice begin their rites with. But he paused.
As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so,
indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run
with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due
reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played
so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds,
of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most
incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's;
nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of
November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again,
our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea,
and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon;
Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer
"Yes"; if we are truthful we say "No"; nature, who has so much to answer for
besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further
complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a
perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us - a piece of a policeman's
trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil - but has
contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a
single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.
Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know
not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement
in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand
towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright,
now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen
of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a
single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed,
our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings,
a rising and falling of lights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in
the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a
million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was
she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover?
Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead? - all of
which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his agony somewhere,
he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted over the
table, which act, explain it how one may (and no explanation perhaps is
possible - Memory is inexplicable), at once substituted for the face of the
Princess a face of a very different sort. But whose was it, he asked
himself? And he had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new
picture which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen
through the next, before he could say to himself, "This is the face of that
rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett's room ever so many years ago
when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him," Orlando continued,
catching at another of those little coloured rags, "sitting at the table, as
I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes," said
Orlando, "that ever were, but who the devil was he?" Orlando asked, for here
Memory added to the forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained
ruffle, then a brown doublet, and finally a pair of thick boots such as
citizens wear in Cheapside. "Not a Nobleman; not one of us," said Orlando
(which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most courteous of
gentlemen; but it shows what an effect noble birth has upon the mind and
incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer), "a poet, I
dare say." By all the laws, Memory, having disturbed him sufficiently,
should now have blotted the whole thing out completely, or have fetched up
something so idiotic and out of keeping - like a dog chasing a cat or an old
woman blowing her nose into a red cotton handkerchief - that, in despair of
keeping pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in
earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the
hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house.) But Orlando
paused. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big,
bright eyes. Still he looked, still he paused. It is these pauses that are
our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops
rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid
rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory lo...
