Orlando: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

Styled by LimpidSoft

Contents

PREFACE 1

CHAPTER 1 6

CHAPTER 2 95

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CHAPTER 3 187

CHAPTER 4 244

CHAPTER 5 368

CHAPTER 6 429

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The present document was derivedfrom text Gutenberg of AustraliaeBook0200331.txtSue Asscher (producer), which wasmade available free of charge. Thisdocument is also free of charge.

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ORLANDO

A BIOGRAPHYBY

VIRGINIA WOOLF

TOV. SACKVILLE-WEST

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PREFACE

MANY friends have helped me in writingthis book. Some are dead and so illus-

trious that I scarcely dare name them, yet noone can read or write without being perpetu-ally in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne,Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, EmilyBronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,–to name

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the first that come to mind. Others are alive,and though perhaps as illustrious in their ownway, are less formidable for that very reason. Iam specially indebted to Mr C.P. Sanger, with-out whose knowledge of the law of real prop-erty this book could never have been written.Mr Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudi-tion has saved me, I hope, some lamentableblunders. I have had the advantage–how greatI alone can estimate–of Mr Arthur Waley’sknowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova(Mrs J.M. Keynes) has been at hand to cor-rect my Russian. To the unrivalled sympa-thy and imagination of Mr Roger Fry I owewhatever understanding of the art of paintingI may possess. I have, I hope, profited in an-other department by the singularly penetrat-ing, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr JulianBell. Miss M.K. Snowdon’s indefatigable re-

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searches in the archives of Harrogate and Chel-tenham were none the less arduous for beingvain. Other friends have helped me in ways toovarious to specify. I must content myself withnaming Mr Angus Davidson; Mrs Cartwright;Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowl-edge of Elizabethan music has proved invalu-able); Mr Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr AdrianStephen; Mr F.L. Lucas; Mr and Mrs DesmondMaccarthy; that most inspiriting of critics, mybrother-in-law, Mr Clive Bell; Mr G.H. Rylands;Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr J.M.Keynes; Mr Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet Dickin-son; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr andMrs St. John Hutchinson; Mr Duncan Grant;Mr and Mrs Stephen Tomlin; Mr and LadyOttoline Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs Syd-ney Woolf; Mr Osbert Sitwell; Madame JacquesRaverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor;

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Mr J.T. Sheppard; Mr and Mrs T.S. Eliot; MissEthel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephewMr Quentin Bell (an old and valued collabo-rator in fiction); Mr Raymond Mortimer; LadyGerald Wellesley; Mr Lytton Strachey; the Vis-countess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr E.M.Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my sis-ter, Vanessa Bell–but the list threatens to growtoo long and is already far too distinguished.For while it rouses in me memories of the pleas-antest kind it will inevitably wake expectationsin the reader which the book itself can only dis-appoint. Therefore I will conclude by thankingthe officials of the British Museum and RecordOffice for their wonted courtesy; my niece MissAngelica Bell, for a service which none but shecould have rendered; and my husband for thepatience with which he has invariably helpedmy researches and for the profound historical

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PREFACE

knowledge to which these pages owe whateverdegree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, Iwould thank, had I not lost his name and ad-dress, a gentleman in America, who has gen-erously and gratuitously corrected the punctu-ation, the botany, the entomology, the geogra-phy, and the chronology of previous works ofmine and will, I hope, not spare his services onthe present occasion.

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CHAPTER 1

HE–FOR THERE COULD be no doubt of hissex, though the fashion of the time did some-thing to disguise it–was in the act of slicingat the head of a Moor which swung from therafters. It was the colour of an old football,and more or less the shape of one, save for thesunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse,

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dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’sfather, or perhaps his grandfather, had struckit from the shoulders of a vast Pagan whohad started up under the moon in the barbar-ian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently,perpetually, in the breeze which never ceasedblowing through the attic rooms of the gigantichouse of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of as-phodel, and stony fields, and fields wateredby strange rivers, and they had struck manyheads of many colours off many shoulders, andbrought them back to hang from the rafters. Sotoo would Orlando, he vowed. But since hewas sixteen only, and too young to ride withthem in Africa or France, he would steal awayfrom his mother and the peacocks in the gardenand go to his attic room and there lunge and

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plunge and slice the air with his blade. Some-times he cut the cord so that the skull bumpedon the floor and he had to string it up again,fastening it with some chivalry almost out ofreach so that his enemy grinned at him throughshrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skullswung to and fro, for the house, at the top ofwhich he lived, was so vast that there seemedtrapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way,blowing that way, winter and summer. Thegreen arras with the hunters on it moved per-petually. His fathers had been noble since theyhad been at all. They came out of the northernmists wearing coronets on their heads. Werenot the bars of darkness in the room, and theyellow pools which chequered the floor, madeby the sun falling through the stained glass ofa vast coat of arms in the window? Orlandostood now in the midst of the yellow body of an

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heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on thewindow-sill to push the window open, it wasinstantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like abutterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols,and have a turn for the deciphering of them,might observe that though the shapely legs,the handsome body, and the well-set shoulderswere all of them decorated with various tints ofheraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw thewindow open, was lit solely by the sun itself.A more candid, sullen face it would be impossi-ble to find. Happy the mother who bears, hap-pier still the biographer who records the life ofsuch a one! Never need she vex herself, norhe invoke the help of novelist or poet. Fromdeed to deed, from glory to glory, from officeto office he must go, his scribe following af-ter, till they reach whatever seat it may be thatis the height of their desire. Orlando, to look

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at, was cut out precisely for some such career.The red of the cheeks was covered with peachdown; the down on the lips was only a littlethicker than the down on the cheeks. The lipsthemselves were short and slightly drawn backover teeth of an exquisite and almond white-ness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose inits short, tense flight; the hair was dark, theears small, and fitted closely to the head. But,alas, that these catalogues of youthful beautycannot end without mentioning forehead andeyes. Alas, that people are seldom born de-void of all three; for directly we glance at Or-lando standing by the window, we must ad-mit that he had eyes like drenched violets, solarge that the water seemed to have brimmedin them and widened them; and a brow like theswelling of a marble dome pressed between thetwo blank medallions which were his temples.

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Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thusdo we rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyesand forehead, we have to admit a thousand dis-agreeables which it is the aim of every goodbiographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him,like that of his mother, a very beautiful ladyin green walking out to feed the peacocks withTwitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exaltedhim–the birds and the trees; and made him inlove with death–the evening sky, the homingrooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairwayinto his brain–which was a roomy one–all thesesights, and the garden sounds too, the hammerbeating, the wood chopping, began that riotand confusion of the passions and emotionswhich every good biographer detests, But tocontinue–Orlando slowly drew in his head, satdown at the table, and, with the half-consciousair of one doing what they do every day of

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their lives at this hour, took out a writing booklabelled ‘Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,’and dipped an old stained goose quill in theink.

Soon he had covered ten pages and morewith poetry. He was fluent, evidently, but hewas abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the per-sonages of his drama; there were Kings andQueens of impossible territories; horrid plotsconfounded them; noble sentiments suffusedthem; there was never a word said as he him-self would have said it, but all was turned witha fluency and sweetness which, considering hisage–he was not yet seventeen–and that the six-teenth century had still some years of its courseto run, were remarkable enough. At last, how-ever, he came to a halt. He was describing, asall young poets are for ever describing, nature,

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and in order to match the shade of green pre-cisely he looked (and here he showed more au-dacity than most) at the thing itself, which hap-pened to be a laurel bush growing beneath thewindow. After that, of course, he could writeno more. Green in nature is one thing, green inliterature another. Nature and letters seem tohave a natural antipathy; bring them togetherand they tear each other to pieces. The shadeof green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme andsplit his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks ofher own. Once look out of a window at beesamong flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sunsetting, once think ‘how many more suns shall Isee set’, etc. etc. (the thought is too well knownto be worth writing out) and one drops the pen,takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, andcatches one’s foot on a painted chest as onedoes so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.

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He was careful to avoid meeting anyone.There was Stubbs, the gardener, coming alongthe path. He hid behind a tree till he hadpassed. He let himself out at a little gatein the garden wall. He skirted all stables,kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, wash-houses, places where they make tallow can-dles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins–for the house was a town ringing with menat work at their various crafts–and gained theferny path leading uphill through the park un-seen. There is perhaps a kinship among qual-ities; one draws another along with it; and thebiographer should here call attention to the factthat this clumsiness is often mated with a loveof solitude. Having stumbled over a chest,Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vastviews, and to feel himself for ever and ever andever alone.

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So, after a long silence, ‘I am alone’, hebreathed at last, opening his lips for the firsttime in this record. He had walked veryquickly uphill through ferns and hawthornbushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a placecrowned by a single oak tree. It was very high,so high indeed that nineteen English countiescould be seen beneath; and on clear days thirtyor perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine.Sometimes one could see the English Channel,wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could beseen and pleasure boats gliding on them; andgalleons setting out to sea; and armadas withpuffs of smoke from which came the dull thudof cannon firing; and forts on the coast; andcastles among the meadows; and here a watchtower; and there a fortress; and again some vastmansion like that of Orlando’s father, massedlike a town in the valley circled by walls. To

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the east there were the spires of London andthe smoke of the city; and perhaps on the verysky line, when the wind was in the right quar-ter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snow-don herself showed mountainous among theclouds. For a moment Orlando stood count-ing, gazing, recognizing. That was his father’shouse; that his uncle’s. His aunt owned thosethree great turrets among the trees there. Theheath was theirs and the forest; the pheasantand the deer, the fox, the badger, and the but-terfly.

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself–there was a passion in his movements whichdeserves the word–on the earth at the foot ofthe oak tree. He loved, beneath all this sum-mer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneathhim; for such he took the hard root of the oak

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tree to be; or, for image followed image, it wasthe back of a great horse that he was riding,or the deck of a tumbling ship–it was anythingindeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt theneed of something which he could attach hisfloating heart to; the heart that tugged at hisside; the heart that seemed filled with spicedand amorous gales every evening about thistime when he walked out. To the oak tree hetied it and as he lay there, gradually the flut-ter in and about him stilled itself; the littleleaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale sum-mer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy onthe ground; and he lay so still that by degreesthe deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeledround him and the swallows dipped and cir-cled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all thefertility and amorous activity of a summer’sevening were woven web-like about his body.

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After an hour or so–the sun was rapidlysinking, the white clouds had turned red, thehills were violet, the woods purple, the valleysblack–a trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to hisfeet. The shrill sound came from the valley.It came from a dark spot down there; a spotcompact and mapped out; a maze; a town, yetgirt about with walls; it came from the heartof his own great house in the valley, which,dark before, even as he looked and the sin-gle trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itselfwith other shriller sounds, lost its darkness andbecame pierced with lights. Some were smallhurrying lights, as if servants dashed alongcorridors to answer summonses; others werehigh and lustrous lights, as if they burnt inempty banqueting-halls made ready to receiveguests who had not come; and others dippedand waved and sank and rose, as if held in

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the hands of troops of serving men, bending,kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and es-corting with all dignity indoors a great Princessalighting from her chariot. Coaches turned andwheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed theirplumes. The Queen had come.

Orlando looked no more. He dashed down-hill. He let himself in at a wicket gate. He toreup the winding staircase. He reached his room.He tossed his stockings to one side of the room,his jerkin to the other. He dipped his head. Hescoured his hands. He pared his finger nails.With no more than six inches of looking-glassand a pair of old candles to help him, he hadthrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waist-coat of taffeta, and shoes with rosettes on themas big as double dahlias in less than ten min-utes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was

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flushed. He was excited, But he was terriblylate.

By short cuts known to him, he made hisway now through the vast congeries of roomsand staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acresdistant on the other side of the house. Buthalf-way there, in the back quarters where theservants lived, he stopped. The door of MrsStewkley’s sitting-room stood open–she wasgone, doubtless, with all her keys to wait uponher mistress. But there, sitting at the servant’sdinner table with a tankard beside him and pa-per in front of him, sat a rather fat, shabby man,whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whoseclothes were of hodden brown. He held apen in his hand, but he was not writing. Heseemed in the act of rolling some thought upand down, to and fro in his mind till it gath-

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ered shape or momentum to his liking. Hiseyes, globed and clouded like some green stoneof curious texture, were fixed. He did not seeOrlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stoppeddead. Was this a poet? Was he writing po-etry? ‘Tell me’, he wanted to say, ‘everythingin the whole world’–for he had the wildest,most absurd, extravagant ideas about poetsand poetry–but how speak to a man who doesnot see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhapsthe depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stoodgazing while the man turned his pen in his fin-gers, this way and that way; and gazed andmused; and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. Whereupon Or-lando, overcome with shyness, darted off andreached the banqueting-hall only just in timeto sink upon his knees and, hanging his headin confusion, to offer a bowl of rose water to

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the great Queen herself.

Such was his shyness that he saw no moreof her than her ringed hands in water; butit was enough. It was a memorable hand; athin hand with long fingers always curling asif round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed,sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a handthat had only to raise itself for a head to fall; ahand, he guessed, attached to an old body thatsmelt like a cupboard in which furs are keptin camphor; which body was yet caparisonedin all sorts of brocades and gems; and held it-self very upright though perhaps in pain fromsciatica; and never flinched though strung to-gether by a thousand fears; and the Queen’seyes were light yellow. All this he felt asthe great rings flashed in the water and thensomething pressed his hair–which, perhaps, ac-

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counts for his seeing nothing more likely to beof use to a historian. And in truth, his mindwas such a welter of opposites–of the night andthe blazing candles, of the shabby poet and thegreat Queen, of silent fields and the clatter ofserving men–that he could see nothing; or onlya hand.

By the same showing, the Queen herself canhave seen only a head. But if it is possiblefrom a hand to deduce a body, informed withall the attributes of a great Queen, her crabbed-ness, courage, frailty, and terror, surely a headcan be as fertile, looked down upon from achair of state by a lady whose eyes were al-ways, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to betrusted, wide open. The long, curled hair, thedark head bent so reverently, so innocently be-fore her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a

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young nobleman has ever stood upright upon;and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loy-alty and manly charm–all qualities which theold woman loved the more the more they failedher. For she was growing old and worn andbent before her time. The sound of cannonwas always in her ears. She saw always theglistening poison drop and the long stiletto.As she sat at table she listened; she heard theguns in the Channel; she dreaded–was that acurse, was that a whisper? Innocence, simplic-ity, were all the more dear to her for the darkbackground she set them against. And it wasthat same night, so tradition has it, when Or-lando was sound asleep, that she made overformally, putting her hand and seal finally tothe parchment, the gift of the great monastichouse that had been the Archbishop’s and thenthe King’s to Orlando’s father.

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Orlando slept all night in ignorance. Hehad been kissed by a queen without knowingit. And perhaps, for women’s hearts are intri-cate, it was his ignorance and the start he gavewhen her lips touched him that kept the mem-ory of her young cousin (for they had blood incommon) green in her mind. At any rate, twoyears of this quiet country life had not passed,and Orlando had written no more perhaps thantwenty tragedies and a dozen histories and ascore of sonnets when a message came that hewas to attend the Queen at Whitehall.

‘Here’, she said, watching him advancedown the long gallery towards her, ‘comes myinnocent!’ (There was a serenity about him al-ways which had the look of innocence when,technically, the word was no longer applica-ble.)

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‘Come!’ she said. She was sitting bolt up-right beside the fire. And she held him a foot’space from her and looked him up and down.Was she matching her speculations the othernight with the truth now visible? Did shefind her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose,breast, hips, hands–she ran them over; her lipstwitched visibly as she looked; but when shesaw his legs she laughed out loud. He wasthe very image of a noble gentleman. But in-wardly? She flashed her yellow hawk’s eyesupon him as if she would pierce his soul. Theyoung man withstood her gaze blushing onlya damask rose as became him. Strength, grace,romance, folly, poetry, youth–she read him likea page. Instantly she plucked a ring from herfinger (the joint was swollen rather) and as shefitted it to his, named him her Treasurer andSteward; next hung about him chains of of-

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fice; and bidding him bend his knee, tied roundit at the slenderest part the jewelled order ofthe Garter. Nothing after that was denied him.When she drove in state he rode at her carriagedoor. She sent him to Scotland on a sad em-bassy to the unhappy Queen. He was aboutto sail for the Polish wars when she recalledhim. For how could she bear to think of thattender flesh torn and that curly head rolled inthe dust? She kept him with her. At the heightof her triumph when the guns were boomingat the Tower and the air was thick enough withgunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzasof the people rang beneath the windows, shepulled him down among the cushions whereher women had laid her (she was so wornand old) and made him bury his face in thatastonishing composition–she had not changedher dress for a month–which smelt for all the

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world, he thought, recalling his boyish mem-ory, like some old cabinet at home where hismother’s furs were stored. He rose, half suffo-cated from the embrace. ‘This’, she breathed,‘is my victory!’–even as a rocket roared up anddyed her cheeks scarlet.

For the old woman loved him. And theQueen, who knew a man when she saw one,though not, it is said, in the usual way, plot-ted for him a splendid ambitious career. Landswere given him, houses assigned him. He wasto be the son of her old age; the limb of her infir-mity; the oak tree on which she leant her degra-dation. She croaked out these promises andstrange domineering tendernesses (they wereat Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in herstiff brocades by the fire which, however highthey piled it, never kept her warm.

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Meanwhile, the long winter months drewon. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost.The river ran sluggishly. One day when thesnow was on the ground and the dark pan-elled rooms were full of shadows and the stagswere barking in the Park, she saw in the mir-ror, which she kept for fear of spies alwaysby her, through the door, which she kept forfear of murderers always open, a boy–could itbe Orlando?–kissing a girl–who in the Devil’sname was the brazen hussy? Snatching at hergolden-hilted sword she struck violently at themirror. The glass crashed; people came run-ning; she was lifted and set in her chair again;but she was stricken after that and groanedmuch, as her days wore to an end, of man’streachery.

It was Orlando’s fault perhaps; yet, after all,

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are we to blame Orlando? The age was the Eliz-abethan; their morals were not ours; nor theirpoets; nor their climate; nor their vegetableseven. Everything was different. The weatheritself, the heat and cold of summer and winter,was, we may believe, of another temper alto-gether. The brilliant amorous day was dividedas sheerly from the night as land from water.Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawnswere whiter and more auroral. Of our crepus-cular half-lights and lingering twilights theyknew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or notat all. The sun blazed or there was darkness.Translating this to the spiritual regions as theirwont is, the poets sang beautifully how rosesfade and petals fall. The moment is brief theysang; the moment is over; one long night isthen to be slept by all. As for using the artificesof the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong

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or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, thatwas not their way. The withered intricacies andambiguities of our more gradual and doubt-ful age were unknown to them. Violence wasall. The flower bloomed and faded. The sunrose and sank. The lover loved and went. Andwhat the poets said in rhyme, the young trans-lated into practice. Girls were roses, and theirseasons were short as the flowers’. Pluckedthey must be before nightfall; for the day wasbrief and the day was all. Thus, if Orlandofollowed the leading of the climate, of the po-ets, of the age itself, and plucked his flowerin the window-seat even with the snow on theground and the Queen vigilant in the corridorwe can scarcely bring ourselves to blame him.He was young; he was boyish; he did but asnature bade him do. As for the girl, we knowno more than Queen Elizabeth herself did what

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her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris,Delia, or Diana, for he made rhymes to themall in turn; equally, she may have been a courtlady, or some serving maid. For Orlando’s tastewas broad; he was no lover of garden flowersonly; the wild and the weeds even had alwaysa fascination for him.

Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biog-rapher may, a curious trait in him, to be ac-counted for, perhaps, by the fact that a cer-tain grandmother of his had worn a smock andcarried milkpails. Some grains of the Kentishor Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, finefluid which came to him from Normandy. Heheld that the mixture of brown earth and blueblood was a good one. Certain it is that he hadalways a liking for low company, especially forthat of lettered people whose wits so often keep

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them under, as if there were the sympathy ofblood between them. At this season of his life,when his head brimmed with rhymes and henever went to bed without striking off someconceit, the cheek of an innkeeper’s daughterseemed fresher and the wit of a gamekeeper’sniece seemed quicker than those of the ladiesat Court. Hence, he began going frequentlyto Wapping Old Stairs and the beer gardens atnight, wrapped in a grey cloak to hide the starat his neck and the garter at his knee. There,with a mug before him, among the sanded al-leys and bowling greens and all the simple ar-chitecture of such places, he listened to sailors’stories of hardship and horror and cruelty onthe Spanish main; how some had lost their toes,others their noses–for the spoken story wasnever so rounded or so finely coloured as thewritten. Especially he loved to hear them vol-

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ley forth their songs of ‘the Azores, while theparrakeets, which they had brought from thoseparts, pecked at the rings in their ears, tappedwith their hard acquisitive beaks at the rubieson their fingers, and swore as vilely as theirmasters. The women were scarcely less bold intheir speech and less free in their manner thanthe birds. They perched on his knee, flung theirarms round his neck and, guessing that some-thing out of the common lay hid beneath hisduffle cloak, were quite as eager to come at thetruth of the matter as Orlando himself.

Nor was opportunity lacking. The river wasastir early and late with barges, wherries, andcraft of all description. Every day sailed to seasome fine ship bound for the Indies; now andagain another blackened and ragged with hairymen on board crept painfully to anchor. No

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one missed a boy or girl if they dallied a lit-tle on the water after sunset; or raised an eye-brow if gossip had seen them sleeping soundlyamong the treasure sacks safe in each other’sarms. Such indeed was the adventure that be-fel Orlando, Sukey, and the Earl of Cumber-land. The day was hot; their loves had been ac-tive; they had fallen asleep among the rubies.Late that night the Earl, whose fortunes weremuch bound up in the Spanish ventures, cameto check the booty alone with a lantern. Heflashed the light on a barrel. He started backwith an oath. Twined about the cask two spiritslay sleeping. Superstitious by nature, and hisconscience laden with many a crime, the Earltook the couple–they were wrapped in a redcloak, and Sukey’s bosom was almost as whiteas the eternal snows of Orlando’s poetry–for aphantom sprung from the graves of drowned

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sailors to upbraid him. He crossed himself. Hevowed repentance. The row of alms houses stillstanding in the Sheen Road is the visible fruit ofthat moment’s panic. Twelve poor old womenof the parish today drink tea and tonight blesshis Lordship for a roof above their heads; sothat illicit love in a treasure ship–but we omitthe moral.

Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not onlyof the discomfort of this way of life, and ofthe crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, butof the primitive manner of the people. For ithas to be remembered that crime and povertyhad none of the attraction for the Elizabethansthat they have for us. They had none of ourmodern shame of book learning; none of ourbelief that to be born the son of a butcher is ablessing and to be unable to read a virtue; no

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fancy that what we call ‘life’ and ‘reality’ aresomehow connected with ignorance and bru-tality; nor, indeed, any equivalent for these twowords at all. It was not to seek ‘life’ that Or-lando went among them; not in quest of ‘real-ity’ that he left them. But when he had hearda score of times how Jakes had lost his noseand Sukey her honour–and they told the sto-ries admirably, it must be admitted–he beganto be a little weary of the repetition, for a nosecan only be cut off in one way and maiden-hood lost in another–or so it seemed to him–whereas the arts and the sciences had a diver-sity about them which stirred his curiosity pro-foundly. So, always keeping them in happymemory, he left off frequenting the beer gar-dens and the skittle alleys, hung his grey cloakin his wardrobe, let his star shine at his neckand his garter twinkle at his knee, and ap-

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peared once more at the Court of King James.He was young, he was rich, he was handsome.No one could have been received with greateracclamation than he was.

It is certain indeed that many ladies wereready to show him their favours. The namesof three at least were freely coupled with his inmarriage–Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne–so hecalled them in his sonnets.

To take them in order; Clorinda was asweet-mannered gentle lady enough;–indeedOrlando was greatly taken with her for sixmonths and a half; but she had white eyelashesand could not bear the sight of blood. A harebrought up roasted at her father’s table turnedher faint. She was much under the influenceof the Priests too, and stinted her underlinenin order to give to the poor. She took it on her

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to reform Orlando of his sins, which sickenedhim, so that he drew back from the marriage,and did not much regret it when she died soonafter of the small-pox.

Favilla, who comes next, was of a differentsort altogether. She was the daughter of a poorSomersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer as-siduity and the use of her eyes had worked herway up at court, where her address in horse-manship, her fine instep, and her grace in danc-ing won the admiration of all. Once, however,she was so ill-advised as to whip a spaniel thathad torn one of her silk stockings (and it mustbe said in justice that Favilla had few stockingsand those for the most part of drugget) withinan inch of its life beneath Orlando’s window.Orlando, who was a passionate lover of ani-mals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked,

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and the two front turned inward, which, hesaid, is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel dis-position in women, and so broke the engage-ment that very night for ever.

The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the mostserious of his flames. She was by birth one ofthe Irish Desmonds and had therefore a fam-ily tree of her own as old and deeply rootedas Orlando’s itself. She was fair, florid, and atrifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, hada perfect set of teeth in the upper jaw, thoughthose on the lower were slightly discoloured.She was never without a whippet or spanielat her knee; fed them with white bread fromher own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals;and was never dressed before mid-day ow-ing to the extreme care she took of her per-son. In short, she would have made a perfect

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wife for such a nobleman as Orlando, and mat-ters had gone so far that the lawyers on bothsides were busy with covenants, jointures, set-tlements, messuages, tenements, and whateveris needed before one great fortune can matewith another when, with the suddenness andseverity that then marked the English climate,came the Great Frost.

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, themost severe that has ever visited these islands.Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to theground. At Norwich a young countrywomanstarted to cross the road in her usual robusthealth and was seen by the onlookers to turnvisibly to powder and be blown in a puff ofdust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her atthe street corner. The mortality among sheepand cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and

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could not be drawn from the sheets. It was nouncommon sight to come upon a whole herdof swine frozen immovable upon the road.The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen,teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boysall struck stark in the act of the moment, onewith his hand to his nose, another with thebottle to his lips, a third with a stone raisedto throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed,upon the hedge within a yard of him. Theseverity of the frost was so extraordinary thata kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; andit was commonly supposed that the great in-crease of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire wasdue to no eruption, for there was none, but tothe solidification of unfortunate wayfarers whohad been turned literally to stone where theystood. The Church could give little help inthe matter, and though some landowners had

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these relics blessed, the most part preferred touse them either as landmarks, scratching-postsfor sheep, or, when the form of the stone al-lowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which pur-poses they serve, admirably for the most part,to this day.

But while the country people suffered theextremity of want, and the trade of the coun-try was at a standstill, London enjoyed a car-nival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court wasat Greenwich, and the new King seized theopportunity that his coronation gave him tocurry favour with the citizens. He directedthat the river, which was frozen to a depth oftwenty feet and more for six or seven mileson either side, should be swept, decorated andgiven all the semblance of a park or pleasureground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drink-

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ing booths, etc. at his expense. For him-self and the courtiers, he reserved a certainspace immediately opposite the Palace gates;which, railed off from the public only by asilken rope, became at once the centre of themost brilliant society in England. Great states-men, in their beards and ruffs, despatched af-fairs of state under the crimson awning of theRoyal Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquestof the Moor and the downfall of the Turk instriped arbours surmounted by plumes of os-trich feathers. Admirals strode up and downthe narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweepingthe horizon and telling stories of the north-westpassage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers dal-lied upon divans spread with sables. Frozenroses fell in showers when the Queen and herladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hov-ered motionless in the air. Here and there burnt

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vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishlysalted, so that the flames were of green, or-ange, and purple fire. But however fiercelythey burnt, the heat was not enough to meltthe ice which, though of singular transparency,was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear in-deed was it that there could be seen, congealedat a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, therea flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless ina trance, but whether their state was one ofdeath or merely of suspended animation whichthe warmth would revive puzzled the philoso-phers. Near London Bridge, where the riverhad frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms,a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, ly-ing on the bed of the river where it had sunklast autumn, overladen with apples. The oldbumboat woman, who was carrying her fruitto market on the Surrey side, sat there in her

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plaids and farthingales with her lap full of ap-ples, for all the world as if she were about toserve a customer, though a certain bluenessabout the lips hinted the truth. ‘Twas a sightKing James specially liked to look upon, andhe would bring a troupe of courtiers to gazewith him. In short, nothing could exceed thebrilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But itwas at night that the carnival was at its mer-riest. For the frost continued unbroken; thenights were of perfect stillness; the moon andstars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds,and to the fine music of flute and trumpet thecourtiers danced.

Orlando, it is true, was none of those whotread lightly the corantoe and lavolta; he wasclumsy and a little absentminded. He muchpreferred the plain dances of his own country,

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which he danced as a child to these fantasticforeign measures. He had indeed just broughthis feet together about six in the evening of theseventh of January at the finish of some suchquadrille or minuet when he beheld, comingfrom the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy,a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s,for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russianfashion served to disguise the sex, filled himwith the highest curiosity. The person, what-ever the name or sex, was about middle height,very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirelyin oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with someunfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these de-tails were obscured by the extraordinary seduc-tiveness which issued from the whole person.Images, metaphors of the most extreme andextravagant twined and twisted in his mind.He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive

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tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all inthe space of three seconds; he did not knowwhether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her,or all three together. (For though we mustpause not a moment in the narrative we mayhere hastily note that all his images at thistime were simple in the extreme to match hissenses and were mostly taken from things hehad liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senseswere simple they were at the same time ex-tremely strong. To pause therefore and seekthe reasons of things is out of the question.)...Amelon, an emerald, a fox in the snow–so heraved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas,a boy it must be–no woman could skate withsuch speed and vigour–swept almost on tiptoepast him, Orlando was ready to tear his hairwith vexation that the person was of his ownsex, and thus all embraces were out of the ques-

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tion. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands,carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever hada mouth like that; no boy had those breasts;no boy had eyes which looked as if they hadbeen fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally,coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey withthe utmost grace to the King, who was shuf-fling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting,the unknown skater came to a standstill. Shewas not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman.Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turnedcold; longed to hurl himself through the sum-mer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to tosshis arm with the beech trees and the oaks. Asit was, he drew his lips up over his small whiteteeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as ifto bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The LadyEuphrosyne hung upon his arm.

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The stranger’s name, he found, was thePrincess Marousha Stanilovska DagmarNatasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she hadcome in the train of the Muscovite Ambas-sador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhapsher father, to attend the coronation. Very littlewas known of the Muscovites. In their greatbeards and furred hats they sat almost silent;drinking some black liquid which they spatout now and then upon the ice. None spokeEnglish, and French with which some at leastwere familiar was then little spoken at theEnglish Court.

It was through this accident that Orlandoand the Princess became acquainted. Theywere seated opposite each other at the greattable spread under a huge awning for the en-tertainment of the notables. The Princess was

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placed between two young Lords, one LordFrancis Vere and the other the young Earl ofMoray. It was laughable to see the predica-ment she soon had them in, for though bothwere fine lads in their way, the babe unbornhad as much knowledge of the French tongueas they had. When at the beginning of din-ner the Princess turned to the Earl and said,with a grace which ravished his heart, ‘Jecrois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gentil-homme qui vous etait apparente en Polognel’ete dernier,’ or ‘La beaute des dames de lacour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement.On ne peut voir une dame plus gracieuse quevotre reine, ni une coiffure plus belle que la si-enne,’ both Lord Francis and the Earl showedthe highest embarrassment. The one helpedher largely to horse-radish sauce, the otherwhistled to his dog and made him beg for

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a marrow bone. At this the Princess couldno longer contain her laughter, and Orlando,catching her eyes across the boars’ heads andstuffed peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, butthe laugh on his lips froze in wonder. Whomhad he loved, what had he loved, he askedhimself in a tumult of emotion, until now? Anold woman, he answered, all skin and bone.Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. Apuling nun. A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed ad-venturess. A nodding mass of lace and cer-emony. Love had meant to him nothing butsawdust and cinders. The joys he had had ofit tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelledhow he could have gone through with it with-out yawning. For as he looked the thicknessof his blood melted; the ice turned to wine inhis veins; he heard the waters flowing and thebirds singing; spring broke over the hard win-

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try landscape; his manhood woke; he graspeda sword in his hand; he charged a more daringfoe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep wa-ter; he saw the flower of danger growing in acrevice; he stretched his hand–in fact he wasrattling off one of his most impassioned son-nets when the Princess addressed him, ‘Wouldyou have the goodness to pass the salt?’

He blushed deeply.‘With all the pleasure in the world,

Madame,’ he replied, speaking French witha perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, hespoke the tongue as his own; his mother’smaid had taught him. Yet perhaps it wouldhave been better for him had he never learntthat tongue; never answered that voice; neverfollowed the light of those eyes...

The Princess continued. Who were those

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bumpkins, she asked him, who sat beside herwith the manners of stablemen? What wasthe nauseating mixture they had poured on herplate? Did the dogs eat at the same table withthe men in England? Was that figure of funat the end of the table with her hair rigged uplike a Maypole (comme une grande perche malfagotee) really the Queen? And did the Kingalways slobber like that? And which of thosepopinjays was George Villiers? Though thesequestions rather discomposed Orlando at first,they were put with such archness and drollerythat he could not help but laugh; and he sawfrom the blank faces of the company that no-body understood a word, he answered her asfreely as she asked him, speaking, as she did,in perfect French.

Thus began an intimacy between the two

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which soon became the scandal of the Court.

Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Mus-covite far more attention than mere civility de-manded. He was seldom far from her side,and their conversation, though unintelligible tothe rest, was carried on with such animation,provoked such blushes and laughter, that thedullest could guess the subject. Moreover, thechange in Orlando himself was extraordinary.Nobody had ever seen him so animated. In onenight he had thrown off his boyish clumsiness;he was changed from a sulky stripling, whocould not enter a ladies’ room without sweep-ing half the ornaments from the table, to a no-bleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. Tosee him hand the Muscovite (as she was called)to her sledge, or offer her his hand for thedance, or catch the spotted kerchief which she

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had let drop, or discharge any other of thosemanifold duties which the supreme lady exactsand the lover hastens to anticipate was a sightto kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make thequick pulse of youth beat faster. Yet over itall hung a cloud. The old men shrugged theirshoulders. The young tittered between theirfingers. All knew that a Orlando was betrothedto another. The Lady Margaret O’Brien O’DareO’Reilly Tyrconnel (for that was the propername of Euphrosyne of the Sonnets) wore Or-lando’s splendid sapphire on the second fin-ger of her left hand. It was she who had thesupreme right to his attentions. Yet she mightdrop all the handkerchiefs in her wardrobe (ofwhich she had many scores) upon the ice andOrlando never stooped to pick them up. Shemight wait twenty minutes for him to hand herto her sledge, and in the end have to be content

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with the services of her Blackamoor. When sheskated, which she did rather clumsily, no onewas at her elbow to encourage her, and, if shefell, which she did rather heavily, no one raisedher to her feet and dusted the snow from herpetticoats. Although she was naturally phleg-matic, slow to take offence, and more reluc-tant than most people to believe that a mereforeigner could oust her from Orlando’s affec-tions, still even the Lady Margaret herself wasbrought at last to suspect that something wasbrewing against her peace of mind.

Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando tookless and less care to hide his feelings. Mak-ing some excuse or other, he would leave thecompany as soon as they had dined, or stealaway from the skaters, who were forming setsfor a quadrille. Next moment it would be seen

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that the Muscovite was missing too. But whatmost outraged the Court, and stung it in itstenderest part, which is its vanity, was that thecouple was often seen to slip under the silkenrope, which railed off the Royal enclosure fromthe public part of the river and to disappearamong the crowd of common people. For sud-denly the Princess would stamp her foot andcry, ‘Take me away. I detest your English mob,’by which she meant the English Court itself.She could stand it no longer. It was full of pry-ing old women, she said, who stared in one’sface, and of bumptious young men who trodon one’s toes. They smelt bad. Their dogsran between her legs. It was like being in acage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles broadon which one could gallop six horses abreastall day long without meeting a soul. Besides,she wanted to see the Tower, the Beefeaters,

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the Heads on Temple Bar, and the jewellers’shops in the city. Thus, it came about that Or-lando took her into the city, showed her theBeefeaters and the rebels’ heads, and boughther whatever took her fancy in the Royal Ex-change. But this was not enough. Each increas-ingly desired the other’s company in privacyall day long where there were none to marvelor to stare. Instead of taking the road to Lon-don, therefore, they turned the other way aboutand were soon beyond the crowd among thefrozen reaches of the Thames where, save forsea birds and some old country woman hack-ing at the ice in a vain attempt to draw a pail-ful of water or gathering what sticks or deadleaves she could find for firing, not a living soulever came their way. The poor kept closely totheir cottages, and the better sort, who couldafford it, crowded for warmth and merriment

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to the city.

Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called herfor short, and because it was the name ofa white Russian fox he had had as a boy–acreature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel,which bit him so savagely that his father had itkilled–hence, they had the river to themselves.Hot with skating and with love they wouldthrow themselves down in some solitary reach,where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, andwrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando wouldtake her in his arms, and know, for the firsttime, he murmured, the delights of love. Then,when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulledin a swoon on the ice, he would tell her ofhis other loves, and how, compared with her,they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and ofcinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she

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would turn once more in his arms and give himfor love’s sake, one more embrace. And thenthey would marvel that the ice did not meltwith their heat, and pity the poor old womanwho had no such natural means of thawing it,but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel.And then, wrapped in their sables, they wouldtalk of everything under the sun; of sights andtravels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man’s beardand that woman’s skin; of a rat that fed fromher hand at table; of the arras that moved al-ways in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather.Nothing was too small for such converse, noth-ing was too great.

Then suddenly, Orlando would fall into oneof his moods of melancholy; the sight of theold woman hobbling over the ice might be thecause of it, or nothing; and would fling him-

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self face downwards on the ice and look intothe frozen waters and think of death. Forthe philosopher is right who says that nothingthicker than a knife’s blade separates happi-ness from melancholy; and he goes on to opinethat one is twin fellow to the other; and drawsfrom this the conclusion that all extremes offeeling are allied to madness; and so bids ustake refuge in the true Church (in his view theAnabaptist), which is the only harbour, port,anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on thissea.

‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sit-ting upright, his face clouded with gloom. (Forthat was the way his mind worked now, inviolent see-saws from life to death, stoppingat nothing in between, so that the biographermust not stop either, but must fly as fast as he

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can and so keep pace with the unthinking pas-sionate foolish actions and sudden extravagantwords in which, it is impossible to deny, Or-lando at this time of his life indulged.)

‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sit-ting upright on the ice. But Sasha who afterall had no English blood in her but was fromRussia where the sunsets are longer, the dawnsless sudden, and sentences often left unfin-ished 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, andsaid nothing. But at length the ice grew coldbeneath them, which she disliked, so pullinghim to his feet again, she talked so enchant-ingly, so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunatelyalways in French, which notoriously loses itsflavour in translation) that he forgot the frozen

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waters or night coming or the old woman orwhatever it was, and would try to tell her–plunging and splashing among a thousand im-ages which had gone as stale as the womenwho inspired them–what she was like. Snow,cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire?None of these. She was like a fox, or an olivetree; like the waves of the sea when you lookdown upon them from a height; like an emer-ald; like the sun on a green hill which is yetclouded–like nothing he had seen or known inEngland. Ransack the language as he might,words failed him. He wanted another land-scape, and another tongue. English was toofrank, too candid, too honeyed a speech forSasha. For in all she said, however open sheseemed and voluptuous, there was somethinghidden; in all she did, however daring, therewas something concealed. So the green flame

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seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun pris-oned in a hill. The clearness was only out-ward; within was a wandering flame. It came;it went; she never shone with the steady beamof an Englishwoman–here, however, remem-bering the Lady Margaret and her petticoats,Orlando ran wild in his transports and swepther over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that hewould chase the flame, dive for the gem, andso on and so on, the words coming on the pantsof his breath with the passion of a poet whosepoetry is half pressed out of him by pain.

But Sasha was silent. When Orlando haddone telling her that she was a fox, an olivetree, or a green hill-top, and had given her thewhole history of his family; how their housewas one of the most ancient in Britain; howthey had come from Rome with the Caesars

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and had the right to walk down the Corso(which is the chief street in Rome) under atasselled palanquin, which he said is a privi-lege reserved only for those of imperial blood(for there was an orgulous credulity about himwhich was pleasant enough), he would pauseand ask her, Where was her own house? Whatwas her father? Had she brothers? Why wasshe here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow,though she answered readily enough, an awk-wardness would come between them. He sus-pected at first that her rank was not as high asshe would like; or that she was ashamed of thesavage ways of her people, for he had heardthat the women in Muscovy wear beards andthe men are covered with fur from the waistdown; that both sexes are smeared with tal-low to keep the cold out, tear meat with theirfingers and live in huts where an English no-

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ble would scruple to keep his cattle; so thathe forebore to press her. But on reflection, heconcluded that her silence could not be for thatreason; she herself was entirely free from hairon the chin; she dressed in velvet and pearls,and her manners were certainly not those of awoman bred in a cattle-shed.

What, then, did she hide from him? Thedoubt underlying the tremendous force of hisfeelings was like a quicksand beneath a mon-ument which shifts suddenly and makes thewhole pile shake. The agony would seize himsuddenly. Then he would blaze out in suchwrath that she did not know how to quiet him.Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhapshis rages pleased her and she provoked thempurposely–such is the curious obliquity of theMuscovitish temperament.

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To continue the story–skating farther thantheir wont that day they reached that part ofthe river where the ships had anchored andbeen frozen in midstream. Among them wasthe ship of the Muscovite Embassy flying itsdouble-headed black eagle from the main mast,which was hung with many-coloured iciclesseveral yards in length. Sasha had left someof her clothing on board, and supposing theship to be empty they climbed on deck andwent in search of it. Remembering certain pas-sages in his own past, Orlando would not havemarvelled had some good citizens sought thisrefuge before them; and so it turned out. Theyhad not ventured far when a fine young manstarted up from some business of his own be-hind a coil of rope and saying, apparently, forhe spoke Russian, that he was one of the crewand would help the Princess to find what she

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wanted, lit a lump of candle and disappearedwith her into the lower parts of the ship.

Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in hisown dreams, thought only of the pleasures oflife; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means formaking her irrevocably and indissolubly hisown. Obstacles there were and hardships toovercome. She was determined to live in Rus-sia, where there were frozen rivers and wildhorses and men, she said, who gashed eachother’s throats open. It is true that a landscapeof pine and snow, habits of lust and slaugh-ter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious tocease his pleasant country ways of sport andtree-planting; relinquish his office; ruin his ca-reer; shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit;drink vodka instead of canary, and slip a knifeup his sleeve–for what purpose, he knew not.

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Still, all this and more than all this he would dofor her sake. As for his marriage to the LadyMargaret, fixed though it was for this day sen-night, the thing was so palpably absurd that hescarcely gave it a thought. Her kinsmen wouldabuse him for deserting a great lady; his friendswould deride him for ruining the finest careerin the world for a Cossack woman and a wasteof snow–it weighed not a straw in the balancecompared with Sasha herself. On the first darknight they would fly. They would take ship toRussia. So he pondered; so he plotted as hewalked up and down the deck.

He was recalled, turning westward, by thesight of the sun, slung like an orange on thecross of St Paul’s. It was blood-red and sink-ing rapidly. It must be almost evening. Sashahad been gone this hour and more. Seized

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instantly with those dark forebodings whichshadowed even his most confident thoughtsof her, he plunged the way he had seen themgo into the hold of the ship; and, after stum-bling among chests and barrels in the darkness,was made aware by a faint glimmer in a cornerthat they were seated there. For one second,he had a vision of them; saw Sasha seated onthe sailor’s knee; saw her bend towards him;saw them embrace before the light was blot-ted out in a red cloud by his rage. He blazedinto such a howl of anguish that the whole shipechoed. Sasha threw herself between them, orthe sailor would have been stifled before hecould draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sick-ness came over Orlando, and they had to layhim on the floor and give him brandy to drinkbefore he revived. And then, when he had re-covered and was sat upon a heap of sacking on

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deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before hisdizzied eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox thathad bit him, now cajoling, now denouncing, sothat he came to doubt what he had seen. Hadnot the candle guttered; had not the shadowsmoved? The box was heavy, she said; the manwas helping her to move it. Orlando believedher one moment–for who can be sure that hisrage has not painted what he most dreads tofind?–the next was the more violent with angerat her deceit. Then Sasha herself turned white;stamped her foot on deck; said she would gothat night, and called upon her Gods to destroyher, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the armsof a common seaman. Indeed, looking at themtogether (which he could hardly bring himselfto do) Orlando was outraged by the foulnessof his imagination that could have painted sofrail a creature in the paw of that hairy sea

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brute. The man was huge; stood six feet fourin his stockings, wore common wire rings inhis ears; and looked like a dray horse uponwhich some wren or robin has perched in itsflight. So he yielded; believed her; and askedher pardon. Yet when they were going downthe ship’s side, lovingly again, Sasha pausedwith her hand on the ladder, and called backto this tawny wide-cheeked monster a volley ofRussian greetings, jests, or endearments, not aword of which Orlando could understand. Butthere was something in her tone (it might be thefault of the Russian consonants) that remindedOrlando of a scene some nights since, when hehad come upon her in secret gnawing a candle-end in a corner, which she had picked from thefloor. True, it was pink; it was gilt; and it wasfrom the King’s table; but it was tallow, and shegnawed it. Was there not, he thought, hand-

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ing her on to the ice, something rank in her,something coarse flavoured, something peas-ant born? And he fancied her at forty grownunwieldy though she was now slim as a reed,and lethargic though she was now blithe as alark. But again as they skated towards Lon-don such suspicions melted in his breast, andhe felt as if he had been hooked by a great fishthrough the nose and rushed through the wa-ters unwillingly, yet with his own consent.

It was an evening of astonishing beauty. Asthe sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets,and pinnacles of London rose in inky blacknessagainst the furious red sunset clouds. Here wasthe fretted cross at Charing; there the dome ofSt Paul’s; there the massy square of the Towerbuildings; there like a grove of trees strippedof all leaves save a knob at the end were the

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heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now theAbbey windows were lit up and burnt like aheavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’sfancy); now all the west seemed a golden win-dow with troops of angels (in Orlando’s fancyagain) passing up and down the heavenlystairs perpetually. All the time they seemed tobe skating in fathomless depths of air, so bluethe ice had become; and so glassy smooth wasit that they sped quicker and quicker to thecity with the white gulls circling about them,and cutting in the air with their wings the verysame sweeps that they cut on the ice with theirskates.

Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tendererthan usual and even more delightful. Seldomwould she talk about her past life, but now shetold him how, in winter in Russia, she would

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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 snowat home, and how they would stray into thegreat hall for warmth and be fed by an old manwith porridge from a bucket. And then shepraised him; for his love of beasts; for his gal-lantry; for his legs. Ravished with her praisesand shamed to think how he had malignedher by fancying her on the knees of a commonsailor and grown fat and lethargic at forty, hetold her that he could find no words to praiseher; yet instantly bethought him how she waslike the spring and green grass and rushing wa-ters, and seizing her more tightly than ever, heswung her with him half across the river sothat the gulls and the cormorants swung too.And halting at length, out of breath, she said,panting slightly, that he was like a million-

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candled Christmas tree (such as they have inRussia) hung with yellow globes; incandescent;enough to light a whole street by; (so one mighttranslate it) for what with his glowing cheeks,his dark curls, his black and crimson cloak, helooked as if he were burning with his own ra-diance, from a lamp lit within.

All the colour, save the red of Orlando’scheeks, soon faded. Night came on. As the or-ange light of sunset vanished it was succeededby an astonishing white glare from the torches,bonfires, flaming cressets, and other devices bywhich the river was lit up and the strangesttransformation took place. Various churchesand noblemen’s palaces, whose fronts were ofwhite stone showed in streaks and patches asif floating on the air. Of St Paul’s, in particu-lar, nothing was left but a gilt cross. The Abbey

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appeared like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Every-thing suffered emaciation and transformation.As they approached the carnival, they hearda deep note like that struck on a tuning-forkwhich boomed louder and louder until it be-came an uproar. Every now and then a greatshout followed a rocket into the air. Gradu-ally they could discern little figures breakingoff from the vast crowd and spinning hitherand thither like gnats on the surface of a river.Above and around this brilliant circle like abowl of darkness pressed the deep black ofa winter’s night. And then into this dark-ness there began to rise with pauses, whichkept the expectation alert and the mouth open,flowering rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown.At one moment the woods and distant hillsshowed green as on a summer’s day; the nextall was winter and blackness again.

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By this time Orlando and the Princess wereclose to the Royal enclosure and found theirway barred by a great crowd of the commonpeople, who were pressing as near to the silkenrope as they dared. Loth to end their pri-vacy and encounter the sharp eyes that were onthe 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; anda crowd of little ragamuffins such as alwayshaunt the outskirts of a crowd, screaming andscrambling among people’s feet–all the riff-raffof the London streets indeed was there, jestingand jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes,shoving, tickling, pinching; here uproarious,there glum; some of them with mouths gapinga yard wide; others as little reverent as daws

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on a house-top; all as variously rigged out astheir purse or stations allowed; here in fur andbroadcloth; there in tatters with their feet keptfrom the ice only by a dishclout bound aboutthem. The main press of people, it appeared,stood opposite a booth or stage something likeour Punch and Judy show upon which somekind of theatrical performance was going for-ward. A black man was waving his arms andvociferating. There was a woman in white laidupon a bed. Rough though the staging was,the actors running up and down a pair of stepsand sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamp-ing their feet and whistling, or when they werebored, tossing a piece of orange peel on tothe ice which a dog would scramble for, stillthe astonishing, sinuous melody of the wordsstirred Orlando like music. Spoken with ex-treme speed and a daring agility of tongue

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which reminded him of the sailors singing inthe beer gardens at Wapping, the words evenwithout meaning were as wine to him. Butnow and again a single phrase would come tohim over the ice which was as if torn from thedepths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moorseemed to him his own frenzy, and when theMoor suffocated the woman in her bed it wasSasha he killed with his own hands.

At last the play was ended. All had growndark. The tears streamed down his face. Look-ing up into the sky there was nothing but black-ness 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 Ofsun and moon, and that the affrighted globeShould yawn–

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Even as he said this a star of some pallor rosein his memory. The night was dark; it was pitchdark; but it was such a night as this that theyhad waited for; it was on such a night as thisthat they had planned to fly. He rememberedeverything. The time had come. With a burst ofpassion he snatched Sasha to him, and hissedin her ear ‘Jour de ma vie!’ It was their signal.At midnight they would meet at an inn nearBlackfriars. Horses waited there. Everythingwas in readiness for their flight. So they parted,she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hourof the time.

Long before midnight Orlando was in wait-ing. The night was of so inky a blackness thata man was on you before he could be seen,which was all to the good, but it was also ofthe most solemn stillness so that a horse’s hoof,

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or a child’s cry, could be heard at a distance ofhalf a mile. Many a time did Orlando, pac-ing the little courtyard, hold his heart at thesound of some nag’s steady footfall on the cob-bles, or at the rustle of a woman’s dress. Butthe traveller was only some merchant, makinghome belated; or some woman of the quarterwhose errand was nothing so innocent. Theypassed, and the street was quieter than before.Then those lights which burnt downstairs inthe small, huddled quarters where the poor ofthe city lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms,and then, one by one, were extinguished. Thestreet lanterns in these purlieus were few atmost; and the negligence of the night watch-man often suffered them to expire long beforedawn. The darkness then became even deeperthan before. Orlando looked to the wicks of hislantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his

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pistols; examined his holsters; and did all thesethings a dozen times at least till he could findnothing more needing his attention. Though itstill lacked some twenty minutes to midnight,he could not bring himself to go indoors to theinn parlour, where the hostess was still servingsack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to afew seafaring men, who would sit there trollingtheir ditties, and telling their stories of Drake,Hawkins, and Grenville, till they toppled offthe benches and rolled asleep on the sandedfloor. The darkness was more compassionateto his swollen and violent heart. He listened toevery footfall; speculated on every sound. Eachdrunken shout and each wail from some poorwretch laid in the straw or in other distress cuthis heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen tohis venture. Yet, he had no fear for Sasha. Hercourage made nothing of the adventure. She

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would come alone, in her cloak and trousers,booted like a man. Light as her footfall was, itwould hardly be heard, even in this silence.

So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly hewas struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy,on the side of his cheek. So strung with expec-tation was he, that he started and put his handto his sword. The blow was repeated a dozentimes on forehead and cheek. The dry frost hadlasted so long that it took him a minute to real-ize that these were raindrops falling; the blowswere the blows of the rain. At first, they fellslowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon thesix drops became sixty; then six hundred; thenran themselves together in a steady spout ofwater. It was as if the hard and consolidatedsky poured itself forth in one profuse foun-tain. In the space of five minutes Orlando was

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soaked to the skin.

Hastily putting the horses under cover, hesought shelter beneath the lintel of the doorwhence he could still observe the courtyard.The air was thicker now than ever, and such asteaming and droning rose from the downpourthat no footfall of man or beast could be heardabove it. The roads, pitted as they were withgreat holes, would be under water and per-haps impassable. But of what effect this wouldhave upon their flight he scarcely thought. Allhis senses were bent upon gazing along thecobbled pathway–gleaming in the light of thelantern–for Sasha’s coming. Sometimes, in thedarkness, he seemed to see her wrapped aboutwith rain strokes. But the phantom vanished.Suddenly, with an awful and ominous voice, avoice full of horror and alarm which raised ev-

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ery hair of anguish in Orlando’s soul, St Paul’sstruck the first stroke of midnight. Four timesmore it struck remorselessly. With the super-stition of a lover, Orlando had made out that itwas on the sixth stroke that she would come.But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the sev-enth came and the eighth, and to his appre-hensive mind they seemed notes first herald-ing and then proclaiming death and disaster.When the twelfth struck he knew that his doomwas sealed. It was useless for the rational partof him to reason; she might be late; she mightbe prevented; she might have missed her way.The passionate and feeling heart of Orlandoknew the truth. Other clocks struck, janglingone after another. The whole world seemed toring with the news of her deceit and his de-rision. The old suspicions subterraneously atwork in him rushed forth from concealment

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openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes,each more poisonous than the last. He stoodin the doorway in the tremendous rain withoutmoving. As the minutes passed, he sagged alittle 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 ofoak trees could be heard. There were also wildcries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Or-lando stood there immovable till Paul’s clockstruck two, and then, crying aloud with an aw-ful irony, and all his teeth showing, ‘Jour dema vie!’ he dashed the lantern to the ground,mounted his horse and galloped he knew notwhere.

Some blind instinct, for he was past reason-ing, must have driven him to take the riverbank in the direction of the sea. For when the

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dawn broke, which it did with unusual sud-denness, the sky turning a pale yellow and therain almost ceasing, he found himself on thebanks of the Thames off Wapping. Now a sightof the most extraordinary nature met his eyes.Where, for three months and more, there hadbeen solid ice of such thickness that it seemedpermanent as stone, and a whole gay city hadbeen stood on its pavement, was now a race ofturbulent yellow waters. The river had gainedits freedom in the night. It was as if a sul-phur spring (to which view many philosophersinclined) had risen from the volcanic regionsbeneath and burst the ice asunder with suchvehemence that it swept the huge and massyfragments furiously apart. The mere look ofthe water was enough to turn one giddy. Allwas riot and confusion. The river was strewnwith icebergs. Some of these were as broad as

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a bowling green and as high as a house; othersno bigger than a man’s hat, but most fantasti-cally twisted. Now would come down a wholeconvoy of ice blocks sinking everything thatstood in their way. Now, eddying and swirlinglike a tortured serpent, the river would seemto be hurtling itself between the fragments andtossing them from bank to bank, so that theycould be heard smashing against the piers andpillars. But what was the most awful and in-spiring of terror was the sight of the humancreatures who had been trapped in the nightand now paced their twisting and precariousislands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whetherthey jumped into the flood or stayed on theice their doom was certain. Sometimes quitea cluster of these poor creatures would comedown together, some on their knees, otherssuckling their babies. One old man seemed to

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be reading aloud from a holy book. At othertimes, and his fate perhaps was the most dread-ful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrowtenement 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 andwealth if God would hear their prayers. Otherswere so dazed with terror that they sat immov-able and silent looking steadfastly before them.One crew of young watermen or post-boys, tojudge by their liveries, roared and shouted thelewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado, andwere dashed against a tree and sunk with blas-phemies on their lips. An old nobleman–forsuch his furred gown and golden chain pro-claimed him–went down not far from whereOrlando stood, calling vengeance upon theIrish rebels, who, he cried with his last breath,

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had plotted this devilry. Many perished clasp-ing some silver pot or other treasure to theirbreasts; and at least a score of poor wretcheswere drowned by their own cupidity, hurlingthemselves from the bank into the flood ratherthan let a gold goblet escape them, or see beforetheir eyes the disappearance of some furredgown. For furniture, valuables, possessionsof all sorts were carried away on the icebergs.Among other strange sights was to be seen a catsuckling its young; a table laid sumptuouslyfor a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; to-gether with an extraordinary number of cook-ing utensils.

Dazed and astounded, Orlando could donothing for some time but watch the appallingrace of waters as it hurled itself past him. Atlast, seeming to recollect himself, he clapped

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spurs to his horse and galloped hard along theriver bank in the direction of the sea. Round-ing a bend of the river, he came opposite thatreach where, not two days ago, the ships of theAmbassadors had seemed immovably frozen.Hastily, he made count of them all; the French;the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All stillfloated, though the French had broken loosefrom her moorings, and the Turkish vessel hadtaken a great rent in her side and was fast fillingwith water. But the Russian ship was nowhereto be seen. For one moment Orlando thoughtit must have foundered; but, raising himself inhis stirrups and shading his eyes, which hadthe sight of a hawk’s, he could just make outthe shape of a ship on the horizon. The blackeagles were flying from the mast head. Theship of the Muscovite Embassy was standingout to sea.

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Flinging himself from his horse, he made, inhis rage, as if he would breast the flood. Stand-ing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faith-less woman all the insults that have ever beenthe lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, hecalled her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and theswirling waters took his words, and tossed athis feet a broken pot and a little straw.

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THE BIOGRAPHER IS now faced with a diffi-culty which it is better perhaps to confess thanto gloss over. Up to this point in telling thestory of Orlando’s life, documents, both privateand historical, have made it possible to fulfilthe first duty of a biographer, which is to plod,without looking to right or left, in the indeli-

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ble footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers;regardless of shade; on and on methodically tillwe fall plump into the grave and write finis onthe tombstone above our heads. But now wecome to an episode which lies right across ourpath, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it isdark, mysterious, and undocumented; so thatthere is no explaining it. Volumes might bewritten in interpretation of it; whole religioussystems founded upon the signification of it.Our simple duty is to state the facts as far asthey are known, and so let the reader make ofthem what he may.

In the summer of that disastrous winterwhich saw the frost, the flood, the deaths ofmany thousands, and the complete downfall ofOrlando’s hopes–for he was exiled from Court;in deep disgrace with the most powerful no-

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bles of his time; the Irish house of Desmondwas justly enraged; the King had already trou-ble enough with the Irish not to relish this fur-ther addition–in that summer Orlando retiredto his great house in the country and there livedin complete solitude. One June morning–it wasSaturday the 18th–he failed to rise at his usualhour, and when his groom went to call him hewas found fast asleep. Nor could he be awak-ened. He lay as if in a trance, without per-ceptible breathing; and though dogs were setto bark under his window; cymbals, drums,bones beaten perpetually in his room; a gorsebush put under his pillow; and mustard plas-ters applied to his feet, still he did not wake,take food, or show any sign of life for sevenwhole days. On the seventh day he wokeat his usual time (a quarter before eight, pre-cisely) and turned the whole posse of cater-

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wauling wives and village soothsayers out ofhis room, which was natural enough; but whatwas strange was that he showed no conscious-ness of any such trance, but dressed himselfand sent for his horse as if he had woken from asingle night’s slumber. Yet some change, it wassuspected, must have taken place in the cham-bers of his brain, for though he was perfectlyrational and seemed graver and more sedate inhis ways than before, he appeared to have animperfect recollection of his past life. He wouldlisten when people spoke of the great frost orthe skating or the carnival, but he never gaveany sign, except by passing his hand across hisbrow as if to wipe away some cloud, of havingwitnessed them himself. When the events ofthe past six months were discussed, he seemednot so much distressed as puzzled, as if hewere troubled by confused memories of some

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time long gone or were trying to recall storiestold him by another. It was observed that ifRussia was mentioned or Princesses or ships,he would fall into a gloom of an uneasy kindand get up and look out of the window or callone of the dogs to him, or take a knife andcarve a piece of cedar wood. But the doctorswere hardly wiser then than they are now, andafter prescribing rest and exercise, starvationand nourishment, society and solitude, that heshould lie in bed all day and ride forty milesbetween lunch and dinner, together with theusual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as thefancy took them, with possets of newt’s slobberon rising, and draughts of peacock’s gall on go-ing to bed, they left him to himself, and gave itas their opinion that he had been asleep for aweek.

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But if sleep it was, of what nature, we canscarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps asthese? Are they remedial measures–trances inwhich the most galling memories, events thatseem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushedwith a dark wing which rubs their harshnessoff and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest,with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the fingerof death to be laid on the tumult of life fromtime to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we somade that we have to take death in small dosesdaily or we could not go on with the businessof living? And then what strange powers arethese that penetrate our most secret ways andchange our most treasured possessions withoutour willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by theextremity of his suffering, died for a week, andthen come to life again? And if so, of what na-ture is death and of what nature life? Having

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waited well over half an hour for an answer tothese questions, and none coming, let us get onwith the story.

Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of ex-treme solitude. His disgrace at Court and theviolence of his grief were partly the reason of it,but as he made no effort to defend himself andseldom invited anyone to visit him (though hehad many friends who would willingly havedone so) it appeared as if to be alone in thegreat house of his fathers suited his temper.Solitude was his choice. How he spent his time,nobody quite knew. The servants, of whom hekept a full retinue, though much of their busi-ness was to dust empty rooms and to smooththe coverlets of beds that were never slept in,watched, in the dark of the evening, as they satover their cakes and ale, a light passing along

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the galleries, through the banqueting-halls, upthe staircase, into the bedrooms, and knewthat their master was perambulating the housealone. None dared follow him, for the housewas haunted by a great variety of ghosts, andthe extent of it made it easy to lose one’s wayand either fall down some hidden staircase oropen a door which, should the wind blow it to,would shut upon one for ever–accidents of nouncommon occurrence, as the frequent discov-ery of the skeletons of men and animals in at-titudes of great agony made evident. Then thelight would be lost altogether, and Mrs Grims-ditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr Dup-per, the chaplain, how she hoped his Lordshiphad not met with some bad accident. Mr Dup-per would opine that his Lordship was on hisknees, no doubt, among the tombs of his an-cestors in the Chapel, which was in the Bil-

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liard Table Court, half a mile away on the southside. For he had sins on his conscience, MrDupper was afraid; upon which Mrs Grims-ditch would retort, rather sharply, that so hadmost of us; and Mrs Stewkley and Mrs Fieldand old Nurse Carpenter would all raise theirvoices in his Lordship’s praise; and the groomsand the stewards would swear that it was athousand pities to see so fine a nobleman mop-ing about the house when he might be huntingthe fox or chasing the deer; and even the littlelaundry maids and scullery maids, the Judysand the Faiths, who were handing round thetankards and cakes, would pipe up their testi-mony to his Lordship’s gallantry; for never wasthere a kinder gentleman, or one more free withthose little pieces of silver which serve to buya knot of ribbon or put a posy in one’s hair;until even the Blackamoor whom they called

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Grace Robinson by way of making a Christianwoman of her, understood what they were at,and agreed that his Lordship was a handsome,pleasant, darling gentleman in the only wayshe could, that is to say by showing all her teethat once in a broad grin. In short, all his servingmen and women held him in high respect, andcursed the foreign Princess (but they called herby a coarser name than that) who had broughthim to this pass.

But though it was probably cowardice, orlove of hot ale, that led Mr Dupper to imaginehis Lordship safe among the tombs so that heneed not go in search of him, it may well havebeen that Mr Dupper was right. Orlando nowtook a strange delight in thoughts of death anddecay, and, after pacing the long galleries andballrooms with a taper in his hand, looking at

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picture after picture as if he sought the likenessof somebody whom he could not find, wouldmount into the family pew and sit for hourswatching the banners stir and the moonlightwaver with a bat or death’s head moth to keephim company. Even this was not enough forhim, but he must descend into the crypt wherehis ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, forten generations together. The place was so sel-dom visited that the rats made free with thelead work, and now a thigh bone would catchat his cloak as he passed, or he would crackthe skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled be-neath his foot. It was a ghastly sepulchre; dugdeep beneath the foundations of the house asif the first Lord of the family, who had comefrom France with the Conqueror, had wishedto testify how all pomp is built upon corrup-tion; how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh:

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how we that dance and sing above must lie be-low; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; howthe ring (here Orlando, stooping his lantern,would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone,that had rolled into a corner) loses its ruby andthe eye which was so lustrous shines no more.‘Nothing remains of all these Princes’, Orlandowould say, indulging in some pardonable ex-aggeration of their rank, ‘except one digit,’ andhe would take a skeleton hand in his and bendthe joints this way and that. ‘Whose hand wasit?’ 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 nee-dle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped coldsteel? Had it–’ but here either his inventionfailed him or, what is more likely, provided himwith so many instances of what a hand can dothat he shrank, as his wont was, from the car-

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dinal labour of composition, which is excision,and he put it with the other bones, thinkinghow there was a writer called Thomas Browne,a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon suchsubjects took his fancy amazingly.

So, taking his lantern and seeing that thebones were in order, for though romantic, hewas singularly methodical and detested noth-ing so much as a ball of string on the floor,let alone the skull of an ancestor, he returnedto that curious, moody pacing down the gal-leries, looking for something among the pic-tures, which was interrupted at length by averitable spasm of sobbing, at the sight of aDutch snow scene by an unknown artist. Thenit seemed to him that life was not worth livingany more. Forgetting the bones of his ancestorsand how life is founded on a grave, he stood

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there shaken with sobs, all for the desire of awoman in Russian trousers, with slanting eyes,a pouting mouth and pearls about her neck.She had gone. She had left him. He was neverto see her again. And so he sobbed. And so hefound his way back to his own rooms; and MrsGrimsditch, seeing the light in the window, putthe tankard from her lips and said Praise be toGod, his Lordship was safe in his room again;for she had been thinking all this while that hewas foully murdered.

Orlando now drew his chair up to the table;opened the works of Sir Thomas Browne andproceeded to investigate the delicate articula-tion of one of the doctor’s longest and mostmarvellously contorted cogitations.

For though these are not matters on whicha biographer can profitably enlarge it is plain

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enough to those who have done a reader’s partin making up from bare hints dropped here andthere the whole boundary and circumferenceof a living person; can hear in what we onlywhisper a living voice; can see, often when wesay nothing about it, exactly what he lookedlike; know without a word to guide them pre-cisely what he thought–and it is for readerssuch as these that we write–it is plain then tosuch a reader that Orlando was strangely com-pounded of many humours–of melancholy, ofindolence, of passion, of love of solitude, tosay nothing of all those contortions and sub-tleties of temper which were indicated on thefirst page, when he slashed at a dead nigger’shead; cut it down; hung it chivalrously out ofhis reach again and then betook himself to thewindowseat with a book. The taste for bookswas an early one. As a child he was some-

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times found at midnight by a page still read-ing. They took his taper away, and he bredglow-worms to serve his purpose. They tookthe glow-worms away, and he almost burnt thehouse down with a tinder. To put it in a nut-shell, leaving the novelist to smooth out thecrumpled silk and all its implications, he wasa 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 runor ride or make love at their own sweet will.But some were early infected by a germ said tobe bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to beblown out of Greece and Italy, which was of sodeadly a nature that it would shake the handas it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as itsought its prey, and make the tongue stammeras it declared its love. It was the fatal nature ofthis disease to substitute a phantom for reality,

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so that Orlando, to whom fortune had givenevery gift–plate, linen, houses, men-servants,carpets, beds in profusion–had only to open abook for the whole vast accumulation to turnto mist. The nine acres of stone which werehis house vanished; one hundred and fifty in-door servants disappeared; his eighty ridinghorses became invisible; it would take too longto count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china,plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other mov-ables often of beaten gold, which evaporatedlike so much sea mist under the miasma. So itwas, and Orlando would sit by himself, read-ing, a naked man.

The disease gained rapidly upon him now inhis solitude. He would read often six hoursinto the night; and when they came to himfor orders about the slaughtering of cattle or

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the harvesting of wheat, he would push awayhis folio and look as if he did not understandwhat was said to him. This was bad enoughand wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer,of Giles, the groom, of Mrs Grimsditch, thehousekeeper, of Mr Dupper, the chaplain. Afine gentleman like that, they said, had no needof books. Let him leave books, they said, to thepalsied or the dying. But worse was to come.For once the disease of reading has laid uponthe system it weakens it so that it falls an easyprey to that other scourge which dwells in theinkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takesto writing. And while this is bad enough in apoor man, whose only property is a chair anda table set beneath a leaky roof–for he has notmuch to lose, after all–the plight of a rich man,who has houses and cattle, maidservants, assesand linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in

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the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out ofhim; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by ver-min. He would give every penny he has (suchis the malignity of the germ) to write one lit-tle book and become famous; yet all the goldin Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption andsickness, blows his brains out, turns his face tothe wall. It matters not in what attitude theyfind him. He has passed through the gates ofDeath and known the flames of Hell.

Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitu-tion and the disease (for reasons presently to begiven) never broke him down as it has brokenmany of his peers. But he was deeply smittenwith it, as the sequel shows. For when he hadread for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne,and the bark of the stag and the call of the night

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watchman showed that it was the dead of nightand all safe asleep, he crossed the room, tooka silver key from his pocket and unlocked thedoors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood inthe corner. Within were some fifty drawers ofcedar wood and upon each was a paper neatlywritten in Orlando’s hand. He paused, as ifhesitating which to open. One was inscribed‘The Death of Ajax’, another ‘The Birth of Pyra-mus’, another ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’, another ‘TheDeath of Hippolytus’, another ‘Meleager’, an-other ‘The Return of Odysseus’,–in fact therewas scarcely a single drawer that lacked thename of some mythological personage at a cri-sis of his career. In each drawer lay a docu-ment of considerable size all written over in Or-lando’s hand. The truth was that Orlando hadbeen afflicted thus for many years. Never hadany boy begged apples as Orlando begged pa-

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per; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Steal-ing away from talk and games, he had hiddenhimself behind curtains, in priest’s holes, orin the cupboard behind his mother’s bedroomwhich had a great hole in the floor and smelthorribly of starling’s dung, with an inkhorn inone hand, a pen in another, and on his kneea roll of paper. Thus had been written, be-fore he was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; somein prose, some in verse; some in French, somein Italian; all romantic, and all long. One hehad had printed by John Ball of the Feathersand Coronet opposite St Paul’s Cross, Cheap-side; but though the sight of it gave him ex-treme delight, he had never dared show it evento his mother, since to write, much more topublish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an in-expiable disgrace.

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Now, however, that it was the dead of nightand he was alone, he chose from this repos-itory one thick document called ‘Xenophila aTragedy’ or some such title, and one thin one,called simply ‘The Oak Tree’ (this was the onlymonosyllabic title among the lot), and then heapproached the inkhorn, fingered the quill, andmade other such passes as those addicted tothis vice begin their rites with. But he paused.

As this pause was of extreme significancein his history, more so, indeed, than manyacts which bring men to their knees and makerivers run with blood, it behoves us to askwhy he paused; and to reply, after due reflec-tion, that it was for some such reason as this.Nature, who has played so many queer tricksupon us, making us so unequally of clay anddiamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed

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them into a case, often of the most incongru-ous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and thebutcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in mud-dle and mystery, so that even now (the first ofNovember 1927) we know not why we go up-stairs, or why we come down again, our mostdaily movements are like the passage of a shipon 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 weare prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we aretruthful we say ‘No’; nature, who has so muchto answer for besides the perhaps unwieldylength of this sentence, has further complicatedher task and added to our confusion by provid-ing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and endswithin us–a piece of a policeman’s trouserslying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’swedding veil–but has contrived that the whole

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assortment shall be lightly stitched together bya single thread. Memory is the seamstress,and a capricious one at that. Memory runsher needle in and out, up and down, hitherand thither. We know not what comes next,or what follows after. Thus, the most ordi-nary movement in the world, such as sittingdown at a table and pulling the inkstand to-wards one, may agitate a thousand odd, dis-connected fragments, now bright, now dim,hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunt-ing, like the underlinen of a family of four-teen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead ofbeing a single, downright, bluff piece of workof which no man need feel ashamed, our com-monest deeds are set about with a flutteringand flickering of wings, a rising and falling oflights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping hispen in the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost

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Princess and asked himself a million questionsinstantly which were as arrows dipped in gall.Where was she; and why had she left him? Wasthe Ambassador her uncle or her lover? Hadthey plotted? Was she forced? Was she mar-ried? Was she dead?–all of which so drove theirvenom into him that, as if to vent his agonysomewhere, he plunged his quill so deep intothe inkhorn that the ink spirted over the ta-ble, which act, explain it how one may (andno explanation perhaps is possible–Memory isinexplicable), at once substituted for the faceof the Princess a face of a very different sort.But whose was it, he asked himself? And hehad to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking atthe new picture which lay on top of the old,as one lantern slide is half seen through thenext, before he could say to himself, ‘This isthe face of that rather fat, shabby man who

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sat in Twitchett’s room ever so many years agowhen old Queen Bess came here to dine; andI saw him,’ Orlando continued, catching at an-other of those little coloured rags, ‘sitting at thetable, as I peeped in on my way downstairs,and he had the most amazing eyes,’ said Or-lando, ‘that ever were, but who the devil washe?’ Orlando asked, for here Memory added tothe forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained ruffle, then a brown doublet, and fi-nally a pair of thick boots such as citizens wearin Cheapside. ‘Not a Nobleman; not one ofus,’ said Orlando (which he would not havesaid aloud, for he was the most courteous ofgentlemen; but it shows what an effect noblebirth has upon the mind and incidentally howdifficult 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

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have blotted the whole thing out completely,or have fetched up something so idiotic andout of keeping–like a dog chasing a cat or anold woman blowing her nose into a red cottonhandkerchief–that, in despair of keeping pacewith her vagaries, Orlando should have struckhis pen in earnest against his paper. (For wecan, if we have the resolution, turn the hussy,Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out ofthe house.) But Orlando paused. Memory stillheld before him the image of a shabby manwith big, bright eyes. Still he looked, still hepaused. It is these pauses that are our undo-ing. It is then that sedition enters the fortressand our troops rise in insurrection. Once be-fore he had paused, and love with its horridrout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its headswith gory locks torn from the shoulders hadburst in. From love he had suffered the tortures

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of the damned. Now, again, he paused, andinto the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, theharridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire ofFame, the strumpet; all joined hands and madeof his heart their dancing ground. Standing up-right in the solitude of his room, he vowed thathe would be the first poet of his race and bringimmortal lustre upon his name. He said (recit-ing the names and exploits of his ancestors)that Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim;Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; SirAndrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian;Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert,the Spaniard. But of all that killing and cam-paigning, that drinking and love-making, thatspending and hunting and riding and eating,what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas,he said, turning to the page of Sir ThomasBrowne, which lay open upon the table–and

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again he paused. Like an incantation risingfrom all parts of the room, from the night windand the moonlight, rolled the divine melodyof those words which, lest they should out-stare this page, we will leave where they lie en-tombed, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh istheir colour, so sound their breathing–and Or-lando, comparing that achievement with thoseof his ancestors, cried out that they and theirdeeds were dust and ashes, but this man andhis words were immortal.

He soon perceived, however, that the battleswhich Sir Miles and the rest had waged againstarmed knights to win a kingdom, were not halfso arduous as this which he now undertook towin immortality against the English language.Anyone moderately familiar with the rigoursof composition will not need to be told the

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story in detail; how he wrote and it seemedgood; read and it seemed vile; corrected andtore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; indespair; had his good nights and bad morn-ings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw hisbook plain before him and it vanished; actedhis people’s parts as he ate; mouthed themas he walked; now cried; now laughed; vac-illated between this style and that; now pre-ferred the heroic and pompous; next the plainand simple; now the vales of Tempe; then thefields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not de-cide whether he was the divinest genius or thegreatest fool in the world.

It was to settle this last question that hedecided after many months of such feverishlabour, to break the solitude of years and com-municate with the outer world. He had a friend

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in London, one Giles Isham, of Norfolk, who,though of gentle birth, was acquainted withwriters and could doubtless put him in touchwith some member of that blessed, indeed sa-cred, fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state hewas now in, there was a glory about a man whohad written a book and had it printed, whichoutshone all the glories of blood and state. Tohis imagination it seemed as if even the bod-ies of those instinct with such divine thoughtsmust be transfigured. They must have aure-oles for hair, incense for breath, and roses mustgrow between their lips–which was certainlynot true either of himself or Mr Dupper. Hecould think of no greater happiness than to beallowed to sit behind a curtain and hear themtalk. Even the imagination of that bold and var-ious discourse made the memory of what heand his courtier friends used to talk about–a

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dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards–seembrutish in the extreme. He bethought him withpride that he had always been called a scholar,and sneered at for his love of solitude andbooks. He had never been apt at pretty phrases.He would stand stock still, blush, and stridelike a grenadier in a ladies’ drawing-room. Hehad twice fallen, in sheer abstraction, from hishorse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea’s fanonce while making a rhyme. Eagerly recall-ing these and other instances of his unfitnessfor the life of society, an ineffable hope, thatall the turbulence of his youth, his clumsiness,his blushes, his long walks, and his love ofthe country proved that he himself belongedto the sacred race rather than to the noble–was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat–possessed him. For the first time since the nightof the great flood he was happy.

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He now commissioned Mr Isham of Norfolkto deliver to Mr Nicholas Greene of Clifford’sInn a document which set forth Orlando’s ad-miration for his works (for Nick Greene was avery famous writer at that time) and his desireto make his acquaintance; which he scarcelydared ask; for he had nothing to offer in re-turn; but if Mr Nicholas Greene would conde-scend to visit him, a coach and four would beat the corner of Fetter Lane at whatever hourMr Greene chose to appoint, and bring himsafely to Orlando’s house. One may fill upthe phrases which then followed; and figureOrlando’s delight when, in no long time, MrGreene signified his acceptance of the NobleLord’s invitation; took his place in the coachand was set down in the hall to the south ofthe main building punctually at seven o’clockon Monday, April the twenty-first.

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Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors hadbeen received there; Judges had stood there intheir ermine. The loveliest ladies of the landhad come there; and the sternest warriors. Ban-ners hung there which had been at Floddenand at Agincourt. There were displayed thepainted coats of arms with their lions and theirleopards and their coronets. There were thelong tables where the gold and silver plate wasstood; and there the vast fireplaces of wroughtItalian marble where nightly a whole oak tree,with its million leaves and its nests of rook andwren, was burnt to ashes. Nicholas Greene,the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in hisslouched hat and black doublet, carrying in onehand a small bag.

That Orlando as he hastened to greet himwas slightly disappointed was inevitable. The

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poet was not above middle height; was of amean figure; was lean and stooped somewhat,and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering,the dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all hisknowledge of mankind was puzzled where toplace him. There was something about himwhich belonged neither to servant, squire, ornoble. The head with its rounded forehead andbeaked nose was fine, but the chin receded.The eyes were brilliant, but the lips hung looseand slobbered. It was the expression of theface–as a whole, however, that was disquiet-ing. There was none of that stately composurewhich makes the faces of the nobility so pleas-ing to look at; nor had it anything of the digni-fied servility of a well-trained domestic’s face;it was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn to-gether. Poet though he was, it seemed as ifhe were more used to scold than to flatter; to

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quarrel than to coo; to scramble than to ride;to struggle than to rest; to hate than to love.This, too, was shown by the quickness of hismovements; and by something fiery and sus-picious in his glance. Orlando was somewhattaken aback. But they went to dinner.

Here, Orlando, who usually took such thingsfor granted, was, for the first time, unaccount-ably ashamed of the number of his servantsand of the splendour of his table. Stranger still,he bethought him with pride–for the thoughtwas generally distasteful–of that great grand-mother Moll who had milked the cows. Hewas about somehow to allude to this humblewoman and her milk-pails, when the poet fore-stalled him by saying that it was odd, seeinghow common the name of Greene was, thatthe family had come over with the Conqueror

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and was of the highest nobility in France. Un-fortunately, they had come down in the worldand done little more than leave their name tothe royal borough of Greenwich. Further talkof the same sort, about lost castles, coats ofarms, cousins who were baronets in the north,intermarriage with noble families in the west,how some Greens spelt the name with an eat the end, and others without, lasted till thevenison was on the table. Then Orlando con-trived to say something of Grandmother Molland her cows, and had eased his heart a littleof its burden by the time the wild fowl werebefore them. But it was not until the Malmseywas passing freely that Orlando dared men-tion what he could not help thinking a moreimportant matter than the Greens or the cows;that is to say the sacred subject of poetry. Atthe first mention of the word, the poet’s eyes

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flashed fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airshe had worn; thumped his glass on the table,and launched into one of the longest, most in-tricate, most passionate, and bitterest storiesthat Orlando had ever heard, save from the lipsof a jilted woman, about a play of his; anotherpoet; and a critic. Of the nature of poetry it-self, Orlando only gathered that it was harderto sell than prose, and though the lines wereshorter took longer in the writing. So the talkwent on with ramifications interminable, un-til Orlando ventured to hint that he had him-self been so rash as to write–but here the poetleapt from his chair. A mouse had squeakedin the wainscot, he said. The truth was, he ex-plained, that his nerves were in a state wherea mouse’s squeak upset them for a fortnight.Doubtless the house was full of vermin, butOrlando had not heard them. The poet then

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gave Orlando the full story of his health forthe past ten years or so. It had been so badthat one could only marvel that he still lived.He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague, thedropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succes-sion; added to which he had an enlarged heart,a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, aboveall, he had, he told Orlando, sensations in hisspine which defied description. There was oneknob about the third from the top which burntlike fire; another about second from the bot-tom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he wokewith a brain like lead; at others it was as if athousand wax tapers were alight and peoplewere throwing fireworks inside him. He couldfeel a rose leaf through his mattress, he said;and knew his way almost about London by thefeel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a pieceof machinery so finely made and curiously put

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together (here he raised his hand as if uncon-sciously, and indeed it was of the finest shapeimaginable) that it confounded him to thinkthat he had only sold five hundred copies ofhis poem, but that of course was largely due tothe conspiracy against him. All he could say, heconcluded, banging his fist upon the table, wasthat the art of poetry was dead in England.

How that could be with Shakespeare, Mar-lowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne, all nowwriting or just having written, Orlando, reel-ing off the names of his favourite heroes, couldnot think.

Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare,he admitted, had written some scenes thatwere well enough; but he had taken themchiefly from Marlowe. Marlowe was a likelyboy, but what could you say of a lad who died

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before he was thirty? As for Browne, he wasfor writing poetry in prose, and people soongot tired of such conceits as that. Donne wasa mountebank who wrapped up his lack ofmeaning in hard words. The gulls were takenin; but the style would be out of fashion twelvemonths hence. As for Ben Jonson–Ben Jonsonwas a friend of his and he never spoke ill of hisfriends.

No, he concluded, the great age of litera-ture is past; the great age of literature was theGreek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in ev-ery respect to the Greek. In such ages men cher-ished a divine ambition which he might callLa Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Or-lando did not at first catch his meaning). Nowall young writers were in the pay of the book-sellers and poured out any trash that would

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sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender in thisway and Shakespeare was already paying thepenalty. Their own age, he said, was markedby precious conceits and wild experiments–neither of which the Greeks would have toler-ated for a moment. Much though it hurt himto say it–for he loved literature as he loved hislife–he could see no good in the present andhad no hope for the future. Here he pouredhimself out another glass of wine.

Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yetcould not help observing that the critic himselfseemed by no means downcast. On the con-trary, the more he denounced his own time,the more complacent he became. He could re-member, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern inFleet Street when Kit Marlowe was there andsome others. Kit was in high feather, rather

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drunk, which he easily became, and in a moodto say silly things. He could see him now,brandishing his glass at the company and hic-coughing out, ‘Stap my vitals, Bill’ (this wasto Shakespeare), ‘there’s a great wave comingand you’re on the top of it,’ by which he meant,Greene explained, that they were trembling onthe verge of a great age in English literature,and that Shakespeare was to be a poet of someimportance. Happily for himself, he was killedtwo nights later in a drunken brawl, and so didnot live to see how this prediction turned out.‘Poor foolish fellow,’ said Greene, ‘to go andsay a thing like that. A great age, forsooth–theElizabethan a great age!’

‘So, my dear Lord,’ he continued, settlinghimself comfortably in his chair and rubbingthe wine-glass between his fingers, ‘we must

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make the best of it, cherish the past and hon-our those writers–there are still a few of ‘em–who take antiquity for their model and write,not for pay but for Glawr.’ (Orlando couldhave wished him a better accent.) ‘Glawr’, saidGreene, ‘is the spur of noble minds. Had I apension of three hundred pounds a year paidquarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I wouldlie in bed every morning reading Cicero. Iwould imitate his style so that you couldn’t tellthe difference between us. That’s what I callfine writing,’ said Greene; ‘that’s what I callGlawr. But it’s necessary to have a pension todo it.’

By this time Orlando had abandoned allhope of discussing his own work with the poet;but this mattered the less as the talk now gotupon the lives and characters of Shakespeare,

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Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greenehad known intimately and about whom hehad a thousand anecdotes of the most amus-ing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed somuch in his life. These, then, were his gods!Half were drunken and all were amorous.Most of them quarrelled with their wives; notone of them was above a lie or an intrigue ofthe most paltry kind. Their poetry was scrib-bled down on the backs of washing bills heldto the heads of printer’s devils at the streetdoor. Thus Hamlet went to press; thus Lear;thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said, thatthese plays show the faults they do. The restof the time was spent in carousings and jun-ketings in taverns and in beer gardens, Whenthings were said that passed belief for wit, andthings were done that made the utmost frolic ofthe courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this

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Greene told with a spirit that roused Orlandoto the highest pitch of delight. He had a powerof mimicry that brought the dead to life, andcould say the finest things of books providedthey were written three hundred years ago.

So time passed, and Orlando felt for hisguest a strange mixture of liking and contempt,of admiration and pity, as well as somethingtoo indefinite to be called by any one name,but had something of fear in it and somethingof fascination. He talked incessantly abouthimself, yet was such good company that onecould listen to the story of his ague for ever.Then he was so witty; then he was so irrev-erent; then he made so free with the namesof God and Woman; then he was So full ofqueer crafts and had such strange lore in hishead; could make salad in three hundred dif-

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ferent ways; knew all that could be knownof the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozenmusical instruments, and was the first person,and perhaps the last, to toast cheese in thegreat Italian fireplace. That he did not knowa geranium from a carnation, an oak from abirch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a tegfrom a ewe, wheat from barley, plough landfrom fallow; was ignorant of the rotation of thecrops; thought oranges grew underground andturnips on trees; preferred any townscape toany landscape;–all this and much more amazedOrlando, who had never met anybody of hiskind before. Even the maids, who despisedhim, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants,who loathed him, hung about to hear his sto-ries. Indeed, the house had never been so livelyas now that he was there–all of which gave Or-lando a great deal to think about, and caused

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him to compare this way of life with the old.He recalled the sort of talk he had been used toabout the King of Spain’s apoplexy or the mat-ing of a bitch; he bethought him how the daypassed between the stables and the dressingcloset; he remembered how the Lords snoredover their wine and hated anybody who wokethem up. He bethought him how active andvaliant they were in body; how slothful andtimid in mind. Worried by these thoughts,and unable to strike a proper balance, he cameto the conclusion that he had admitted to hishouse a plaguey spirit of unrest that wouldnever suffer him to sleep sound again.

At the same moment, Nick Greene came toprecisely the opposite conclusion. Lying inbed of a morning on the softest pillows be-tween the smoothest sheets and looking out

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of his oriel window upon turf which for cen-turies had known neither dandelion nor dockweed, he thought that unless he could some-how make his escape, he should be smoth-ered alive. Getting up and hearing the pigeonscoo, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, hethought that unless he could hear the draysroar upon the cobbles of Fleet Street, he wouldnever write another line. If this goes on muchlonger, he thought, hearing the footman mendthe fire and spread the table with silver dishesnext door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gavea prodigious yawn) sleeping die.

So he sought Orlando in his room, and ex-plained that he had not been able to sleep awink all night because of the silence. (In-deed, the house was surrounded by a park fif-teen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet

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high.) Silence, he said, was of all things themost oppressive to his nerves. He would endhis visit, by Orlando’s leave, that very morn-ing. Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also agreat reluctance to let him go. The house, hethought, would seem very dull without him.On parting (for he had never yet liked to men-tion the subject), he had the temerity to presshis play upon the Death of Hercules upon thepoet and ask his opinion of it. The poet tookit; muttered something about Glawr and Ci-cero, which Orlando cut short by promising topay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene,with many protestations of affection, jumpedinto the coach and was gone.

The great hall had never seemed so large,so splendid, or so empty as the chariot rolledaway. Orlando knew that he would never have

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the heart to make toasted cheese in the Italianfireplace again. He would never have the wit tocrack jokes about Italian pictures; never havethe skill to mix punch as it should be mixed;a thousand good quips and cranks would belost to him. Yet what a relief to be out of thesound of that querulous voice, what a luxuryto be alone once more, so he could not help re-flecting, as he unloosed the mastiff which hadbeen tied up these six weeks because it neversaw the poet without biting him.

Nick Greene was set down at the corner ofFetter Lane that same afternoon, and foundthings going on much as he had left them. MrsGreene, that is to say, was giving birth to ababy in one room; Tom Fletcher was drinkinggin in another. Books were tumbled all aboutthe floor; dinner–such as it was–was set on

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a dressing-table where the children had beenmaking mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was theatmosphere for writing, here he could write,and write he did. The subject was made forhim. A noble Lord at home. A visit to a Noble-man in the country–his new poem was to havesome such title as that. Seizing the pen withwhich his little boy was tickling the cat’s ears,and dipping it in the egg-cup which served forinkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satirethere and then. It was so done to a turn thatno one could doubt that the young Lord whowas roasted was Orlando; his most private say-ings and doings, his enthusiasms and folies,down to the very colour of his hair and the for-eign way he had of rolling his r’s, were thereto the life. And if there had been any doubtabout it, Greene clinched the matter by intro-ducing, with scarcely any disguise, passages

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from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Her-cules, which he found as he expected, wordyand bombastic in the extreme.

The pamphlet, which ran at once into sev-eral editions, and paid the expenses of MrsGreene’s tenth lying-in, was soon sent byfriends who take care of such matters to Or-lando himself. When he had read it, which hedid with deadly composure from start to finish,he rang for the footman; delivered the docu-ment to him at the end of a pair of tongs; badehim drop it in the filthiest heart of the foulestmidden on the estate. Then, when the manwas turning to go he stopped him, ‘Take theswiftest horse in the stable,’ he said, ‘ride fordear life to Harwich. There embark upon a shipwhich you will find bound for Norway. Buy forme from the King’s own kennels the finest elk-

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hounds of the Royal strain, male and female.Bring them back without delay. For’, he mur-mured, scarcely above his breath as he turnedto his books, ‘I have done with men.’

The footman, who was perfectly trained inhis duties, bowed and disappeared. He ful-filled his task so efficiently that he was backthat day three weeks, leading in his hand aleash of the finest elk-hounds, one of whom,a female, gave birth that very night under thedinner-table to a litter of eight fine puppies. Or-lando had them brought to his bedchamber.

‘For’, he said, ‘I have done with men.’

Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.

Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, thisyoung Nobleman had not only had every ex-perience that life has to offer, but had seen the

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worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition,women and poets were all equally vain. Lit-erature was a farce. The night after readingGreene’s Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, heburnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poeti-cal works, only retaining ‘The Oak Tree’, whichwas his boyish dream and very short. Twothings alone remained to him in which he nowput any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-houndand a rose bush. The world, in all its variety,life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that.Dogs and a bush were the whole of it. So feel-ing quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and verynaked in consequence, he called his hounds tohim and strode through the Park.

So long had he been secluded, writing andreading, that he had half forgotten the ameni-ties of nature, which in June can be great. When

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he reached that high mound whence on finedays half of England with a slice of Wales andScotland thrown in can be seen, he flung him-self under his favourite oak tree and felt that ifhe need never speak to another man or womanso long as he lived; if his dogs did not developthe faculty of speech; if he never met a poet or aPrincess again, he might make out what yearsremained to him in tolerable content.

Here he came then, day after day, week af-ter week, month after month, year after year.He saw the beech trees turn golden and theyoung ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickleand then circular; he saw–but probably thereader can imagine the passage which shouldfollow and how every tree and plant in theneighbourhood is described first green, thengolden; how moons rise and suns set; how

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spring follows winter and autumn summer;how night succeeds day and day night; howthere is first a storm and then fine weather;how things remain much as they are for twoor three hundred years or so, except for a lit-tle dust and a few cobwebs which one oldwoman can sweep up in half an hour; a con-clusion which, one cannot help feeling, mighthave been reached more quickly by the sim-ple statement that ‘Time passed’ (here the ex-act amount could be indicated in brackets) andnothing whatever happened.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makesanimals and vegetables bloom and fade withamazing punctuality, has no such simple ef-fect upon the mind of man. The mind of man,moreover, works with equal strangeness uponthe body of time. An hour, once it lodges in

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the queer element of the human spirit, may bestretched to fifty or a hundred times its clocklength; on the other hand, an hour may be ac-curately represented on the timepiece of themind by one second. This extraordinary dis-crepancy between time on the clock and timein the mind is less known than it should beand deserves fuller investigation. But the bi-ographer, whose interests are, as we have said,highly restricted, must confine himself to onesimple statement: when a man has reached theage of thirty, as Orlando now had, time whenhe is thinking becomes inordinately long; timewhen he is doing becomes inordinately short.Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the busi-ness of his vast estates in a flash; but directlyhe was alone on the mound under the oak tree,the seconds began to round and fill until itseemed as if they would never fall. They filled

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themselves, moreover, with the strangest vari-ety of objects. For not only did he find him-self confronted by problems which have puz-zled the wisest of men, such as What is love?What friendship? What truth? but directlyhe came to think about them, his whole past,which seemed to him of extreme length and va-riety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it adozen times its natural size, coloured it a thou-sand tints, and filled it with all the odds andends in the universe.

In such thinking (or by whatever name itshould be called) he spent months and yearsof his life. It would be no exaggeration to saythat he would go out after breakfast a manof thirty and come home to dinner a man offifty-five at least. Some weeks added a cen-tury to his age, others no more than three sec-

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onds at most. Altogether, the task of estimat-ing the length of human life (of the animals’we presume not to speak) is beyond our ca-pacity, for directly we say that it is ages long,we are reminded that it is briefer than the fallof a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forceswhich alternately, and what is more confusingstill, at the same moment, dominate our un-fortunate numbskulls–brevity and diuturnity–Orlando was sometimes under the influenceof the elephant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigiouslength. Yet even so, it went like a flash. Buteven when it stretched longest and the mo-ments swelled biggest and he seemed to wan-der alone in deserts of vast eternity, there wasno time for the smoothing out and decipher-ing of those scored parchments which thirtyyears among men and women had rolled tight

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in his heart and brain. Long before he haddone thinking about Love (the oak tree hadput forth its leaves and shaken them to theground a dozen times in the process) Ambi-tion would jostle it off the field, to be replacedby Friendship or Literature. And as the firstquestion had not been settled–What is Love?–back it would come at the least provocation ornone, and hustle Books or Metaphors of Whatone lives for into the margin, there to wait tillthey saw their chance to rush into the fieldagain. What made the process still longer wasthat it was profusely illustrated, not only withpictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laidon her tapestry couch in rose-coloured brocadewith an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted sword by her side, but with scents–shewas strongly perfumed–and with sounds; thestags were barking in Richmond Park that win-

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ter’s day. And so, the thought of love would beall ambered over with snow and winter; withlog fires burning; with Russian women, goldswords, and the bark of stags; with old KingJames’ slobbering and fireworks and sacks oftreasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailingships. Every single thing, once he tried to dis-lodge it from its place in his mind, he foundthus cumbered with other matter like the lumpof glass which, after a year at the bottom of thesea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drownedwomen.

‘Another metaphor by Jupiter!’ he would ex-claim as he said this (which will show the dis-orderly and circuitous way in which his mindworked and explain why the oak tree flow-ered and faded so often before he came to

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any conclusion about Love). ‘And what’s thepoint of it?’ he would ask himself. ‘Why notsay simply in so many words–’ and then hewould try to think for half an hour,–or was ittwo years and a half?–how to say simply inso many words what love is. ‘A figure likethat is manifestly untruthful,’ he argued, ‘forno dragon-fly, unless under very exceptionalcircumstances, could live at the bottom of thesea. And if literature is not the Bride and Bed-fellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all,’he cried, ‘why say Bedfellow when one’s al-ready said Bride? Why not simply say whatone means and leave it?’

So then he tried saying the grass is green andthe sky is blue and so to propitiate the austerespirit of poetry whom still, though at a greatdistance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The

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sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Look-ing up, he saw that, on the contrary, the skyis like the veils which a thousand Madonnashave let fall from their hair; and the grass fleetsand darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the em-braces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen intothe bad habit of speaking aloud), ‘I don’t seethat one’s more true than another. Both are ut-terly false.’ And he despaired of being able tosolve the problem of what poetry is and whattruth is and fell into a deep dejection.

And here we may profit by a pause in hissoliloquy to reflect how odd it was to see Or-lando stretched there on his elbow on a Juneday and to reflect that this fine fellow withall his faculties about him and a healthy body,witness cheeks and limbs–a man who never

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thought twice about heading a charge or fight-ing a duel–should be so subject to the lethargyof thought, and rendered so susceptible by it,that when it came to a question of poetry, or hisown competence in it, he was as shy as a littlegirl behind her mother’s cottage door. In ourbelief, Greene’s ridicule of his tragedy hurt himas much as the Princess’ ridicule of his love.But to return:–

Orlando went on thinking. He kept look-ing at the grass and at the sky and trying tobethink him what a true poet, who has hisverses published in London, would say aboutthem. Memory meanwhile (whose habits havealready been described) kept steady before hiseyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as if that sar-donic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he hadproved himself, were the Muse in person, and

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it was to him that Orlando must do homage.So Orlando, that summer morning, offered hima variety of phrases, some plain, others fig-ured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his headand sneering and muttering something aboutGlawr and Cicero and the death of poetry inour time. At length, starting to his feet (it wasnow winter and very cold) Orlando swore oneof the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, forit bound him to a servitude than which none isstricter. ‘I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever writeanother word, or try to write another word, toplease Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, orindifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, toplease myself’; and here he made as if he weretearing a whole budget of papers across andtossing them in the face of that sneering loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if youstoop to shy a stone at him, Memory ducked

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her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and sub-stituted for it–nothing whatever.

But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking.He had indeed much to think of. For when hetore the parchment across, he tore, in one rend-ing, the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll whichhe had made out in his own favour in the soli-tude of his room appointing himself, as theKing appoints Ambassadors, the first poet ofhis race, the first writer of his age, conferringeternal immortality upon his soul and grantinghis body a grave among laurels and the intan-gible banners of a people’s reverence perpet-ually. Eloquent as this all was, he now toreit up and threw it in the dustbin. ‘Fame’, hesaid. ‘is like’ (and since there was no NickGreene to stop him, he went on to revel in im-ages of which we will choose only one or two

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of the quietest) ‘a braided coat which hampersthe limbs; a jacket of silver which curbs theheart; a painted shield which covers a scare-crow,’ etc. etc. The pith of his phrases wasthat while fame impedes and constricts, obscu-rity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity isdark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mindtake its way unimpeded. Over the obscure manis poured the merciful suffusion of darkness.None knows where he goes or comes. He mayseek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; healone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And sohe sank into a quiet mood, under the oak tree,the hardness of whose roots, exposed above theground, seemed to him rather comfortable thanotherwise.

Sunk for a long time in profound thoughtsas to the value of obscurity, and the delight of

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having no name, but being like a wave whichreturns to the deep body of the sea; think-ing how obscurity rids the mind of the irk ofenvy and spite; how it sets running in the veinsthe free waters of generosity and magnanimity;and allows giving and taking without thanksoffered or praise given; which must have beenthe way of all great poets, he supposed (thoughhis knowledge of Greek was not enough to bearhim out), for, he thought, Shakespeare musthave written like that, and the church buildersbuilt like that, anonymously, needing no thank-ing or naming, but only their work in the day-time and a little ale perhaps at night–‘What anadmirable life this is,’ he thought, stretchinghis limbs out under the oak tree. ‘And whynot enjoy it this very moment?’ The thoughtstruck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped likea plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected

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love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the otherstings and pricks which the nettle-bed of lifehad burnt upon him when ambitious of fame,but could no longer inflict upon one careless ofglory, he opened his eyes, which had been wideopen all the time, but had seen only thoughts,and saw, lying in the hollow beneath him, hishouse.

There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. Itlooked a town rather than a house, but a townbuilt, not hither and thither, as this man wishedor that, but circumspectly, by a single architectwith one idea in his head. Courts and build-ings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly andsymmetrical; the courts were some of them ob-long and some square; in this was a fountain; inthat a statue; the buildings were some of themlow, some pointed; here was a chapel, there a

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belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in be-tween and clumps of cedar trees and beds ofbright flowers; all were clasped–yet so well setout was it that it seemed that every part hadroom to spread itself fittingly–by the roll of amassive wall; while smoke from innumerablechimneys curled perpetually into the air. Thisvast, yet ordered building, which could housea thousand men and perhaps two thousandhorses, was built, Orlando thought, by work-men whose names are unknown. Here havelived, for more centuries than I can count, theobscure generations of my own obscure fam-ily. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes,Elizabeths has left a token of himself behindhim, yet all, working together with their spadesand their needles, their love-making and theirchild-bearing, have left this.

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Never had the house looked more noble andhumane.

Why, then, had he wished to raise himselfabove them? For it seemed vain and arro-gant in the extreme to try to better that anony-mous work of creation; the labours of thosevanished hands. Better was it to go unknownand leave behind you an arch, a potting shed,a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn likea meteor and leave no dust. For after all, hesaid, kindling as he looked at the great houseon the greensward below, the unknown lordsand ladies who lived there never forgot to setaside something for those who come after; forthe roof that will leak; for the tree that will fall.There was always a warm corner for the oldshepherd in the kitchen; always food for thehungry; always their goblets were polished,

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though they lay sick, and their windows werelit though they lay dying. Lords though theywere, they were content to go down into ob-scurity with the molecatcher and the stone-mason. Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders–thus he apostrophized them with a warmththat entirely gainsaid such critics as called himcold, indifferent, slothful (the truth being thata quality often lies just on the other side of thewall from where we seek it)–thus he apostro-phized his house and race in terms of the mostmoving eloquence; but when it came to theperoration–and what is eloquence that lacks aperoration?–he fumbled. He would have likedto have ended with a flourish to the effect thathe would follow in their footsteps and add an-other stone to their building. Since, however,the building already covered nine acres, to addeven a single stone seemed superfluous. Could

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one mention furniture in a peroration? Couldone speak of chairs and tables and mats to liebeside people’s beds? For whatever the perora-tion wanted, that was what the house stood inneed of. Leaving his speech unfinished for themoment, he strode down hill again resolvedhenceforward to devote himself to the furnish-ing of the mansion. The news–that she wasto attend him instantly–brought tears to theeyes of good old Mrs Grimsditch, now grownsomewhat old. Together they perambulatedthe house.

The towel horse in the King’s bedroom (‘andthat was King Jamie, my Lord,’ she said, hint-ing that it was many a day since a King hadslept under their roof; but the odious Parlia-ment days were over and there was now aCrown in England again) lacked a leg; there

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were no stands to the ewers in the little closetleading into the waiting room of the Duchess’spage; Mr Greene had made a stain on the car-pet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she andJudy, for all their scrubbing, had never beenable to wash out. Indeed, when Orlando cameto reckon up the matter of furnishing with rose-wood chairs and cedar-wood cabinets, with sil-ver basins, china bowls, and Persian carpets,every one of the three hundred and sixty-fivebedrooms which the house contained, he sawthat it would be no light one; and if some thou-sands of pounds of his estate remained over,these would do little more than hang a fewgalleries with tapestry, set the dining hall withfine, carved chairs and provide mirrors of solidsilver and chairs of the same metal (for whichhe had an inordinate passion) for the furnish-ing of the royal bedchambers.

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He now set to work in earnest, as we canprove beyond a doubt if we look at his ledgers.Let us glance at an inventory of what he boughtat this time, with the expenses totted up in themargin–but these we omit.

‘To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto cur-tains of crimson and white taffeta; the valenceto them of white satin embroidered with crim-son and white silk...

‘To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixtystools, suitable with their buckram covers tothem all...

‘To sixty seven walnut tree tables...

‘To seventeen dozen boxes containing eachdozen five dozen of Venice glasses...

‘To one hundred and two mats, each thirtyyards long...

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‘To ninety seven cushions of crimsondamask laid with silver parchment laceand footstools of cloth of tissue and chairssuitable...

‘To fifty branches for a dozen lights apiece...’

Already–it is an effect lists have upon us–we are beginning to yawn. But if we stop, itis only that the catalogue is tedious, not that itis finished. There are ninety-nine pages moreof it and the total sum disbursed ran into manythousands–that is to say millions of our money.And if his day was spent like this, at nightagain, Lord Orlando might be found reckoningout what it would cost to level a million mole-hills, if the men were paid tenpence an hour;and again, how many hundredweight of nailsat fivepence halfpenny a gill were needed to re-pair the fence round the park, which was fif-

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teen miles in circumference. And so on and soon.

The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cup-board is much like another, and one molehillnot much different from a million. Some pleas-ant journeys it cost him; and some fine adven-tures. As, for instance, when he set a whole cityof blind women near Bruges to stitch hangingsfor a silver canopied bed; and the story of hisadventure with a Moor in Venice of whom hebought (but only at the sword’s point) his lac-quered cabinet, might, in other hands, proveworth the telling. Nor did the work lack va-riety; for here would come, drawn by teamsfrom Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across andlaid along the gallery for flooring; and then achest from Persia, stuffed with wool and saw-dust. from which, at last, he would take a sin-

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gle plate, or one topaz ring.

At length, however, there was no room in thegalleries for another table; no room on the ta-bles for another cabinet; no room in the cabi-net for another rose-bowl; no room in the bowlfor another handful of potpourri; there wasno room for anything anywhere; in short thehouse was furnished. In the garden snow-drops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses,lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, peartrees and apple trees and cherry trees and mul-berry trees, with an enormous quantity of rareand flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen andperennial, grew so thick on each other’s rootsthat there was no plot of earth without itsbloom, and no stretch of sward without itsshade. In addition, he had imported wild fowlwith gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the

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surliness of whose manners concealed, he wascertain, trusty hearts.

All now was ready; and when it was eveningand the innumerable silver sconces were lit andthe light airs which for ever moved about thegalleries stirred the blue and green arras, sothat it looked as if the huntsmen were ridingand Daphne flying; when the silver shone andlacquer glowed and wood kindled; when thecarved chairs held their arms out and dolphinsswam upon the walls with mermaids on theirbacks; when all this and much more than allthis was complete and to his liking, Orlandowalked through the house with his elk houndsfollowing and felt content. He had matter now,he thought, to fill out his peroration. Perhapsit would be well to begin the speech all overagain. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt

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that still something was lacking. Chairs andtables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas,resting on lions’ paws with swans’ necks curv-ing under them, beds even of the softest swans-down are not by themselves enough. Peoplesitting in them, people lying in them improvethem amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now be-gan a series of very splendid entertainments tothe nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood.The three hundred and sixty-five bedroomswere full for a month at a time. Guests jostledeach other on the fifty-two staircases. Threehundred servants bustled about the pantries.Banquets took place almost nightly. Thus, in avery few years, Orlando had worn the nap offhis velvet, and spent the half of his fortune; buthe had earned the good opinion of his neigh-bours. held a score of offices in the county, andwas annually presented with perhaps a dozen

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volumes dedicated to his Lordship in ratherfulsome terms by grateful poets. For though hewas careful not to consort with writers at thattime and kept himself always aloof from ladiesof foreign blood, still, he was excessively gen-erous both to women and to poets, and bothadored him.

But when the feasting was at its height andhis guests were at their revels, he was aptto take himself off to his private room alone.There when the door was shut, and he wascertain of privacy, he would have out an oldwriting book, stitched together with silk stolenfrom his mother’s workbox, and labelled ina round schoolboy hand, ‘The Oak Tree, APoem’. In this he would write till midnightchimed and long after. But as he scratchedout as many lines as he wrote in, the sum of

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them was often, at the end of the year, ratherless than at the beginning, and it looked as ifin the process of writing the poem would becompletely unwritten. For it is for the historianof letters to remark that he had changed hisstyle amazingly. His floridity was chastened;his abundance curbed; the age of prose wascongealing those warm fountains. The verylandscape outside was less stuck about withgarlands and the briars themselves were lessthorned and intricate. Perhaps the senses werea little duller and honey and cream less seduc-tive to the palate. Also that the streets were bet-ter drained and the houses better lit had its ef-fect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.

One day he was adding a line or two withenormous labour to ‘The Oak Tree, A Poem’,when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye.

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It was no shadow, he soon saw, but the fig-ure of a very tall lady in riding hood andmantle crossing the quadrangle on which hisroom looked out. As this was the most pri-vate of the courts, and the lady was a strangerto him, Orlando marvelled how she had gotthere. Three days later the same apparitionappeared again; and on Wednesday noon ap-peared once more. This time, Orlando wasdetermined to follow her, nor apparently wasshe afraid to be found, for she slackened hersteps as he came up and looked him full in theface. Any other woman thus caught in a Lord’sprivate grounds would have been afraid; anyother woman with that face, head-dress, andaspect would have thrown her mantilla acrossher shoulders to hide it. For this lady resem-bled nothing so much as a hare; a hare startled,but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is over-

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come by an immense and foolish audacity; ahare that sits upright and glowers at its pur-suer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erectbut quivering, with nose pointed, but twitch-ing. This hare, moreover, was six feet high andwore a head-dress into the bargain of some an-tiquated kind which made her look still taller.Thus confronted, she stared at Orlando with astare in which timidity and audacity were moststrangely combined.

First, she asked him, with a proper, butsomewhat clumsy curtsey, to forgive her her in-trusion. Then, rising to her full height again,which must have been something over sixfeet two, she went on to say–but with sucha cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando thoughtshe must have escaped from a lunatic asylum–

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that she was the Archduchess Harriet Griseldaof Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in theRoumanian territory. She desired above allthings to make his acquaintance, she said. Shehad taken lodging over a baker’s shop at thePark Gates. She had seen his picture and it wasthe image of a sister of hers who was–here sheguffawed–long since dead. She was visitingthe English court. The Queen was her Cousin.The King was a very good fellow but seldomwent to bed sober. Here she tee-heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing for itbut to ask her in and give her a glass of wine.

Indoors, her manners regained the hauteurnatural to a Roumanian Archduchess; and hadshe not shown a knowledge of wines rarein a lady, and made some observations uponfirearms and the customs of sportsmen in her

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country, which were sensible enough, the talkwould have lacked spontaneity. Jumping to herfeet at last, she announced that she would callthe following day, swept another prodigiouscurtsey and departed. The following day, Or-lando rode out. The next, he turned his back;on the third he drew his curtain. On the fourthit rained, and as he could not keep a lady in thewet, nor was altogether averse to company, heinvited her in and asked her opinion whether asuit of armour, which belonged to an ancestorof his, was the work of Jacobi or of Topp. Heinclined to Topp. She held another opinion–itmatters very little which. But it is of some im-portance to the course of our story that, in il-lustrating her argument, which had to do withthe working of the tie pieces, the ArchduchessHarriet took the golden shin case and fitted itto Orlando’s leg.

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That he had a pair of the shapliest legs thatany Nobleman has ever stood upright uponhas already been said.

Perhaps something in the way she fastenedthe ankle buckle; or her stooping posture; orOrlando’s long seclusion; or the natural sym-pathy which is between the sexes; or the Bur-gundy; or the fire–any of these causes mayhave been to blame; for certainly blame thereis on one side or another, when a Nobleman ofOrlando’s breeding, entertaining a lady in hishouse, and she his elder by many years, witha face a yard long and staring eyes, dressedsomewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle andriding cloak though the season was warm–blame there is when such a Nobleman is sosuddenly and violently overcome by passion ofsome sort that he has to leave the room.

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But what sort of passion, it may well beasked, could this be? And the answer is dou-ble faced as Love herself. For Love–but leavingLove out of the argument for a moment, the ac-tual event was this:

When the Archduchess Harriet Griseldastooped to fasten the buckle, Orlando heard,suddenly and unaccountably, far off the beat-ing of Love’s wings. The distant stir of thatsoft plumage roused in him a thousand memo-ries of rushing waters, of loveliness in the snowand faithlessness in the flood; and the soundcame nearer; and he blushed and trembled;and he was moved as he had thought never tobe moved again; and he was ready to raise hishands and let the bird of beauty alight uponhis shoulders, when–horror!–a creaking soundlike that the crows make tumbling over the

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trees began to reverberate; the air seemed darkwith coarse black wings; voices croaked; bits ofstraw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and therepitched down upon his shoulders the heaviestand foulest of the birds; which is the vulture.Thus he rushed from the room and sent thefootman to see the Archduchess Harriet to hercarriage.

For Love, to which we may now return, hastwo faces; one white, the other black; two bod-ies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has twohands, two feet, two nails, two, indeed, of ev-ery member and each one is the exact oppo-site of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joinedtogether that you cannot separate them. Inthis case, Orlando’s love began her flight to-wards him with her white face turned, andher smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer

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and nearer she came wafting before her airsof pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sightof the Archduchess presumably) she wheeledabout, turned the other way round; showedherself black, hairy, brutish; and it was Lustthe vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise,that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon hisshoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched thefootman.

But the harpy is not so easily banished as allthat. Not only did the Archduchess continue tolodge at the Baker’s, but Orlando was hauntedevery day and night by phantoms of the foulestkind. Vainly, it seemed, had he furnished hishouse with silver and hung the walls with ar-ras, when at any moment a dung-bedraggledfowl could settle upon his writing table. Thereshe was, flopping about among the chairs; he

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saw her waddling ungracefully across the gal-leries. Now, she perched, top heavy upon a firescreen. When he chased her out, back she cameand pecked at the glass till she broke it.

Thus realizing that his home was uninhabit-able, and that steps must be taken to end thematter instantly, he did what any other youngman would have done in his place, and askedKing Charles to send him as Ambassador Ex-traordinary to Constantinople. The King waswalking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on hisarm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts.‘Twas a thousand pities, that amorous ladysighed, that such a pair of legs should leave thecountry.

Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could dono more than toss one kiss over her shoulderbefore Orlando sailed.

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IT IS, INDEED, highly unfortunate, and muchto be regretted that at this stage of Orlando’scareer, when he played a most important partin the public life of his country, we have leastinformation to go upon. We know that he dis-charged his duties to admiration–witness hisBath and his Dukedom. We know that he had

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a finger in some of the most delicate negoti-ations between King Charles and the Turks–to that, treaties in the vault of the Record Of-fice bear testimony. But the revolution whichbroke out during his period of office, and thefire which followed, have so damaged or de-stroyed all those papers from which any trust-worthy record could be drawn, that what wecan give is lamentably incomplete. Often thepaper was scorched a deep brown in the mid-dle of the most important sentence. Just whenwe thought to elucidate a secret that has puz-zled historians for a hundred years, there was ahole in the manuscript big enough to put yourfinger through. We have done our best to pieceout a meagre summary from the charred frag-ments that remain; but often it has been neces-sary to speculate, to surmise, and even to usethe imagination.

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Orlando’s day was passed, it would seem,somewhat in this fashion. About seven, hewould rise, wrap himself in a long Turkishcloak, light a cheroot, and lean his elbows onthe parapet. Thus he would stand, gazingat the city beneath him, apparently entranced.At this hour the mist would lie so thick thatthe domes of Santa Sofia and the rest wouldseem to be afloat; gradually the mist woulduncover them; the bubbles would be seen tobe firmly fixed; there would be the river; therethe Galata Bridge; there the green-turbaned pil-grims without eyes or noses, begging alms;there the pariah dogs picking up offal; there theshawled women; there the innumerable don-keys; there men on horses carrying long poles.Soon, the whole town would be astir withthe cracking of whips, the beating of gongs,cryings to prayer, lashing of mules, and rat-

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tle of brass-bound wheels, while sour odours,made from bread fermenting and incense, andspice, rose even to the heights of Pera itself andseemed the very breath of the strident multi-coloured and barbaric population.

Nothing, he reflected, gazing at the viewwhich was now sparkling in the sun, couldwell be less like the counties of Surrey and Kentor the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells.To the right and left rose in bald and stonyprominence the inhospitable Asian mountains,to which the arid castle of a robber chief or twomight hang; but parsonage there was none, normanor house, nor cottage, nor oak, elm, violet,ivy, or wild eglantine. There were no hedgesfor ferns to grow on, and no fields for sheepto graze. The houses were white as egg-shellsand as bald. That he, who was English root

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and fibre, should yet exult to the depths of hisheart in this wild panorama, and gaze and gazeat those passes and far heights planning jour-neys there alone on foot where only the goatand shepherd had gone before; should feel apassion of affection for the bright, unseason-able flowers, love the unkempt pariah dogs be-yond even his elk hounds at home, and snuffthe acrid, sharp smell of the streets eagerly intohis nostrils, surprised him. He wondered if,in the season of the Crusades, one of his an-cestors had taken up with a Circassian peasantwoman; thought it possible; fancied a certaindarkness in his complexion; and, going indoorsagain, withdrew to his bath.

An hour later, properly scented, curled, andanointed, he would receive visits from secre-taries and other high officials carrying, one af-

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ter another, red boxes which yielded only tohis own golden key. Within were papers ofthe highest importance, of which only frag-ments, here a flourish, there a seal firmly at-tached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain. Oftheir contents then, we cannot speak, but canonly testify that Orlando was kept busy, whatwith his wax and seals, his various colouredribbons which had to be diversely attached,his engrossing of titles and making of flour-ishes round capital letters, till luncheon came–asplendid meal of perhaps thirty courses.

After luncheon, lackeys announced that hiscoach and six was at the door, and he went,preceded by purple Janissaries running on footand waving great ostrich feather fans abovetheir heads, to call upon the other ambassadorsand dignitaries of state. The ceremony was

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always the same. On reaching the courtyard,the Janissaries struck with their fans upon themain portal, which immediately flew open re-vealing a large chamber, splendidly furnished.Here were seated two figures, generally of theopposite sexes. Profound bows and curtseyswere exchanged. In the first room, it was per-missible only to mention the weather. Havingsaid that it was fine or wet, hot or cold, theAmbassador then passed on to the next cham-ber, where again, two figures rose to greet him.Here it was only permissible to compare Con-stantinople as a place of residence with Lon-don; and the Ambassador naturally said thathe preferred Constantinople, and his hosts nat-urally said, though they had not seen it, thatthey preferred London. In the next chamber,King Charles’s and the Sultan’s healths hadto be discussed at some length. In the next

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were discussed the Ambassador’s health andthat of his host’s wife, but more briefly. Inthe next the Ambassador complimented hishost upon his furniture, and the host compli-mented the Ambassador upon his dress. Inthe next, sweet meats were offered, the hostdeploring their badness, the Ambassador ex-tolling their goodness. The ceremony endedat length with the smoking of a hookah andthe drinking of a glass of coffee; but thoughthe motions of smoking and drinking weregone through punctiliously there was neithertobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass,as, had either smoke or drink been real, thehuman frame would have sunk beneath thesurfeit. For, no sooner had the Ambassadordespatched one such visit, than another hadto be undertaken. The same ceremonies weregone through in precisely the same order six

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or seven times over at the houses of the othergreat officials, so that it was often late at nightbefore the Ambassador reached home. ThoughOrlando performed these tasks to admirationand never denied that they are, perhaps, themost important part of a diplomatist’s duties,he was undoubtedly fatigued by them, and of-ten depressed to such a pitch of gloom thathe preferred to take his dinner alone with hisdogs. To them, indeed, he might be heard talk-ing in his own tongue. And sometimes, it issaid, he would pass out of his own gates lateat night so disguised that the sentries did notknow him. Then he would mingle with thecrowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll throughthe bazaars; or throw aside his shoes and jointhe worshippers in the Mosques. Once, whenit was given out that he was ill of a fever,shepherds, bringing their goats to market, re-

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ported that they had met an English Lord onthe mountain top and heard him praying tohis God. This was thought to be Orlando him-self, and his prayer was, no doubt, a poem saidaloud, for it was known that he still carriedabout with him, in the bosom of his cloak, amuch scored manuscript; and servants, listen-ing at the door, heard the Ambassador chant-ing something in an odd, sing-song voice whenhe was alone.

It is with fragments such as these that wemust do our best to make up a picture of Or-lando’s life and character at this time. Thereexist, even to this day, rumours, legends, anec-dotes of a floating and unauthenticated kindabout Orlando’s life in Constantinople–(wehave quoted but a few of them) which go toprove that he possessed, now that he was in

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the prime of life, the power to stir the fancy andrivet the eye which will keep a memory greenlong after all that more durable qualities cando to preserve it is forgotten. The power is amysterious one compounded of beauty, birth,and some rarer gift, which we may call glam-our and have done with it. ‘A million candles’,as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his be-ing at the trouble of lighting a single one. Hemoved like a stag, without any need to thinkabout his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voiceand echo beat a silver gong. Hence rumoursgathered round him. He became the adored ofmany women and some men. It was not neces-sary that they should speak to him or even thatthey should see him; they conjured up beforethem especially when the scenery was roman-tic, or the sun was setting, the figure of a noblegentleman in silk stockings. Upon the poor and

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uneducated, he had the same power as uponthe rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers,still sing songs about the English Lord ‘whodropped his emeralds in the well’, which un-doubtedly refer to Orlando, who once, it seems,tore his jewels from him in a moment of rageor intoxication and flung them in a fountain;whence they were fished by a page boy. Butthis romantic power, it is well known, is of-ten associated with a nature of extreme reserve.Orlando seems to have made no friends. As faras is known, he formed no attachments. A cer-tain great lady came all the way from Englandin order to be near him, and pestered him withher attentions, but he continued to dischargehis duties so indefatigably that he had not beenAmbassador at the Horn for more than twoyears and a half before King Charles signifiedhis intention of raising him to the highest rank

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in the peerage. The envious said that this wasNell Gwyn’s tribute to the memory of a leg.But, as she had seen him once only, and wasthen busily engaged in pelting her royal masterwith nutshells, it is likely that it was his meritsthat won him his Dukedom, not his calves.

Here we must pause, for we have reached amoment of great significance in his career. Forthe conferring of the Dukedom was the occa-sion of a very famous, and indeed, much dis-puted incident, which we must now describe,picking our way among burnt papers and lit-tle bits of tape as best we may. It was at theend of the great fast of Ramadan that the Or-der of the Bath and the patent of nobility ar-rived in a frigate commanded by Sir AdrianScrope; and Orlando made this the occasionfor an entertainment more splendid than any

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that has been known before or since in Con-stantinople. The night was fine; the crowd im-mense, and the windows of the Embassy bril-liantly illuminated. Again, details are lack-ing, for the fire had its way with all suchrecords, and has left only tantalizing fragmentswhich leave the most important points obscure.From the diary of John Fenner Brigge, how-ever, an English naval officer, who was amongthe guests, we gather that people of all nation-alities ‘were packed like herrings in a barrel’in the courtyard. The crowd pressed so un-pleasantly close that Brigge soon climbed intoa Judas tree, the better to observe the proceed-ings. The rumour had got about among the na-tives (and here is additional proof of Orlando’smysterious power over the imagination) thatsome kind of miracle was to be performed.‘Thus,’ writes Brigge (but his manuscript is

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full of burns and holes, some sentences beingquite illegible), ‘when the rockets began to soarinto the air, there was considerable uneasinessamong us lest the native population should beseized...fraught with unpleasant consequencesto all...English ladies in the company, I ownthat my hand went to my cutlass. Happily,’ hecontinues in his somewhat long-winded style,‘these fears seemed, for the moment, ground-less and, observing the demeanour of the na-tives...I came to the conclusion that this demon-stration of our skill in the art of pyrotechny wasvaluable, if only because it impressed uponthem...the superiority of the British...Indeed,the sight was one of indescribable magnifi-cence. I found myself alternately praising theLord that he had permitted...and wishing thatmy poor, dear mother...By the Ambassador’sorders, the long windows, which are so impos-

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ing a feature of Eastern architecture, for thoughignorant in many ways...were thrown wide;and within, we could see a tableau vivant ortheatrical display in which English ladies andgentlemen...represented a masque the work ofone...The words were inaudible, but the sightof so many of our countrymen and women,dressed with the highest elegance and distinc-tion...moved me to emotions of which I am cer-tainly not ashamed, though unable...I was in-tent upon observing the astonishing conduct ofLady–which was of a nature to fasten the eyesof all upon her, and to bring discredit upon hersex and country, when’–unfortunately a branchof the Judas tree broke, Lieutenant Brigge fellto the ground, and the rest of the entry recordsonly his gratitude to Providence (who plays avery large part in the diary) and the exact na-ture of his injuries.

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Happily, Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughterof the General of that name, saw the scene frominside and carries on the tale in a letter, muchdefaced too, which ultimately reached a femalefriend at Tunbridge Wells. Miss Penelope wasno less lavish in her enthusiasm than thegallant officer. ‘Ravishing,’ she exclaims tentimes on one page, ‘wondrous...utterly beyonddescription...gold plate...candelabras...negroesin plush breeches... pyramids of ice...fountainsof negus...jellies made to represent HisMajesty’s ships...swans made to representwater lilies...birds in golden cages...gentlemenin slashed crimson velvet...Ladies’ headdressesat least six foot high...musical boxes....Mr Pere-grine said I looked quite lovely which I onlyrepeat to you, my dearest, because I know...Oh!how I longed for you all!...surpassing any-thing we have seen at the Pantiles...oceans

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to drink...some gentlemen overcome...LadyBetty ravishing....Poor Lady Bonham madethe unfortunate mistake of sitting down with-out a chair beneath her...Gentlemen all verygallant...wished a thousand times for youand dearest Betsy...But the sight of all others,the cynosure of all eyes...as all admitted, fornone could be so vile as to deny it, was theAmbassador himself. Such a leg! Such a coun-tenance!! Such princely manners!!! To see himcome into the room! To see him go out again!And something interesting in the expression,which makes one feel, one scarcely knowswhy, that he has suffered! They say a lady wasthe cause of it. The heartless monster!!! Howcan one of our reputed tender sex have had theeffrontery!!! He is unmarried, and half theladies in the place are wild for love of him...Athousand, thousand kisses to Tom, Gerry,

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Peter, and dearest Mew’ [presumably her cat].

From the Gazette of the time, we gather that‘as the clock struck twelve, the Ambassador ap-peared on the centre Balcony which was hungwith priceless rugs. Six Turks of the Impe-rial Body Guard, each over six foot in height,held torches to his right and left. Rocketsrose into the air at his appearance, and a greatshout went up from the people, which the Am-bassador acknowledged, bowing deeply, andspeaking a few words of thanks in the Turk-ish language, which it was one of his accom-plishments to speak with fluency. Next, SirAdrian Scrope, in the full dress of a BritishAdmiral, advanced; the Ambassador knelt onone knee; the Admiral placed the Collar ofthe Most Noble Order of the Bath round hisneck, then pinned the Star to his breast; af-

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ter which another gentleman of the diplomaticcorps advancing in a stately manner placed onhis shoulders the ducal robes, and handed himon a crimson cushion, the ducal coronet.’

At length, with a gesture of extraordinarymajesty and grace, first bowing profoundly,then raising himself proudly erect, Orlandotook the golden circlet of strawberry leaves andplaced it, with a gesture which none that saw itever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this pointthat the first disturbance began. Either the peo-ple had expected a miracle–some say a showerof gold was prophesied to fall from the skies–which did not happen, or this was the signalchosen for the attack to begin; nobody seems toknow; but as the coronet settled on Orlando’sbrows a great uproar rose. Bells began ring-ing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard

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above the shouts of the people; many Turks fellflat to the ground and touched the earth withtheir foreheads. A door burst open. The nativespressed into the banqueting rooms. Womenshrieked. A certain lady, who was said to bedying for love of Orlando, seized a candelabraand dashed it to the ground. What might nothave happened, had it not been for the pres-ence of Sir Adrian Scrope and a squad of Britishbluejackets, nobody can say. But the Admiralordered the bugles to be sounded; a hundredbluejackets stood instantly at attention; the dis-order was quelled, and quiet, at least for thetime being, fell upon the scene.

So far, we are on the firm, if rather narrow,ground of ascertained truth. But nobody hasever known exactly what took place later thatnight. The testimony of the sentries and oth-

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ers seems, however, to prove that the Embassywas empty of company, and shut up for thenight in the usual way by two A.M. The Am-bassador was seen to go to his room, still wear-ing the insignia of his rank, and shut the door.Some say he locked it, which was against hiscustom. Others maintain that they heard musicof a rustic kind, such as shepherds play, laterthat night in the courtyard under the Ambas-sador’s window. A washer-woman, who waskept awake by toothache, said that she saw aman’s figure, wrapped in a cloak or dressinggown, come out upon the balcony. Then, shesaid, a woman, much muffled, but apparentlyof the peasant class, was drawn up by means ofa rope which the man let down to her on to thebalcony. There, the washer-woman said, theyembraced passionately ‘like lovers’, and wentinto the room together, drawing the curtains so

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that no more could be seen.

Next morning, the Duke, as we must nowcall him, was found by his secretaries sunk inprofound slumber amid bed clothes that weremuch tumbled. The room was in some dis-order, his coronet having rolled on the floor,and his cloak and garter being flung all of aheap on a chair. The table was littered withpapers. No suspicion was felt at first, as thefatigues of the night had been great. But whenafternoon came and he still slept, a doctor wassummoned. He applied remedies which hadbeen used on the previous occasion, plasters,nettles, emetics, etc., but without success. Or-lando slept on. His secretaries then thoughtit their duty to examine the papers on the ta-ble. Many were scribbled over with poetry, inwhich frequent mention was made of an oak

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tree. There were also various state papers andothers of a private nature concerning the man-agement of his estates in England. But at lengththey came upon a document of far greater sig-nificance. It was nothing less, indeed, than adeed of marriage, drawn up, signed, and wit-nessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knightof the Garter, etc., etc., etc., and Rosina Pepita,a dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gipsy,mother also unknown but reputed a seller ofold iron in the market-place over against theGalata Bridge. The secretaries looked at eachother in dismay. And still Orlando slept. Morn-ing and evening they watched him, but, savethat his breathing was regular and his cheeksstill flushed their habitual deep rose, he gaveno sign of life. Whatever science or ingenuitycould do to waken him they did. But still heslept.

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On the seventh day of his trance (Thursday,May the 10th) the first shot was fired of thatterrible and bloody insurrection of which Lieu-tenant Brigge had detected the first symptoms.The Turks rose against the Sultan, set fire to thetown, and put every foreigner they could find,either to the sword or to the bastinado. A fewEnglish managed to escape; but, as might havebeen expected, the gentlemen of the BritishEmbassy preferred to die in defence of their redboxes, or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunchesof keys rather than let them fall into the handsof the Infidel. The rioters broke into Orlando’sroom, but seeing him stretched to all appear-ances dead they left him untouched, and onlyrobbed him of his coronet and the robes of theGarter.

And now again obscurity descends, and

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would indeed that it were deeper! Would, wealmost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that itwere so deep that we could see nothing what-ever through its opacity! Would that we mighthere take the pen and write Finis to our work!Would that we might spare the reader whatis to come and say to him in so many words,Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas,Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Godswho keep watch and ward by the inkpot of thebiographer, cry No! Putting their silver trum-pets to their lips they demand in one blast,Truth! And again they cry Truth! and sound-ing yet a third time in concert they peal forth,The Truth and nothing but the Truth!

At which–Heaven be praised! for it affordsus a breathing space–the doors gently open, asif a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr

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had wafted them apart, and three figures en-ter. First, comes Our Lady of Purity; whosebrows are bound with fillets of the whitestlamb’s wool; whose hair is as an avalanche ofthe driven snow; and in whose hand reposesthe white quill of a virgin goose. Followingher, but with a statelier step, comes Our Ladyof Chastity; on whose brow is set like a turretof burning but unwasting fire a diadem of ici-cles; her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, ifthey touch you, freeze you to the bone. Closebehind her, sheltering indeed in the shadow ofher more stately sisters, comes Our Lady of Mod-esty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose faceis only shown as the young moon shows whenit is thin and sickle shaped and half hiddenamong clouds. Each advances towards the cen-tre of the room where Orlando still lies sleep-ing; and with gestures at once appealing and

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commanding, Our Lady of Purity speaks first:

‘I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; thesnow is dear to me; and the moon rising; andthe silver sea. With my robes I cover the speck-led hen’s eggs and the brindled sea shell; Icover vice and poverty. On all things frail ordark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore,speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare!’

Here the trumpets peal forth.

‘Purity Avaunt! Begone Purity!’

Then Our Lady of Chastity speaks:

‘I am she whose touch freezes and whoseglance turns to stone. I have stayed the starin its dancing, and the wave as it falls. Thehighest Alps are my dwelling place; and whenI walk, the lightnings flash in my hair; wheremy eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando

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wake, I will freeze him to the bone. Spare, Ospare!’

Here the trumpets peal forth.‘Chastity Avaunt! Begone Chastity!’Then Our Lady of Modesty speaks, so low that

one can hardly hear:‘I am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am

and ever shall be. Not for me the fruitful fieldsand the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious tome; and when the apples burgeon or the flocksbreed, I run, I run; I let my mantle fall. My haircovers my eyes. I do not see. Spare, O spare!’

Again the trumpets peal forth:‘Modesty Avaunt! Begone Modesty!’With gestures of grief and lamentation the

three sisters now join hands and dance slowly,tossing their veils and singing as they go:

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‘Truth come not out from your horrid den.Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt inthe brutal gaze of the sun things that werebetter unknown and undone; you unveil theshameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide!Hide!’

Here they make as if to cover Orlando withtheir draperies. The trumpets, meanwhile, stillblare forth,

‘The Truth and nothing but the Truth.’At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over

the mouths of the trumpets so as to mufflethem, but in vain, for now all the trumpetsblare forth together,

‘Horrid Sisters, go!’The sisters become distracted and wail in

unison, still circling and flinging their veils upand down.

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‘It has not always been so! But men want usno longer; the women detest us. We go; we go.I (Purity says this) to the hen roost. I (Chastitysays this) to the still unravished heights of Sur-rey. I (Modesty says this) to any cosy nook wherethere are ivy and curtains in plenty.’

‘For there, not here (all speak together join-ing hands and making gestures of farewell anddespair towards the bed where Orlando liessleeping) dwell still in nest and boudoir, officeand lawcourt those who love us; those whohonour us, virgins and city men; lawyers anddoctors; those who prohibit; those who deny;those who reverence without knowing why;those who praise without understanding; thestill very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribeof the respectable; who prefer to see not; de-sire to know not; love the darkness; those still

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worship us, and with reason; for we have giventhem Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. Tothem we go, you we leave. Come, Sisters,come! This is no place for us here.’

They retire in haste, waving their draperiesover their heads, as if to shut out somethingthat they dare not look upon and close the doorbehind them.

We are, therefore, now left entirely alone inthe room with the sleeping Orlando and thetrumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging them-selves side by side in order, blow one terrificblast:–

‘The Truth!

at which Orlando woke.

He stretched himself. He rose. He stoodupright in complete nakedness before us, and

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while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth!we have no choice left but confess–he was awoman.

The sound of the trumpets died away andOrlando stood stark naked. No human be-ing, since the world began, has ever lookedmore ravishing. His form combined in one thestrength of a man and a woman’s grace. As hestood there, the silver trumpets prolonged theirnote, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sightwhich their blast had called forth; and Chastity,Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, byCuriosity, peeped in at the door and threw agarment like a towel at the naked form which,

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unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Or-lando looked himself up and down in a longlooking-glass, without showing any signs ofdiscomposure, and went, presumably, to hisbath.

We may take advantage of this pause inthe narrative to make certain statements. Or-lando had become a woman–there is no deny-ing it. But in every other respect, Orlando re-mained precisely as he had been. The change ofsex, though it altered their future, did nothingwhatever to alter their identity. Their faces re-mained, as their portraits prove, practically thesame. His memory–but in future we must, forconvention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’for ‘he’–her memory then, went back throughall the events of her past life without encoun-tering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there

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may have been, as if a few dark drops hadfallen into the clear pool of memory; certainthings had become a little dimmed; but thatwas all. The change seemed to have been ac-complished painlessly and completely and insuch a way that Orlando herself showed nosurprise at it. Many people, taking this intoaccount, and holding that such a change ofsex is against nature, have been at great painsto prove (1) that Orlando had always been awoman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment aman. Let biologists and psychologists deter-mine. It is enough for us to state the simplefact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty;when he became a woman and has remainedso ever since.

But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality;we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.

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Orlando had now washed, and dressed herselfin those Turkish coats and trousers which canbe worn indifferently by either sex; and wasforced to consider her position. That it was pre-carious and embarrassing in the extreme mustbe the first thought of every reader who hasfollowed her story with sympathy. Young, no-ble, beautiful, she had woken to find herself ina position than which we can conceive nonemore delicate for a young lady of rank. Weshould not have blamed her had she rung thebell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showedno such signs of perturbation. All her actionswere deliberate in the extreme, and might in-deed have been thought to show tokens of pre-meditation. First, she carefully examined thepapers on the table; took such as seemed tobe written in poetry, and secreted them in herbosom; next she called her Seleuchi hound,

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which had never left her bed all these days,though half famished with hunger, fed andcombed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in herbelt; finally wound about her person severalstrings of emeralds and pearls of the finest ori-ent which had formed part of her Ambassado-rial wardrobe. This done, she leant out of thewindow, gave one low whistle, and descendedthe shattered and bloodstained staircase, nowstrewn with the litter of waste-paper baskets,treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax, etc.,and so entered the courtyard. There, in theshadow of a giant fig tree, waited an old gipsyon a donkey. He led another by the bridle. Or-lando swung her leg over it; and thus, attendedby a lean dog, riding a donkey, in company ofa gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at theCourt of the Sultan left Constantinople.

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They rode for several days and nights andmet with a variety of adventures, some at thehands of men, some at the hands of nature,in all of which Orlando acquitted herself withcourage. Within a week they reached the highground outside Broussa, which was then thechief camping ground of the gipsy tribe towhich Orlando had allied herself. Often shehad looked at those mountains from her bal-cony at the Embassy; often had longed to bethere; and to find oneself where one has longedto be always, to a reflective mind, gives foodfor thought. For some time, however, she wastoo well pleased with the change to spoil itby thinking. The pleasure of having no doc-uments to seal or sign, no flourishes to make,no calls to pay, was enough. The gipsies fol-lowed the grass; when it was grazed down,on they moved again. She washed in streams

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if she washed at all; no boxes, red, blue, orgreen, were presented to her; there was not akey, let alone a golden key, in the whole camp;as for ‘visiting’, the word was unknown. Shemilked the goats; she collected brushwood; shestole a hen’s egg now and then, but alwaysput a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herdedcattle; she stripped vines; she trod the grape;she filled the goat-skin and drank from it; andwhen she remembered how, at about this timeof day, she should have been making the mo-tions of drinking and smoking over an emptycoffee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco,she laughed aloud, cut herself another hunchof bread, and begged for a puff from old Rus-tum’s pipe, filled though it was with cow dung.

The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that shemust have been in secret communication be-

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fore the revolution, seem to have looked uponher as one of themselves (which is always thehighest compliment a people can pay), and herdark hair and dark complexion bore out thebelief that she was, by birth, one of them andhad been snatched by an English Duke from anut tree when she was a baby and taken to thatbarbarous land where people live in houses be-cause they are too feeble and diseased to standthe open air. Thus, though in many ways in-ferior to them, they were willing to help her tobecome more like them; taught her their arts ofcheese-making and basket-weaving, their sci-ence of stealing and bird-snaring, and wereeven prepared to consider letting her marryamong them.

But Orlando had contracted in Englandsome of the customs or diseases (whatever

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you choose to consider them) which cannot, itseems, be expelled. One evening, when theywere all sitting round the camp fire and thesunset was blazing over the Thessalian hills,Orlando exclaimed:

‘How good to eat! (The gipsies have no wordfor ‘beautiful’. This is the nearest.)

All the young men and women burst outlaughing uproariously. The sky good to eat,indeed! The elders, however, who had seenmore of foreigners than they had, became sus-picious. They noticed that Orlando often satfor whole hours doing nothing whatever, ex-cept look here and then there; they would comeupon her on some hill-top staring straight infront of her, no matter whether the goats weregrazing or straying. They began to suspect thatshe had other beliefs than their own, and the

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older men and women thought it probable thatshe had fallen into the clutches of the vilest andcruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature.Nor were they far wrong. The English dis-ease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, andhere, where Nature was so much larger andmore powerful than in England, she fell intoits hands as she had never done before. Themalady is too well known, and has been, alas,too often described to need describing afresh,save very briefly. There were mountains; therewere valleys; there were streams. She climbedthe mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on thebanks of the streams. She likened the hillsto ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and theflanks of kine. She compared the flowers toenamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin.Trees were withered hags, and sheep were greyboulders. Everything, in fact, was something

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else. She found the tarn on the mountain-topand almost threw herself in to seek the wisdomshe thought lay hid there; and when, from themountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Seaof Marmara, the plains of Greece, and made out(her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with awhite streak or two, which must, she thought,be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with hereyeballs, and she prayed that she might sharethe majesty of the hills, know the serenity ofthe plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do.Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the pur-ple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at thegoodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyesagain, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imag-ined its raptures and made them her own. Re-turning home, she saluted each star, each peak,and each watch-fire as if they signalled to heralone; and at last, when she flung herself upon

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her mat in the gipsies’ tent, she could not helpbursting out again, How good to eat! Howgood to eat! (For it is a curious fact that thoughhuman beings have such imperfect means ofcommunication, that they can only say ‘good toeat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the otherway about, they will yet endure ridicule andmisunderstanding rather than keep any expe-rience to themselves.) All the young gipsieslaughed. But Rustum el Sadi, the old manwho had brought Orlando out of Constantino-ple on his donkey, sat silent. He had a noselike a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed as iffrom the age-long descent of iron hail; he wasbrown and keen-eyed, and as he sat tuggingat his hookah he observed Orlando narrowly.He had the deepest suspicion that her God wasNature. One day he found her in tears. Inter-preting this to mean that her God had punished

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her, he told her that he was not surprised. Heshowed her the fingers of his left hand, with-ered by the frost; he showed her his right foot,crushed where a rock had fallen. This, he said,was what her God did to men. When she said,‘But so beautiful’, using the English word, heshook his head; and when she repeated it hewas angry. He saw that she did not believewhat he believed, and that was enough, wiseand ancient as he was, to enrage him.

This difference of opinion disturbed Or-lando, who had been perfectly happy untilnow. She began to think, was Nature beauti-ful or cruel; and then she asked herself whatthis beauty was; whether it was in things them-selves, or only in herself; so she went on to thenature of reality, which led her to truth, whichin its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in

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the days on the high mound at home); whichmeditations, since she could impart no word ofthem, made her long, as she had never longedbefore, for pen and ink.

‘Oh! if only I could write!’ she cried (for shehad the odd conceit of those who write thatwords written are shared). She had no ink;and but little paper. But she made ink fromberries and wine; and finding a few marginsand blank spaces in the manuscript of ‘The OakTree’, managed by writing a kind of shorthand,to describe the scenery in a long, blank versionpoem, and to carry on a dialogue with herselfabout this Beauty and Truth concisely enough.This kept her extremely happy for hours onend. But the gipsies became suspicious. First,they noticed that she was less adept than beforeat milking and cheese-making; next, she often

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hesitated before replying; and once a gipsy boywho had been asleep, woke in a terror feel-ing her eyes upon him. Sometimes this con-straint would be felt by the whole tribe, num-bering some dozens of grown men and women.It sprang from the sense they had (and theirsenses are very sharp and much in advanceof their vocabulary) that whatever they weredoing crumbled like ashes in their hands. Anold woman making a basket, a boy skinning asheep, would be singing or crooning content-edly at their work, when Orlando would comeinto the camp, fling herself down by the fireand gaze into the flames. She need not evenlook at them, and yet they felt, here is some-one who doubts; (we make a rough-and-readytranslation from the gipsy language) here issomeone who does not do the thing for thesake of doing; nor looks for looking’s sake; here

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is someone who believes neither in sheep-skinnor basket; but sees (here they looked appre-hensively about the tent) something else. Thena vague but most unpleasant feeling would be-gin to work in the boy and in the old woman.They broke their withys; they cut their fingers.A great rage filled them. They wished Orlandowould leave the tent and never come near themagain. Yet she was of a cheerful and willingdisposition, they owned; and one of her pearlswas enough to buy the finest herd of goats inBroussa.

Slowly, she began to feel that there was somedifference between her and the gipsies whichmade her hesitate sometimes to marry and set-tle down among them for ever. At first she triedto account for it by saying that she came of anancient and civilized race, whereas these gip-

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sies were an ignorant people, not much betterthan savages. One night when they were ques-tioning her about England she could not helpwith some pride describing the house whereshe was born, how it had 365 bedrooms andhad been in the possession of her family forfour or five hundred years. Her ancestors wereearls, or even dukes, she added. At this shenoticed again that the gipsies were uneasy; butnot angry as before when she had praised thebeauty of nature. Now they were courteous,but concerned as people of fine breeding arewhen a stranger has been made to reveal hislow birth or poverty. Rustum followed herout of the tent alone and said that she neednot mind if her father were a Duke, and pos-sessed all the bedrooms and furniture that shedescribed. They would none of them think theworse of her for that. Then she was seized

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with a shame that she had never felt before.It was clear that Rustum and the other gipsiesthought a descent of four or five hundred yearsonly the meanest possible. Their own fami-lies went back at least two or three thousandyears. To the gipsy whose ancestors had builtthe Pyramids centuries before Christ was born,the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenetswas no better and no worse than that of theSmiths and the Joneses: both were negligible.Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lin-eage of such antiquity, there was nothing spe-cially memorable or desirable in ancient birth;vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then,though he was too courteous to speak openly,it was clear that the gipsy thought that therewas no more vulgar ambition than to possessbedrooms by the hundred (they were on top ofa hill as they spoke; it was night; the moun-

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tains rose around them) when the whole earthis ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view,a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing buta profiteer or robber who snatched land andmoney from people who rated these things oflittle worth, and could think of nothing betterto do than to build three hundred and sixty-fivebedrooms when one was enough, and nonewas even better than one. She could not denythat her ancestors had accumulated field afterfield; house after house; honour after honour;yet had none of them been saints or heroes,or great benefactors of the human race. Norcould she counter the argument (Rustum wastoo much of a gentleman to press it, but she un-derstood) that any man who did now what herancestors had done three or four hundred yearsago would be denounced–and by her own fam-ily most loudly–for a vulgar upstart, an adven-

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turer, a nouveau riche.

She sought to answer such arguments by thefamiliar if oblique method of finding the gipsylife itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a shorttime, much bad blood was bred between them.Indeed, such differences of opinion are enoughto cause bloodshed and revolution. Townshave been sacked for less, and a million mar-tyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yieldan inch upon any of the points here debated.No passion is stronger in the breast of man thanthe desire to make others believe as he believes.Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness andfills him with rage as the sense that anotherrates low what he prizes high. Whigs and To-ries, Liberal party and Labour party–for whatdo they battle except their own prestige? It isnot love of truth but desire to prevail that sets

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quarter against quarter and makes parish de-sire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peaceof mind and subserviency rather than the tri-umph of truth and the exaltation of virtue–butthese moralities belong, and should be left tothe historian, since they are as dull as ditch wa-ter.

‘Four hundred and seventy-six bedroomsmean nothing to them,’ sighed Orlando.

‘She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats,’ saidthe gipsies.

What was to be done, Orlando could notthink. To leave the gipsies and become oncemore an Ambassador seemed to her intolera-ble. But it was equally impossible to remainfor ever where there was neither ink nor writ-ing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots norrespect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. So she

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was thinking, one fine morning on the slopesof Mount Athos, when minding her goats.And then Nature, in whom she trusted, eitherplayed her a trick or worked a miracle–again,opinions differ too much for it to be possible tosay which. Orlando was gazing rather discon-solately at the steep hill-side in front of her. Itwas now midsummer, and if we must comparethe landscape to anything, it would have beento a dry bone; to a sheep’s skeleton; to a gigan-tic skull picked white by a thousand vultures.The heat was intense, and the little fig tree un-der which Orlando lay only served to print pat-terns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.

Suddenly a shadow, though there was noth-ing to cast a shadow, appeared on the baldmountain-side opposite. It deepened quicklyand soon a green hollow showed where there

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had been barren rock before. As she looked,the hollow deepened and widened, and a greatpark-like space opened in the flank of thehill. Within, she could see an undulating andgrassy lawn; she could see oak trees dottedhere and there; she could see the thrushes hop-ping among the branches. She could see thedeer stepping delicately from shade to shade,and could even hear the hum of insects and thegentle sighs and shivers of a summer’s day inEngland. After she had gazed entranced forsome time, snow began falling; soon the wholelandscape was covered and marked with vio-let shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now shesaw heavy carts coming along the roads, ladenwith tree trunks, which they were taking, sheknew, to be sawn for firewood; and then ap-peared the roofs and belfries and towers andcourtyards of her own home. The snow was

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falling steadily, and she could now hear theslither and flop which it made as it slid downthe roof and fell to the ground. The smoke wentup from a thousand chimneys. All was so clearand minute that she could see a Daw peck-ing for worms in the snow. Then, gradually,the violet shadows deepened and closed overthe carts and the lawns and the great house it-self. All was swallowed up. Now there wasnothing left of the grassy hollow, and insteadof the green lawns was only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to havepicked bare. At this, she burst into a passion oftears, and striding back to the gipsies’ camp,told them that she must sail for England thevery next day.

It was happy for her that she did so. Alreadythe young men had plotted her death. Honour,

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they said, demanded it, for she did not thinkas they did. Yet they would have been sorry tocut her throat; and welcomed the news of herdeparture. An English merchant ship, as luckwould have it, was already under sail in theharbour about to return to England; and Or-lando, by breaking off another pearl from hernecklace, not only paid her passage but hadsome banknotes left over in her wallet. Theseshe would have liked to present to the gipsies.But they despised wealth she knew; and shehad to content herself with embraces, which onher part were sincere.

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WITH SOME OF the guineas left from thesale of the tenth pearl on her string, Orlandobought herself a complete outfit of such clothesas women then wore, and it was in the dress ofa young Englishwoman of rank that she nowsat on the deck of the “Enamoured Lady”. It isa strange fact, but a true one, that up to this mo-

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ment she had scarcely given her sex a thought.Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she hadhitherto worn had done something to distracther thoughts; and the gipsy women, except inone or two important particulars, differ verylittle from the gipsy men. At any rate, it wasnot until she felt the coil of skirts about her legsand the Captain offered, with the greatest po-liteness, to have an awning spread for her ondeck, that she realized with a start the penal-ties and the privileges of her position. But thatstart was not of the kind that might have beenexpected.

It was not caused, that is to say, simplyand solely by the thought of her chastity andhow she could preserve it. In normal circum-stances a lovely young woman alone wouldhave thought of nothing else; the whole edifice

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of female government is based on that founda-tion stone; chastity is their jewel, their centre-piece, which they run mad to protect, and diewhen ravished of. But if one has been a man forthirty years or so, and an Ambassador into thebargain, if one has held a Queen in one’s armsand one or two other ladies, if report be true, ofless exalted rank, if one has married a RosinaPepita, and so on, one does not perhaps givesuch a very great start about that. Orlando’sstart was of a very complicated kind, and notto be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed,ever accused her of being one of those quickwits who run to the end of things in a minute.It took her the entire length of the voyage tomoralize out the meaning of her start, and so,at her own pace, we will follow her.

‘Lord,’ she thought, when she had recovered

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from her start, stretching herself out at lengthunder her awning, ‘this is a pleasant, lazy wayof life, to be sure. But,’ she thought, givingher legs a kick, ‘these skirts are plaguey thingsto have about one’s heels. Yet the stuff (flow-ered paduasoy) is the loveliest in the world.Never have I seen my own skin (here she laidher hand on her knee) look to such advantageas now. Could I, however, leap overboard andswim in clothes like these? No! Therefore, Ishould have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to that? Now do I?’ she won-dered, here encountering the first knot in thesmooth skein of her argument.

Dinner came before she had untied it,and then it was the Captain himself–CaptainNicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain ofdistinguished aspect, who did it for her as he

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helped her to a slice of corned beef.

‘A little of the fat, Ma’m?’ he asked. ‘Let mecut you just the tiniest little slice the size of yourfingernail.’ At those words a delicious tremorran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrentsrushed. It recalled the feeling of indescribablepleasure with which she had first seen Sasha,hundreds of years ago. Then she had pursued,now she fled. Which is the greater ecstasy? Theman’s or the woman’s? And are they not per-haps the same? No, she thought, this is themost delicious (thanking the Captain but refus-ing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, shewould, if he wished it, have the very thinnest,smallest shiver in the world. This was the mostdelicious of all, to yield and see him smile. ‘Fornothing,’ she thought, regaining her couch ondeck, and continuing the argument, ‘is more

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heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yieldand to resist. Surely it throws the spirit intosuch a rapture as nothing else can. So that I’mnot sure’, she continued, ‘that I won’t throwmyself overboard, for the mere pleasure of be-ing rescued by a blue-jacket after all.’

(It must be remembered that she was like achild entering into possession of a pleasaunceor toy cupboard; her arguments would notcommend themselves to mature women, whohave had the run of it all their lives.)

‘But what used we young fellows in thecockpit of the “Marie Rose” to say about awoman who threw herself overboard for thepleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket?’ shesaid. ‘We had a word for them. Ah! I haveit...’ (But we must omit that word; it was dis-respectful in the extreme and passing strange

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on a lady’s lips.) ‘Lord! Lord! she cried againat the conclusion of her thoughts, ‘must I thenbegin to respect the opinion of the other sex,however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts,if I can’t swim, if I have to be rescued by ablue-jacket, by God!’ she cried, ‘I must!’ Uponwhich a gloom fell over her. Candid by na-ture, and averse to all kinds of equivocation,to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a round-about way of going to work. Yet, she reflected,the flowered paduasoy–the pleasure of beingrescued by a blue-jacket–if these were onlyto be obtained by roundabout ways, round-about one must go, she supposed. She remem-bered how, as a young man, she had insistedthat women must be obedient, chaste, scented,and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall haveto pay in my own person for those desires,’she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging by

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my own short experience of the sex) obedient,chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled bynature. They can only attain these graces, with-out which they may enjoy none of the delightsof life, by the most tedious discipline. There’sthe hairdressing,’ she thought, ‘that alone willtake an hour of my morning, there’s looking inthe looking-glass, another hour; there’s stayingand lacing; there’s washing and powdering;there’s changing from silk to lace and from laceto paduasoy; there’s being chaste year in yearout...’ Here she tossed her foot impatiently, andshowed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on themast, who happened to look down at the mo-ment, started so violently that he missed hisfooting and only saved himself by the skin ofhis teeth. ‘If the sight of my ankles means deathto an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wifeand family to support, I must, in all humanity,

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keep them covered,’ Orlando thought. Yet herlegs were among her chiefest beauties. And shefell to thinking what an odd pass we have cometo when all a woman’s beauty has to be keptcovered lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head.‘A pox on them!’ she said, realizing for the firsttime what, in other circumstances, she wouldhave been taught as a child, that is to say, thesacred responsibilities of womanhood.

@‘And that’s the last oath I shall ever be ableto swear,’ she thought; ‘once I set foot on En-glish soil. And I shall never be able to cracka man over the head, or tell him he lies in histeeth, or draw my sword and run him throughthe body, or sit among my peers, or wear acoronet, or walk in procession, or sentence aman to death, or lead an army, or prance downWhitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two

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different medals on my breast. All I can do,once I set foot on English soil, is to pour outtea and ask my lords how they like it. D’youtake sugar? D’you take cream?’ And mincingout the words, she was horrified to perceivehow low an opinion she was forming of theother sex, the manly, to which it had once beenher pride to belong–‘To fall from a mast-head’,she thought, ‘because you see a woman’s an-kles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and paradethe streets, so that women may praise you; todeny a woman teaching lest she may laugh atyou; to be the slave of the frailest chit in pet-ticoats. and yet to go about as if you werethe Lords of creation.–Heavens!’ she thought,‘what fools they make of us–what fools we are!’And here it would seem from some ambiguityin her terms that she was censuring both sexesequally, as if she belonged to neither; and in-

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deed, for the time being, she seemed to vacil-late; she was man; she was woman; she knewthe secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. Itwas a most bewildering and whirligig stateof mind to be in. The comforts of ignoranceseemed utterly denied her. She was a featherblown on the gale. Thus it is no great won-der, as she pitted one sex against the other,and found each alternately full of the most de-plorable infirmities, and was not sure to whichshe belonged–it was no great wonder that shewas about to cry out that she would return toTurkey and become a gipsy again when the an-chor fell with a great splash into the sea; thesails came tumbling on deck, and she perceived(so sunk had she been in thought that she hadseen nothing for several days) that the ship wasanchored off the coast of Italy. The Captain atonce sent to ask the honour of her company

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ashore with him in the longboat.

When she returned the next morning, shestretched herself on her couch under theawning and arranged her draperies with thegreatest decorum about her ankles.

‘Ignorant and poor as we are compared withthe other sex,’ she thought, continuing the sen-tence which she had left unfinished the otherday, ‘armoured with every weapon as they are,while they debar us even from a knowledge ofthe alphabet’ (and from these opening wordsit is plain that something had happened dur-ing the night to give her a push towards thefemale sex, for she was speaking more as awoman speaks than as a man, yet with a sort ofcontent after all), ‘still–they fall from the mast-head.’ Here she gave a great yawn and fellasleep. When she woke, the ship was sailing

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before a fair breeze so near the shore that townson the cliffs’ edge seemed only kept from slip-ping into the water by the interposition of somegreat rock or the twisted roots of some ancientolive tree. The scent of oranges wafted froma million trees, heavy with the fruit, reachedher on deck. A score of blue dolphins, twist-ing their tails, leapt high now and again intothe air. Stretching her arms out (arms, shehad learnt already, have no such fatal effectsas legs), she thanked Heaven that she was notprancing down Whitehall on a warhorse, noreven sentencing a man to death. ‘Better is it’,she thought, ‘to be clothed with poverty andignorance, which are the dark garments of thefemale sex; better to leave the rule and disci-pline of the world to others; better be quit ofmartial ambition, the love of power, and all theother manly desires if so one can more fully

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enjoy the most exalted raptures known to thehumane spirit, which are’, she said aloud, asher habit was when deeply moved, ‘contem-plation, solitude, love.’

‘Praise God that I’m a woman!’ she cried,and was about to run into extreme folly–thanwhich none is more distressing in woman orman either–of being proud of her sex, when shepaused over the singular word, which, for allwe can do to put it in its place, has crept in atthe end of the last sentence: Love. ‘Love,’ saidOrlando. Instantly–such is its impetuosity–love took a human shape–such is its pride. Forwhere other thoughts are content to remain ab-stract, nothing will satisfy this one but to put onflesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hoseand jerkin. And as all Orlando’s loves had beenwomen, now, through the culpable laggardry

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of the human frame to adapt itself to conven-tion, though she herself was a woman, it wasstill a woman she loved; and if the conscious-ness of being of the same sex had any effect atall, it was to quicken and deepen those feel-ings which she had had as a man. For now athousand hints and mysteries became plain toher that were then dark. Now, the obscurity,which divides the sexes and lets linger innu-merable impurities in its gloom, was removed,and if there is anything in what the poet saysabout truth and beauty, this affection gainedin beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, shecried, she knew Sasha as she was, and in theardour of this discovery, and in the pursuit ofall those treasures which were now revealed,she was so rapt and enchanted that it was as ifa cannon ball had exploded at her ear when aman’s voice said, ‘Permit me, Madam,’ a man’s

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hand raised her to her feet; and the fingers of aman with a three-masted sailing ship tattooedon the middle finger pointed to the horizon.

‘The cliffs of England, Ma’am,’ said the Cap-tain, and he raised the hand which had pointedat the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave asecond start, even more violent than the first.

‘Christ Jesus!’ she cried.Happily, the sight of her native land after

long absence excused both start and exclama-tion, or she would have been hard put to itto explain to Captain Bartolus the raging andconflicting emotions which now boiled withinher. How tell him that she, who now trem-bled on his arm, had been a Duke and an Am-bassador? How explain to him that she, whohad been lapped like a lily in folds of padua-soy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose

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women among treasure sacks in the holds ofpirate ships on summer nights when the tulipswere abloom and the bees buzzing off WappingOld Stairs? Not even to herself could she ex-plain the giant start she gave, as the resoluteright hand of the sea-captain indicated the cliffsof the British Islands.

‘To refuse and to yield,’ she murmured, ‘howdelightful; to pursue and conquer, how august;to perceive and to reason, how sublime.’ Notone of these words so coupled together seemedto her wrong; nevertheless, as the chalky cliffsloomed nearer, she felt culpable; dishonoured;unchaste, which, for one who had never giventhe matter a thought, was strange. Closer andcloser they drew, till the samphire gatherers,hanging half-way down the cliff, were plainto the naked eye. And watching them, she

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felt, scampering up and down within her, likesome derisive ghost who in another instant willpick up her skirts and flaunt out of sight, Sashathe lost, Sasha the memory, whose reality shehad proved just now so surprisingly–Sasha,she felt, mopping and mowing and makingall sorts of disrespectful gestures towards thecliffs and the samphire gatherers; and when thesailors began chanting, ‘So good-bye and adieuto you, Ladies of Spain’, the words echoed inOrlando’s sad heart, and she felt that howevermuch landing there meant comfort, meant op-ulence, meant consequence and state (for shewould doubtless pick up some noble Princeand reign, his consort, over half Yorkshire),still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery,meant deceit, meant denying her love, fetter-ing her limbs, pursing her lips, and restrainingher tongue, then she would turn about with the

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ship and set sail once more for the gipsies.

Among the hurry of these thoughts, how-ever, there now rose, like a dome of smooth,white marble, something which, whether factor fancy, was so impressive to her feveredimagination that she settled upon it as onehas seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight,with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bellwhich shelters some tender vegetable. Theform of it, by the hazard of fancy, recalled thatearliest, most persistent memory–the man withthe big forehead in Twitchett’s sitting-room,the man who sat writing, or rather looking,but certainly not at her, for he never seemedto see her poised there in all her finery, lovelyboy though she must have been, she could notdeny it–and whenever she thought of him, thethought spread round it, like the risen moon on

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turbulent waters, a sheet of silver calm. Nowher hand went to her bosom (the other wasstill in the Captain’s keeping), where the pagesof her poem were hidden safe. It might havebeen a talisman that she kept there. The dis-traction of sex, which hers was, and what itmeant, subsided; she thought now only of theglory of poetry, and the great lines of Mar-lowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton beganbooming and reverberating, as if a golden clap-per beat against a golden bell in the cathedraltower which was her mind. The truth was thatthe image of the marble dome which her eyeshad first discovered so faintly that it suggesteda poet’s forehead and thus started a flock of ir-relevant ideas, was no figment, but a reality;and as the ship advanced down the Thames be-fore a favouring gale, the image with all its as-sociations gave place to the truth, and revealed

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itself as nothing more and nothing less than thedome of a vast cathedral rising among a fret-work of white spires.

‘St Paul’s,’ said Captain Bartolus, who stoodby her side. ‘The Tower of London,’ hecontinued. ‘Greenwich Hospital, erected inmemory of Queen Mary by her husband, hislate majesty, William the Third. WestminsterAbbey. The Houses of Parliament.’ As hespoke, each of these famous buildings rose toview. It was a fine September morning. Amyriad of little water-craft plied from bank tobank. Rarely has a gayer, or more interesting,spectacle presented itself to the gaze of a re-turned traveller. Orlando hung over the prow,absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had been usedtoo long to savages and nature not to be en-tranced by these urban glories. That, then, was

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the dome of St Paul’s which Mr Wren had builtduring her absence. Near by, a shock of goldenhair burst from a pillar–Captain Bartolus wasat her side to inform her that that was the Mon-ument; there had been a plague and a fire dur-ing her absence, he said. Do what she could torestrain them, the tears came to her eyes, until,remembering that it is becoming in a woman toweep, she let them flow. Here, she thought, hadbeen the great carnival. Here, where the wavesslapped briskly, had stood the Royal Pavilion.Here she had first met Sasha. About here(she looked down into the sparkling waters)one had been used to see the frozen bumboatwoman with her apples on her lap. All thatsplendour and corruption was gone. Gone,too, was the dark night, the monstrous down-pour, the violent surges of the flood. Here,where yellow icebergs had raced circling with a

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crew of terror-stricken wretches on top, a coveyof swans floated, orgulous, undulant, superb.London itself had completely changed sinceshe had last seen it. Then, she remembered, ithad been a huddle of little black, beetle-browedhouses. The heads of rebels had grinned onpikes at Temple Bar. The cobbled pavementshad reeked of garbage and ordure. Now,as the ship sailed past Wapping, she caughtglimpses of broad and orderly thoroughfares.Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-fedhorses stood at the doors of houses whose bowwindows, whose plate glass, whose polishedknockers, testified to the wealth and modestdignity of the dwellers within. Ladies in flow-ered silk (she put the Captain’s glass to her eye)walked on raised footpaths. Citizens in broi-dered coats took snuff at street corners underlamp-posts. She caught sight of a variety of

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painted signs swinging in the breeze and couldform a rapid notion from what was painted onthem of the tobacco, of the stuff, of the silk,of the gold, of the silver ware, of the gloves,of the perfumes, and of a thousand other arti-cles which were sold within. Nor could she domore as the ship sailed to its anchorage by Lon-don Bridge than glance at coffee-house win-dows where, on balconies, since the weatherwas fine, a great number of decent citizens satat ease, with china dishes in front of them, claypipes by their sides, while one among themread from a news sheet, and was frequently in-terrupted by the laughter or the comments ofthe others. Were these taverns, were these wits,were these poets? she asked of Captain Bar-tolus, who obligingly informed her that evennow–if she turned her head a little to the leftand looked along the line of his first finger–so–

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they were passing the Cocoa Tree, where,–yes,there he was–one might see Mr Addison tak-ing his coffee; the other two gentlemen–‘there,Ma’am, a little to the right of the lamp-post, oneof ‘em humped, t’other much the same as youor me’–were Mr Dryden and Mr Pope.’ ‘Saddogs,’ said the Captain, by which he meant thatthey were Papists, ‘but men of parts, none theless,’ he added, hurrying aft to superintend thearrangements for landing. (The Captain musthave been mistaken, as a reference to any text-book of literature will show; but the mistakewas a kindly one, and so we let it stand.)

‘Addison, Dryden, Pope,’ Orlando repeatedas if the words were an incantation. For onemoment she saw the high mountains aboveBroussa, the next, she had set her foot upon hernative shore.

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But now Orlando was to learn how little themost tempestuous flutter of excitement availsagainst the iron countenance of the law; howharder than the stones of London Bridge it is,and than the lips of a cannon more severe. Nosooner had she returned to her home in Black-friars than she was made aware by a succes-sion of Bow Street runners and other graveemissaries from the Law Courts that she was aparty to three major suits which had been pre-ferred against her during her absence, as wellas innumerable minor litigations, some aris-ing out of, others depending on them. Thechief charges against her were (1) that she wasdead, and therefore could not hold any prop-erty whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman,

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which amounts to much the same thing; (3)that she was an English Duke who had mar-ried one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had hadby her three sons, which sons now declaringthat their father was deceased, claimed that allhis property descended to them. Such gravecharges as these would, of course, take timeand money to dispose of. All her estates wereput in Chancery and her titles pronounced inabeyance while the suits were under litigation.Thus it was in a highly ambiguous condition,uncertain whether she was alive or dead, manor woman, Duke or nonentity, that she posteddown to her country seat, where, pending thelegal judgment, she had the Law’s permissionto reside in a state of incognito or incognita, asthe case might turn out to be.

It was a fine evening in December when she

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arrived and the snow was falling and the vi-olet shadows were slanting much as she hadseen them from the hill-top at Broussa. Thegreat house lay more like a town than a house,brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow,with all its chimneys smoking busily as if in-spired with a life of their own. She could notrestrain a cry as she saw it there tranquil andmassive, couched upon the meadows. As theyellow coach entered the park and came bowl-ing along the drive between the trees, the reddeer raised their heads as if expectantly, andit was observed that instead of showing thetimidity natural to their kind, they followedthe coach and stood about the courtyard whenit drew up. Some tossed their antlers, otherspawed the ground as the step was let downand Orlando alighted. One, it is said, actuallyknelt in the snow before her. She had not time

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to reach her hand towards the knocker beforeboth wings of the great door were flung open,and there, with lights and torches held abovetheir heads, were Mrs Grimsditch, Mr Dup-per, and a whole retinue of servants come togreet her. But the orderly procession was inter-rupted first by the impetuosity of Canute, theelk-hound, who threw himself with such ar-dour upon his mistress that he almost knockedher to the ground; next, by the agitation of MrsGrimsditch, who, making as if to curtsey, wasovercome with emotion and could do no morethan gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kissupon both her cheeks. After that, Mr Dupperbegan to read from a parchment, but the dogsbarking, the huntsmen winding their horns,and the stags, who had come into the court-yard in the confusion, baying the moon, not

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much progress was made, and the companydispersed within after crowding about theirMistress, and testifying in every way to theirgreat joy at her return.

No one showed an instant’s suspicion thatOrlando was not the Orlando they had known.If any doubt there was in the human mind theaction of the deer and the dogs would havebeen enough to dispel it, for the dumb crea-tures, as is well known, are far better judgesboth of identity and character than we are.Moreover, said Mrs Grimsditch, over her dishof china tea, to Mr Dupper that night, if herLord was a Lady now, she had never seena lovelier one, nor was there a penny pieceto choose between them; one was as well-favoured as the other; they were as like astwo peaches on one branch; which, said Mrs

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Grimsditch, becoming confidential, she had al-ways had her suspicions (here she nodded herhead very mysteriously), which it was no sur-prise to her (here she nodded her head veryknowingly), and for her part, a very great com-fort; for what with the towels wanting mend-ing and the curtains in the chaplain’s parlourbeing moth-eaten round the fringes, it was timethey had a Mistress among them.

‘And some little masters and mistresses tocome after her,’ Mr Dupper added, being priv-ileged by virtue of his holy office to speak hismind on such delicate matters as these.

So, while the old servants gossiped in theservants’ hall, Orlando took a silver candle inher hand and roamed once more through thehalls, the galleries, the courts, the bedrooms;saw loom down at her again the dark visage

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of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain,among her ancestors; sat now in this chair ofstate, now reclined on that canopy of delight;observed the arras, how it swayed; watched thehuntsmen riding and Daphne flying; bathedher hand, as she had loved to do as a child, inthe yellow pool of light which the moonlightmade falling through the heraldic Leopard inthe window; slid along the polished planks ofthe gallery, the other side of which was roughtimber; touched this silk, that satin; fancied thecarved dolphins swam; brushed her hair withKing James’ silver brush; buried her face in thepotpourri, which was made as the Conquerorhad taught them many hundred years ago andfrom the same roses; looked at the garden andimagined the sleeping crocuses, the dormantdahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming whitein the snow and the great yew hedges, thick as

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a house, black behind them; saw the orangeriesand the giant medlars;–all this she saw, andeach sight and sound, rudely as we write itdown, filled her heart with such a lust andbalm of joy, that at length, tired out, she en-tered the Chapel and sank into the old red arm-chair in which her ancestors used to hear ser-vice. There she lit a cheroot (‘twas a habit shehad brought back from the East) and openedthe Prayer Book.

It was a little book bound in velvet, stitchedwith gold, which had been held by MaryQueen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye offaith could detect a brownish stain, said to bemade of a drop of the Royal blood. But whatpious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what evilpassions it soothed asleep, who dare say, see-ing that of all communions this with the deity

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is the most inscrutable? Novelist, poet, histo-rian all falter with their hand on that door; nordoes the believer himself enlighten us, for is hemore ready to die than other people, or moreeager to share his goods? Does he not keepas many maids and carriage horses as the rest?and yet with it all, holds a faith he says whichshould make goods a vanity and death desir-able. In the Queen’s prayerbook, along withthe blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and acrumb of pastry; Orlando now added to thesekeepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, readingand smoking, was moved by the humane jum-ble of them all–the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco–to such a mood of contem-plation as gave her a reverent air suitable inthe circumstances, though she had, it is said, notraffic with the usual God. Nothing, however,can be more arrogant, though nothing is com-

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moner than to assume that of Gods there is onlyone, and of religions none but the speaker’s.Orlando, it seemed, had a faith of her own.With all the religious ardour in the world, shenow reflected upon her sins and the imperfec-tions that had crept into her spiritual state. Theletter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the poet’sEden. Do what she would there were still toomany of these sinful reptiles in the first stan-zas of ‘The Oak Tree’. But ‘S’ was nothing,in her opinion, compared with the termination‘ing’. The present participle is the Devil him-self, she thought, now that we are in the placefor believing in Devils. To evade such tempta-tions is the first duty of the poet, she concluded,for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul,poetry can adulterate and destroy more surelythan lust or gunpowder. The poet’s, then, is thehighest office of all, she continued. His words

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reach where others fall short. A silly song ofShakespeare’s has done more for the poor andthe wicked than all the preachers and philan-thropists in the world. No time, no devotion,can be too great, therefore, which makes the ve-hicle of our message less distorting. We mustshape our words till they are the thinnest in-tegument for our thoughts. Thoughts are di-vine, etc. Thus it is obvious that she was backin the confines of her own religion which timehad only strengthened in her absence, and wasrapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief.

‘I am growing up,’ she thought, taking hertaper at last. ‘I am losing some illusions,’ shesaid, shutting Queen Mary’s book, ‘perhaps toacquire others,’ and she descended among thetombs where the bones of her ancestors lay.

But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir

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Miles, Sir Gervase, and the rest, had lost some-thing of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi hadwaved his hand that night in the Asian moun-tains. Somehow the fact that only three or fourhundred years ago these skeletons had beenmen with their way to make in the world likeany modern upstart, and that they had madeit by acquiring houses and offices, garters andribbands, as any other upstart does, while po-ets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breed-ing had preferred the quietude of the country,for which choice they paid the penalty by ex-treme poverty, and now hawked broadsheetsin the Strand, or herded sheep in the fields,filled her with remorse. She thought of theEgyptian pyramids and what bones lie beneaththem as she stood in the crypt; and the vast,empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmaraseemed, for the moment, a finer dwelling-place

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than this many-roomed mansion in which nobed lacked its quilt and no silver dish its silvercover.

‘I am growing up,’ she thought, taking hertaper. ‘I am losing my illusions, perhaps toacquire new ones,’ and she paced down thelong gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagree-able process, and a troublesome. But it wasinteresting, amazingly, she thought, stretchingher legs out to her log fire (for no sailor waspresent), and she reviewed, as if it were an av-enue of great edifices, the progress of her ownself along her own past.

How she had loved sound when she wasa boy, and thought the volley of tumultuoussyllables from the lips the finest of all po-etry. Then–it was the effect of Sasha and herdisillusionment perhaps–into this high frenzy

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was let fall some black drop, which turnedher rhapsody into sluggishness. Slowly therehad opened within her something intricate andmany-chambered, which one must take a torchto explore, in prose not verse; and she remem-bered how passionately she had studied thatdoctor at Norwich, Browne, whose book wasat her hand there. She had formed here in soli-tude after her affair with Greene, or tried toform, for Heaven knows these growths are age-long in coming, a spirit capable of resistance.‘I will write,’ she had said, ‘what I enjoy writ-ing’; and so had scratched out twenty-six vol-umes. Yet still, for all her travels and adven-tures and profound thinkings and turnings thisway and that, she was only in process of fabri-cation. What the future might bring, Heavenonly knew. Change was incessant, and changeperhaps would never cease. High battlements

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of thought, habits that had seemed durable asstone, went down like shadows at the touch ofanother mind and left a naked sky and freshstars twinkling in it. Here she went to the win-dow, and in spite of the cold could not help un-latching it. She leant out into the damp nightair. She heard a fox bark in the woods, andthe clutter of a pheasant trailing through thebranches. She heard the snow slither and flopfrom the roof to the ground. ‘By my life,’ sheexclaimed, ‘this is a thousand times better thanTurkey. Rustum,’ she cried, as if she were ar-guing with the gipsy (and in this new powerof bearing an argument in mind and continu-ing it with someone who was not there to con-tradict she showed again the development ofher soul), ‘you were wrong. This is better thanTurkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco–of what odds andends are we compounded,’ she said (thinking

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of Queen Mary’s prayer-book). ‘What a phan-tasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place ofdissemblables! At one moment we deplore ourbirth and state and aspire to an ascetic exal-tation; the next we are overcome by the smellof some old garden path and weep to hear thethrushes sing.’ And so bewildered as usual bythe multitude of things which call for explana-tion and imprint their message without leavingany hint as to their meaning, she threw her che-root out of the window and went to bed.

Next morning, in pursuance of thesethoughts, she had out her pen and paper. andstarted afresh upon ‘The Oak Tree’, for to haveink and paper in plenty when one has madedo with berries and margins is a delight notto be conceived. Thus she was now strikingout a phrase in the depths of despair, now in

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the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when ashadow darkened the page. She hastily hid hermanuscript.

As her window gave on to the most centralof the courts, as she had given orders that shewould see no one, as she knew no one andwas herself legally unknown, she was first sur-prised at the shadow, then indignant at it, then(when she looked up and saw what caused it)overcome with merriment. For it was a famil-iar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadowof no less a personage than the ArchduchessHarriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She wasloping across the court in her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of herhead was changed. This then was the womanwho had chased her from England! This was

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the eyrie of that obscene vulture–this the fa-tal fowl herself! At the thought that she hadfled all the way to Turkey to avoid her seduc-tions (now become excessively flat), Orlandolaughed aloud. There was something inex-pressibly comic in the sight. She resembled, asOrlando had thought before, nothing so muchas a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes,the lank cheeks, the high headdress of that ani-mal. She stopped now, much as a hare sits erectin the corn when thinking itself unobserved,and stared at Orlando, who stared back at herfrom the window. After they had stared likethis for a certain time, there was nothing forit but to ask her in, and soon the two ladieswere exchanging compliments while the Arch-duchess struck the snow from her mantle.

‘A plague on women,’ said Orlando to her-

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self, going to the cupboard to fetch a glass ofwine, ‘they never leave one a moment’s peace.A more ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying setof people don’t exist. It was to escape thisMaypole that I left England, and now’–hereshe turned to present the Archduchess with thesalver, and behold–in her place stood a tall gen-tleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in thefender. She was alone with a man.

Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness ofher sex, which she had completely forgotten,and of his, which was now remote enough tobe equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized withfaintness.

‘La!’ she cried, putting her hand to her side,‘how you frighten me!’

‘Gentle creature,’ cried the Archduchess,falling on one knee and at the same time press-

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ing a cordial to Orlando’s lips, ‘forgive me forthe deceit I have practised on you!’

Orlando sipped the wine and the Archdukeknelt and kissed her hand.

In short, they acted the parts of man andwoman for ten minutes with great vigour andthen fell into natural discourse. The Arch-duchess (but she must in future be known asthe Archduke) told his story–that he was a manand always had been one; that he had seena portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly inlove with him; that to compass his ends, he haddressed as a woman and lodged at the Baker’sshop; that he was desolated when he fled toTurkey; that he had heard of her change andhastened to offer his services (here he teed andheed intolerably). For to him, said the Arch-duke Harry, she was and would ever be the

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Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex. Thethree p’s would have been more persuasive ifthey had not been interspersed with tee-heesand haw-haws of the strangest kind. ‘If thisis love,’ said Orlando to herself, looking at theArchduke on the other side of the fender, andnow from the woman’s point of view, ‘there issomething highly ridiculous about it.’

Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harrymade the most passionate declaration of hissuit. He told her that he had something liketwenty million ducats in a strong box at hiscastle. He had more acres than any noblemanin England. The shooting was excellent: hecould promise her a mixed bag of ptarmiganand grouse such as no English moor, or Scotcheither, could rival. True, the pheasants had suf-fered from the gape in his absence, and the

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does had slipped their young, but that couldbe put right, and would be with her help whenthey lived in Roumania together.

As he spoke, enormous tears formed in hisrather prominent eyes and ran down the sandytracts of his long and lanky cheeks.

That men cry as frequently and as unreason-ably as women, Orlando knew from her ownexperience as a man; but she was beginning tobe aware that women should be shocked whenmen display emotion in their presence, and so,shocked she was.

The Archduke apologized. He commandedhimself sufficiently to say that he would leaveher now, but would return on the followingday for his answer.

That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednes-day; he came on Thursday; he came on Fri-

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day; and he came on Saturday. It is true thateach visit began, continued, or concluded witha declaration of love, but in between therewas much room for silence. They sat on ei-ther side of the fireplace and sometimes theArchduke knocked over the fire-irons and Or-lando picked them up again. Then the Arch-duke would bethink him how he had shot anelk in Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was ita very big elk, and the Archduke would saythat it was not as big as the reindeer whichhe shot in Norway; and Orlando would ask,had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archdukewould say he had shot an albatross, and Or-lando would say (half hiding her yawn) was analbatross as big as an elephant, and the Arch-duke would say–something very sensible, nodoubt, but Orlando heard it not, for she waslooking at her writing-table, out of the window,

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at the door. Upon which the Archduke wouldsay, ‘I adore you’, at the very same momentthat Orlando said ‘Look, it’s beginning to rain’,at which they were both much embarrassed,and blushed scarlet, and could neither of themthink what to say next. Indeed, Orlando wasat her wit’s end what to talk about and had shenot bethought her of a game called Fly Loo, atwhich great sums of money can be lost withvery little expense of spirit, she would havehad to marry him, she supposed; for how elseto get rid of him she knew not. By this device,however, and it was a simple one, needing onlythree lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies,the embarrassment of conversation was over-come and the necessity of marriage avoided.For now, the Archduke would bet her five hun-dred pounds to a tester that a fly would settleon this lump and not on that. Thus, they would

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have occupation for a whole morning watch-ing the flies (who were naturally sluggish atthis season and often spent an hour or so cir-cling round the ceiling) until at length somefine bluebottle made his choice and the matchwas won. Many hundreds of pounds changedhands between them at this game, which theArchduke, who was a born gambler, swore wasevery bit as good as horse racing, and vowedhe could play at for ever. But Orlando soon be-gan to weary.

What’s the good of being a fine youngwoman in the prime of life’, she asked, ‘if I haveto pass all my mornings watching blue-bottleswith an Archduke?’

She began to detest the sight of sugar; fliesmade her dizzy. Some way out of the diffi-culty there must be, she supposed, but she was

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still awkward in the arts of her sex, and as shecould no longer knock a man over the head orrun him through the body with a rapier, shecould think of no better method than this. Shecaught a blue-bottle, gently pressed the life outof it (it was half dead already; or her kindnessfor the dumb creatures would not have permit-ted it) and secured it by a drop of gum ara-bic to a lump of sugar. While the Archdukewas gazing at the ceiling, she deftly substitutedthis lump for the one she had laid her moneyon, and crying ‘Loo Loo!’ declared that shehad won her bet. Her reckoning was that theArchduke, with all his knowledge of sport andhorseracing, would detect the fraud and, as tocheat at Loo is the most heinous of crimes, andmen have been banished from the society ofmankind to that of apes in the tropics for everbecause of it, she calculated that he would be

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manly enough to refuse to have anything fur-ther to do with her. But she misjudged the sim-plicity of the amiable nobleman. He was nonice judge of flies. A dead fly looked to himmuch the same as a living one. She played thetrick twenty times on him and he paid her over17,250 pounds (which is about 40,885 pounds6 shillings and 8 pence of our own money) be-fore Orlando cheated so grossly that even hecould be deceived no longer. When he realizedthe truth at last, a painful scene ensued. TheArchduke rose to his full height. He colouredscarlet. Tears rolled down his cheeks one byone. That she had won a fortune from him wasnothing–she was welcome to it; that she haddeceived him was something–it hurt him tothink her capable of it; but that she had cheatedat Loo was everything. To love a woman whocheated at play was, he said, impossible. Here

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he broke down completely. Happily, he said,recovering slightly, there were no witnesses.She was, after all, only a woman, he said. Inshort, he was preparing in the chivalry of hisheart to forgive her and had bent to ask her par-don for the violence of his language, when shecut the matter short, as he stooped his proudhead, by dropping a small toad between hisskin and his shirt.

In justice to her, it must be said that shewould infinitely have preferred a rapier. Toadsare clammy things to conceal about one’s per-son a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbid-den; one must have recourse to toads. More-over toads and laughter between them some-times do what cold steel cannot. She laughed.The Archduke blushed. She laughed. TheArchduke cursed. She laughed. The Archduke

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slammed the door.‘Heaven be praised!’ cried Orlando still

laughing. She heard the sound of chariotwheels driven at a furious pace down thecourtyard. She heard them rattle along theroad. Fainter and fainter the sound became.Now it faded away altogether.

‘I am alone,’ said Orlando, aloud since therewas no one to hear.

That silence is more profound after noise stillwants the confirmation of science. But thatloneliness is more apparent directly after onehas been made love to, many women wouldtake their oath. As the sound of the Arch-duke’s chariot wheels died away, Orlando feltdrawing further from her and further from heran Archduke (she did not mind that), a for-tune (she did not mind that), a title (she did

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not mind that), the safety and circumstance ofmarried life (she did not mind that), but lifeshe heard going from her, and a lover. ‘Lifeand a lover,’ she murmured; and going to herwriting-table she dipped her pen in the ink andwrote:

‘Life and a lover’–a line which did not scanand made no sense with what went before–something about the proper way of dippingsheep to avoid the scab. Reading it over sheblushed and repeated,

‘Life and a lover.’ Then laying her pen asideshe went into her bedroom, stood in front ofher mirror, and arranged her pearls about herneck. Then since pearls do not show to ad-vantage against a morning gown of spriggedcotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta;thence to one of peach bloom; thence to a wine-

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coloured brocade. Perhaps a dash of powderwas needed, and if her hair were disposed–so–about her brow, it might become her. Thenshe slipped her feet into pointed slippers, anddrew an emerald ring upon her finger. ‘Now,’she said when all was ready and lit the sil-ver sconces on either side of the mirror. Whatwoman would not have kindled to see whatOrlando saw then burning in the snow–for allabout the looking-glass were snowy lawns, andshe was like a fire, a burning bush, and the can-dle flames about her head were silver leaves;or again, the glass was green water, and she amermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave,singing so that oarsmen leant from their boatsand fell down, down to embrace her; so dark,so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so aston-ishingly seductive that it was a thousand pitiesthat there was no one there to put it in plain

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English, and say outright, ‘Damn it, Madam,you are loveliness incarnate,’ which was thetruth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit ofher person) knew it, for she smiled the involun-tary smile which women smile when their ownbeauty, which seems not their own, forms like adrop falling or a fountain rising and confrontsthem all of a sudden in the glass–this smile shesmiled and then she listened for a moment andheard only the leaves blowing and the spar-rows twittering, and then she sighed, ‘Life, alover,’ and then she turned on her heel with ex-traordinary rapidity; whipped her pearls fromher neck, stripped the satins from her back,stood erect in the neat black silk knickerbock-ers of an ordinary nobleman, and rang the bell.When the servant came, she told him to ordera coach and six to be in readiness instantly. Shewas summoned by urgent affairs to London.

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Within an hour of the Archduke’s departure,off she drove.

And as she drove, we may seize the op-portunity, since the landscape was of a sim-ple English kind which needs no description,to draw the reader’s attention more particu-larly than we could at the moment to one ortwo remarks which have slipped in here andthere in the course of the narrative. For exam-ple, it may have been observed that Orlandohid her manuscripts when interrupted. Next,that she looked long and intently in the glass;and now, as she drove to London, one mightnotice her starting and suppressing a cry whenthe horses galloped faster than she liked. Hermodesty as to her writing, her vanity as to herperson, her fears for her safety all seems to hintthat what was said a short time ago about there

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being no change in Orlando the man and Or-lando the woman, was ceasing to be altogethertrue. She was becoming a little more modest,as women are, of her brains, and a little morevain, as women are, of her person. Certainsusceptibilities were asserting themselves, andothers were diminishing. The change of clotheshad, some philosophers will say, much to dowith it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have,they say, more important offices than merelyto keep us warm. They change our view ofthe world and the world’s view of us. For ex-ample, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando’sskirt, he had an awning stretched for her im-mediately, pressed her to take another slice ofbeef, and invited her to go ashore with him inthe long-boat. These compliments would cer-tainly not have been paid her had her skirts,instead of flowing, been cut tight to her legs

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in the fashion of breeches. And when weare paid compliments, it behoves us to makesome return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied;she flattered the good man’s humours as shewould not have done had his neat breechesbeen a woman’s skirts, and his braided coat awoman’s satin bodice. Thus, there is much tosupport the view that it is clothes that wear usand not we them; we may make them take themould of arm or breast, but they mould ourhearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.So, having now worn skirts for a considerabletime, a certain change was visible in Orlando,which is to be found if the reader will look at @above, even in her face. If we compare the pic-ture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlandoas a woman we shall see that though both areundoubtedly one and the same person, thereare certain changes. The man has his hand free

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to seize his sword, the woman must use hers tokeep the satins from slipping from her shoul-ders. The man looks the world full in the face,as if it were made for his uses and fashioned tohis liking. The woman takes a sidelong glanceat it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Hadthey both worn the same clothes, it is possiblethat their outlook might have been the same.

That is the view of some philosophers andwise ones, but on the whole, we incline to an-other. The difference between the sexes is, hap-pily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but asymbol of something hid deep beneath. It wasa change in Orlando herself that dictated herchoice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’ssex. And perhaps in this she was only express-ing rather more openly than usual–opennessindeed was the soul of her nature–something

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that happens to most people without beingthus plainly expressed. For here again, wecome to a dilemma. Different though the sexesare, they intermix. In every human being a vac-illation from one sex to the other takes place,and often it is only the clothes that keep themale or female likeness, while underneath thesex is the very opposite of what it is above. Ofthe complications and confusions which thusresult everyone has had experience; but herewe leave the general question and note onlythe odd effect it had in the particular case ofOrlando herself.

For it was this mixture in her of man andwoman, one being uppermost and then theother, that often gave her conduct an unex-pected turn. The curious of her own sex wouldargue, for example, if Orlando was a woman,

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how did she never take more than ten min-utes to dress? And were not her clothes chosenrather at random, and sometimes worn rathershabby? And then they would say, still, she hasnone of the formality of a man, or a man’s loveof power. She is excessively tender-hearted.She could not endure to see a donkey beatenor a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, shedetested household matters, was up at dawnand out among the fields in summer before thesun had risen. No farmer knew more aboutthe crops than she did. She could drink withthe best and liked games of hazard. She rodewell and drove six horses at a gallop over Lon-don Bridge. Yet again, though bold and ac-tive as a man, it was remarked that the sight ofanother in danger brought on the most wom-anly palpitations. She would burst into tearson slight provocation. She was unversed in ge-

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ography, found mathematics intolerable, andheld some caprices which are more commonamong women than men, as for instance thatto travel south is to travel downhill. Whether,then, Orlando was most man or woman, it isdifficult to say and cannot now be decided.For her coach was now rattling on the cob-bles. She had reached her home in the city. Thesteps were being let down; the iron gates werebeing opened. She was entering her father’shouse at Blackfriars, which though fashion wasfast deserting that end of the town, was stilla pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens run-ning down to the river, and a pleasant grove ofnut trees to walk in.

Here she took up her lodging and beganinstantly to look about her for what she hadcome in search of–that is to say, life and a lover.

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About the first there might be some doubt; thesecond she found without the least difficultytwo days after her arrival. It was a Tuesdaythat she came to town. On Thursday she wentfor a walk in the Mall, as was then the habitof persons of quality. She had not made morethan a turn or two of the avenue before shewas observed by a little knot of vulgar peoplewho go there to spy upon their betters. As shecame past them, a common woman carryinga child at her breast stepped forward, peeredfamiliarly into Orlando’s face, and cried out,‘Lawk upon us, if it ain’t the Lady Orlando!’Her companions came crowding round, andOrlando found herself in a moment the centreof a mob of staring citizens and tradesmen’swives, all eager to gaze upon the heroine ofthe celebrated lawsuit. Such was the interestthat the case excited in the minds of the com-

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mon people. She might, indeed, have foundherself gravely discommoded by the pressureof the crowd–she had forgotten that ladies arenot supposed to walk in public places alone–had not a tall gentleman at once stepped for-ward and offered her the protection of his arm.It was the Archduke. She was overcome withdistress and yet with some amusement at thesight. Not only had this magnanimous noble-man forgiven her, but in order to show that hetook her levity with the toad in good part, hehad procured a jewel made in the shape of thatreptile which he pressed upon her with a repe-tition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.

What with the crowd, what with the Duke,what with the jewel, she drove home in thevilest temper imaginable. Was it impossi-ble then to go for a walk without being half-

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suffocated, presented with a toad set in emer-alds, and asked in marriage by an Archduke?She took a kinder view of the case next daywhen she found on her breakfast table half adozen billets from some of the greatest ladiesin the land–Lady Suffolk, Lady Salisbury, LadyChesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others whoreminded her in the politest manner of old al-liances between their families and her own,and desired the honour of her acquaintance.Next day, which was a Saturday, many of thesegreat ladies waited on her in person. On Tues-day, about noon, their footmen brought cardsof invitation to various routs, dinners, and as-semblies in the near future; so that Orlandowas launched without delay, and with somesplash and foam at that, upon the waters ofLondon society.

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To give a truthful account of London soci-ety at that or indeed at any other time, is be-yond the powers of the biographer or the his-torian. Only those who have little need of thetruth, and no respect for it–the poets and thenovelists–can be trusted to do it, for this isone of the cases where the truth does not exist.Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma–amirage. To make our meaning plain–Orlandocould come home from one of these routs atthree or four in the morning with cheeks likea Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She woulduntie a lace, pace the room a score of times, un-tie another lace, stop, and pace the room again.Often the sun would be blazing over South-wark chimneys before she could persuade her-self to get into bed, and there she would lie,pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing foran hour or longer before she slept at last. And

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what was all this stir about? Society. Andwhat had society said or done to throw a rea-sonable lady into such an excitement? In plainlanguage, nothing. Rack her memory as shewould, next day Orlando could never remem-ber a single word to magnify into the namesomething. Lord O. had been gallant. LordA. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. MrM. amusing. But when she tried to recollectin what their gallantry, politeness, charm, orwit had consisted, she was bound to supposeher memory at fault, for she could not namea thing. It was the same always. Nothing re-mained over the next day, yet the excitement ofthe moment was intense. Thus we are forcedto conclude that society is one of those brewssuch as skilled housekeepers serve hot aboutChristmas time, whose flavour depends uponthe proper mixing and stirring of a dozen dif-

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ferent ingredients. Take one out, and it is initself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A.,Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is noth-ing. Stir them all together and they combine togive off the most intoxicating of flavours, themost seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication,this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis.At one and the same time, therefore, societyis everything and society is nothing. Societyis the most powerful concoction in the worldand society has no existence whatsoever. Suchmonsters the poets and the novelists alone candeal with; with such something-nothings theirworks are stuffed out to prodigious size; andto them with the best will in the world we arecontent to leave it.

Following the example of our predecessors,therefore, we will only say that society in the

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reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled bril-liance. To have the entry there was the aimof every well-bred person. The graces weresupreme. Fathers instructed their sons, moth-ers their daughters. No education was com-plete for either sex which did not include thescience of deportment, the art of bowing andcurtseying, the management of the sword andthe fan, the care of the teeth, the conduct of theleg, the flexibility of the knee, the proper meth-ods of entering and leaving the room, with athousand etceteras, such as will immediatelysuggest themselves to anybody who has him-self been in society. Since Orlando had wonthe praise of Queen Elizabeth for the way shehanded a bowl of rose water as a boy, it mustbe supposed that she was sufficiently expertto pass muster. Yet it is true that there wasan absentmindedness about her which some-

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times made her clumsy; she was apt to thinkof poetry when she should have been thinkingof taffeta; her walk was a little too much of astride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures,being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea onoccasion.

Whether this slight disability was enough tocounterbalance the splendour of her bearing,or whether she inherited a drop too much ofthat black humour which ran in the veins ofall her race, certain it is that she had not beenin the world more than a score of times be-fore she might have been heard to ask herself,had there been anybody but her spaniel Pip-pin to hear her, ‘What the devil is the mat-ter with me?’ The occasion was Tuesday, the16th of June 1712; she had just returned froma great ball at Arlington House; the dawn was

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in the sky, and she was pulling off her stock-ings. ‘I don’t care if I never meet another soulas long as I live,’ cried Orlando, bursting intotears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, whichis, after all, of some importance in its way, es-caped her. ‘Is this’, she asked–but there wasnone to answer, ‘is this’, she finished her sen-tence all the same, ‘what people call life?’ Thespaniel raised her forepaw in token of sym-pathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with hertongue. Orlando stroked the spaniel with herhand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with herlips. In short, there was the truest sympathybetween them that can be between a dog andits mistress, and yet it cannot be denied thatthe dumbness of animals is a great impedi-ment to the refinements of intercourse. Theywag their tails; they bow the front part of thebody and elevate the hind; they roll, they jump,

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they paw, they whine, they bark, they slob-ber, they have all sorts of ceremonies and ar-tifices of their own, but the whole thing is ofno avail, since speak they cannot. Such washer quarrel, she thought, setting the dog gen-tly on to the floor, with the great people at Ar-lington House. They, too, wag their tails, bow,roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they can-not. ‘All these months that I’ve been out inthe world’, said Orlando, pitching one stockingacross the room, ‘I’ve heard nothing but whatPippin might have said. I’m cold. I’m happy.I’m hungry. I’ve caught a mouse. I’ve burieda bone. Please kiss my nose.’ And it was notenough.

How, in so short a time, she had passed fromintoxication to disgust we will only seek to ex-plain by supposing that this mysterious com-

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position which we call society, is nothing abso-lutely good or bad in itself, but has a spirit init, volatile but potent, which either makes youdrunk when you think it, as Orlando thoughtit, delightful, or gives you a headache whenyou think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive.That the faculty of speech has much to do withit either way, we take leave to doubt. Often adumb hour is the most ravishing of all; brilliantwit can be tedious beyond description. But tothe poets we leave it, and so on with our story.

Orlando threw the second stocking after thefirst and went to bed dismally enough, de-termined that she would forswear society forever. But again as it turned out, she was toohasty in coming to her conclusions. For thevery next morning she woke to find, among theusual cards of invitation upon her table, one

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from a certain great Lady, the Countess of R.Having determined overnight that she wouldnever go into society again, we can only ex-plain Orlando’s behaviour–she sent a messen-ger hot-foot to R– House to say that she wouldattend her Ladyship with all the pleasure inthe world–by the fact that she was still suf-fering from the effect of three honeyed wordsdropped into her ear on the deck of the “En-amoured Lady” by Captain Nicholas BenedictBartolus as they sailed down the Thames. Ad-dison, Dryden, Pope, he had said, pointing tothe Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Popehad chimed in her head like an incantationever since. Who can credit such folly? but soit was. All her experience with Nick Greenehad taught her nothing. Such names still ex-ercised over her the most powerful fascination.Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and

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as Orlando, we have said, had no belief inthe usual divinities she bestowed her credulityupon great men–yet with a distinction. Admi-rals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all.But the very thought of a great writer stirredher to such a pitch of belief that she almost be-lieved him to be invisible. Her instinct was asound one. One can only believe entirely, per-haps, in what one cannot see. The little glimpseshe had of these great men from the deck of theship was of the nature of a vision. That the cupwas china, or the gazette paper, she doubted.When Lord O. said one day that he had dinedwith Dryden the night before, she flatly disbe-lieved him. Now, the Lady R.‘s reception roomhad the reputation of being the antechamber tothe presence room of genius; it was the placewhere men and women met to swing censersand chant hymns to the bust of genius in a

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niche in the wall. Sometimes the God himselfvouchsafed his presence for a moment. Intel-lect alone admitted the suppliant, and nothing(so the report ran) was said inside that was notwitty.

It was thus with great trepidation that Or-lando entered the room. She found a com-pany already assembled in a semicircle roundthe fire. Lady R., an oldish lady, of dark com-plexion, with a black lace mantilla on her head,was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre.Thus being somewhat deaf, she could controlthe conversation on both sides of her. On bothsides of her sat men and women of the highestdistinction. Every man, it was said, had been aPrime Minister and every woman, it was whis-pered, had been the mistress of a king. Certainit is that all were brilliant, and all were famous.

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Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence insilence...After three hours, she curtseyed pro-foundly and left.

But what, the reader may ask with someexasperation, happened in between. In threehours, such a company must have said thewittiest, the profoundest, the most interestingthings in the world. So it would seem indeed.But the fact appears to be that they said noth-ing. It is a curious characteristic which theyshare with all the most brilliant societies thatthe world has seen. Old Madame du Deffandand her friends talked for fifty years withoutstopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhapsthree witty sayings. So that we are at libertyto suppose either that nothing was said, or thatnothing witty was said, or that the fraction ofthree witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand

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two hundred and fifty nights, which does notleave a liberal allowance of wit for any one ofthem.

The truth would seem to be–if we dare usesuch a word in such a connection–that all thesegroups of people lie under an enchantment.The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witchwho lays her guests under a spell. In this housethey think themselves happy; in that witty; ina third profound. It is all an illusion (whichis nothing against it, for illusions are the mostvaluable and necessary of all things, and shewho can create one is among the world’s great-est benefactors), but as it is notorious that illu-sions are shattered by conflict with reality, sono real happiness, no real wit, no real profun-dity are tolerated where the illusion prevails.This serves to explain why Madame du Def-

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fand said no more than three witty things inthe course of fifty years. Had she said more,her circle would have been destroyed. Thewitticism, as it left her lips, bowled over thecurrent conversation as a cannon ball lays lowthe violets and the daisies. When she madeher famous ‘mot de Saint Denis’ the very grasswas singed. Disillusionment and desolationfollowed. Not a word was uttered. ‘Spareus another such, for Heaven’s sake, Madame!’her friends cried with one accord. And sheobeyed. For almost seventeen years she saidnothing memorable and all went well. Thebeautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbrokenon her circle as it lay unbroken on the circleof Lady R. The guests thought that they werehappy, thought that they were witty, thoughtthat they were profound, and, as they thoughtthis, other people thought it still more strongly;

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and so it got about that nothing was more de-lightful than one of Lady R.‘s assemblies; ev-eryone envied those who were admitted; thosewho were admitted envied themselves becauseother people envied them; and so there seemedno end to it–except that which we have now torelate.

For about the third time Orlando went therea certain incident occurred. She was still un-der the illusion that she was listening to themost brilliant epigrams in the world, though,as a matter of fact, old General C. was onlysaying, at some length, how the gout had lefthis left leg and gone to his right, while Mr L.interrupted when any proper name was men-tioned, ‘R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as Iknow myself. S.? My dearest friend. T.? Stayedwith him a fortnight in Yorkshire’–which, such

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is the force of illusion, sounded like the witti-est repartee, the most searching comment uponhuman life, and kept the company in a roar;when the door opened and a little gentlemanentered whose name Orlando did not catch.Soon a curiously disagreeable sensation cameover her. To judge from their faces, the rest be-gan to feel it as well. One gentleman said therewas a draught. The Marchioness of C. feareda cat must be under the sofa. It was as if theireyes were being slowly opened after a pleas-ant dream and nothing met them but a cheapwash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It wasas if the fumes of some delicious wine wereslowly leaving them. Still the General talkedand still Mr L. remembered. But it becamemore and more apparent how red the General’sneck was, how bald Mr L.‘s head was. As forwhat they said–nothing more tedious and triv-

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ial could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted andthose who had fans yawned behind them. Atlast Lady R. rapped with hers upon the arm ofher great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talk-ing.

Then the little gentleman said, He said next,He said finally (These sayings are too wellknown to require repetition, and besides, theyare all to be found in his published works.),

Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, truewisdom, true profundity. The company wasthrown into complete dismay. One such sayingwas bad enough; but three, one after another,on the same evening! No society could surviveit.

‘Mr Pope,’ said old Lady R. in a voice trem-bling with sarcastic fury, ‘you are pleased to bewitty.’ Mr Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke

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a word. They sat in dead silence some twentyminutes. Then, one by one, they rose and slunkfrom the room. That they would ever comeback after such an experience was doubtful.Link-boys could be heard calling their coachesall down South Audley Street. Doors wereslammed and carriages drove off. Orlandofound herself near Mr Pope on the staircase.His lean and misshapen frame was shaken bya variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, tri-umph, wit, and terror (he was shaking like aleaf) shot from his eyes. He looked like somesquat reptile set with a burning topaz in itsforehead. At the same time, the strangest tem-pest of emotion seized now upon the lucklessOrlando. A disillusionment so complete as thatinflicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rock-ing from side to side. Everything appears tentimes more bare and stark than before. It is

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a moment fraught with the highest danger forthe human spirit. Women turn nuns and menpriests in such moments. In such moments,rich men sign away their wealth; and happymen cut their throats with carving knives. Or-lando would have done all willingly, but therewas a rasher thing still for her to do, and thisshe did. She invited Mr Pope to come homewith her.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den un-armed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a row-ing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top ofSt Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alonewith a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one.While one drowns us the other gnaws us. Ifwe survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves.A man who can destroy illusions is both beastand flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmo-

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sphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender airand the plant dies, the colour fades. The earthwe walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl wetread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By thetruth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis wak-ing that kills us. He who robs us of our dreamsrobs us of our life–(and so on for six pages ifyou will, but the style is tedious and may wellbe dropped).

On this showing, however, Orlando shouldhave been a heap of cinders by the time thechariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars.That she was still flesh and blood, though cer-tainly exhausted, is entirely due to a fact towhich we drew attention earlier in the narra-tive. The less we see the more we believe.Now the streets that lie between Mayfair andBlackfriars were at that time very imperfectly

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lit. True, the lighting was a great improvementupon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the be-nighted traveller had to trust to the stars or thered flame of some night watchman to save himfrom the gravel pits at Park Lane or the oakwoods where swine rootled in the TottenhamCourt Road. But even so it wanted much ofour modern efficiency. Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards orso, but between lay a considerable stretch ofpitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes Orlandoand Mr Pope would be in blackness; and thenfor about half a minute again in the light. Avery strange state of mind was thus bred in Or-lando. As the light faded, she began to feel stealover her the most delicious balm. ‘This is in-deed a very great honour for a young womanto be driving with Mr Pope,’ she began to think,looking at the outline of his nose. ‘I am the

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most blessed of my sex. Half an inch fromme–indeed, I feel the knot of his knee ribbonspressing against my thigh–is the greatest witin Her Majesty’s dominions. Future ages willthink of us with curiosity and envy me withfury.’ Here came the lamp-post again. ‘Whata foolish wretch I am!’ she thought. ‘Thereis no such thing as fame and glory. Ages tocome will never cast a thought on me or on MrPope either. What’s an “age”, indeed? Whatare “we”?’ and their progress through Berke-ley Square seemed the groping of two blindants, momentarily thrown together without in-terest or concern in common, across a black-ened desert. She shivered. But here again wasdarkness. Her illusion revived. ‘How noblehis brow is,’ she thought (mistaking a hump ona cushion for Mr Pope’s forehead in the dark-ness). ‘What a weight of genius lives in it!

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What wit, wisdom, and truth–what a wealth ofall those jewels, indeed, for which people areready to barter their lives! Yours is the onlylight that burns for ever. But for you the hu-man pilgrimage would be performed in utterdarkness’; (here the coach gave a great lurchas it fell into a rut in Park Lane) ‘without ge-nius we should be upset and undone. Most au-gust, most lucid of beams,’–thus she was apos-trophizing the hump on the cushion when theydrove beneath one of the street lamps in Berke-ley Square and she realized her mistake. MrPope had a forehead no bigger than anotherman’s. ‘Wretched man,’ she thought, ‘how youhave deceived me! I took that hump for yourforehead. When one sees you plain, how ig-noble, how despicable you are! Deformed andweakly, there is nothing to venerate in you,much to pity, most to despise.’

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Again they were in darkness and her angerbecame modified directly she could see noth-ing but the poet’s knees.

‘But it is I that am a wretch,’ she reflected,once they were in complete obscurity again,‘for base as you may be, am I not still baser?It is you who nourish and protect me, you whoscare the wild beast, frighten the savage, makeme clothes of the silkworm’s wool, and carpetsof the sheep’s. If I want to worship, have younot provided me with an image of yourself andset it in the sky? Are not evidences of your careeverywhere? How humble, how grateful, howdocile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be allmy joy to serve, honour, and obey you.’

Here they reached the big lamp-post at thecorner of what is now Piccadilly Circus. Thelight blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides

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some degraded creatures of her own sex, twowretched pigmies on a stark desert land. Bothwere naked, solitary, and defenceless. The onewas powerless to help the other. Each hadenough to do to look after itself. Looking MrPope full in the face, ‘It is equally vain’, shethought; ‘for you to think you can protect me,or for me to think I can worship you. The lightof truth beats upon us without shadow, and thelight of truth is damnably unbecoming to usboth.’

All this time, of course, they went on talkingagreeably, as people of birth and education use,about the Queen’s temper and the Prime Min-ister’s gout, while the coach went from lightto darkness down the Haymarket, along theStrand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length,her house in Blackfriars. For some time the

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dark spaces between the lamps had been be-coming brighter and the lamps themselves lessbright–that is to say, the sun was rising, andit was in the equable but confused light of asummer’s morning in which everything is seenbut nothing is seen distinctly that they alighted,Mr Pope handing Orlando from her carriageand Orlando curtseying Mr Pope to precedeher into her mansion with the most scrupulousattention to the rites of the Graces.

From the foregoing passage, however, itmust not be supposed that genius (but the dis-ease is now stamped out in the British Isles, thelate Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last per-son to suffer from it) is constantly alight, forthen we should see everything plain and per-haps should be scorched to death in the pro-cess. Rather it resembles the lighthouse in its

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working, which sends one ray and then nomore for a time; save that genius is much morecapricious in its manifestations and may flashsix or seven beams in quick succession (as MrPope did that night) and then lapse into dark-ness for a year or for ever. To steer by itsbeams is therefore impossible, and when thedark spell is on them men of genius are, it issaid, much like other people.

It was happy for Orlando, though at first dis-appointing, that this should be so, for she nowbegan to live much in the company of men ofgenius. Nor were they so different from therest of us as one might have supposed. Addi-son, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fondof tea. They liked arbours. They collected lit-tle bits of coloured glass. They adored grot-tos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise

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was delightful. They wore plum-coloured suitsone day and grey another. Mr Swift had a finemalacca cane. Mr Addison scented his hand-kerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered with his head. Apiece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor werethey without their jealousies. (We are jottingdown a few reflections that came to Orlandohiggledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyedwith herself for noticing such trifles, and kepta book in which to write down their memo-rable sayings, but the page remained empty.All the same, her spirits revived, and she tookto tearing up her cards of invitation to greatparties; kept her evenings free; began to lookforward to Mr Pope’s visit, to Mr Addison’s,to Mr Swift’s–and so on and so on. If thereader will here refer to the “Rape of the Lock”,to the “Spectator”, to “Gulliver’s Travels”, hewill understand precisely what these mysteri-

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ous words may mean. Indeed, biographers andcritics might save themselves all their labours ifreaders would only take this advice. For whenwe read:

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’sLaw, Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, Orstain her Honour, or her new Brocade, Forgether Pray’rs or miss a Masquerade, Or lose herHeart, or Necklace, at a Ball.

–we know as if we heard him how Mr Pope’stongue flickered like a lizard’s, how his eyesflashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved,how he lied, how he suffered. In short, everysecret of a writer’s soul, every experience of hislife; every quality of his mind is written largein his works; yet we require critics to explainthe one and biographers to expound the other.That time hangs heavy on people’s hands is the

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only explanation of the monstrous growth.So, now that we have read a page or two

of the “Rape of the Lock”, we know exactlywhy Orlando was so much amused and somuch frightened and so very bright-cheekedand bright-eyed that afternoon.

Mrs Nelly then knocked at the door to saythat Mr Addison waited on her Ladyship. Atthis, Mr Pope got up with a wry smile, madehis congee, and limped off. In came Mr Addi-son. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the fol-lowing passage from the “Spectator”:

‘I consider woman as a beautiful, romanticanimal, that may be adorned with furs andfeathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks.The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to makeher a tippet, the peacock, parrot and swan shallpay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be

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searched for shells, and the rocks for gems, andevery part of nature furnish out its share to-wards the embellishment of a creature that isthe most consummate work of it. All this, Ishall indulge them in, but as for the petticoatI have been speaking of, I neither can, nor willallow it.’

We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all,in the hollow, of our hands. Look once moreinto the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrin-kle in his stocking? Does not every ripple andcurve of his wit lie exposed before us, and hisbenignity and his timidity and his urbanity andthe fact that he would marry a Countess anddie very respectably in the end? All is clear.And when Mr Addison has said his say, there isa terrific rap at the door, and Mr Swift, who hadthese arbitrary ways with him, walks in unan-

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nounced. One moment, where is “Gulliver’sTravels”? Here it is! Let us read a passage fromthe voyage to the Houyhnhnms:

‘I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tran-quillity of Mind; I did not find the Treacheryor Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries ofa secret or open Enemy. I had no occasionof bribing, flattering or pimping, to procurethe Favour of any great Man or of his Min-ion. I wanted no Fence against Fraud or Op-pression; Here was neither Physician to destroymy Body, nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; NoInformer to watch my Words, and Actions, orforge Accusations against me for Hire: Herewere no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, Housebreakers, Attor-neys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians,Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers...’

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But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lestyou flay us all alive, and yourself too! Noth-ing can be plainer than that violent man. Heis so coarse and yet so clean; so brutal, yet sokind; scorns the whole world, yet talks babylanguage to a girl, and will die, can we doubtit? in a madhouse.

So Orlando poured out tea for them all; andsometimes, when the weather was fine, shecarried them down to the country with her,and feasted them royally in the Round Par-lour, which she had hung with their picturesall in a circle, so that Mr Pope could not saythat Mr Addison came before him, or the otherway about. They were very witty, too (buttheir wit is all in their books) and taught herthe most important part of style, which is thenatural run of the voice in speaking–a qual-

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ity which none that has not heard it can imi-tate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for itis born of the air, and breaks like a wave onthe furniture, and rolls and fades away, and isnever to be recaptured, least of all by those whoprick up their ears, half a century later, and try.They taught her this, merely by the cadence oftheir voices in speech; so that her style changedsomewhat, and she wrote some very pleasant,witty verses and characters in prose. And soshe lavished her wine on them and put bank-notes, which they took very kindly, beneaththeir plates at dinner, and accepted their ded-ications, and thought herself highly honouredby the exchange.

Thus time ran on, and Orlando could oftenbe heard saying to herself with an emphasiswhich might, perhaps, make the hearer a little

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suspicious, ‘Upon my soul, what a life this is!’(For she was still in search of that commodity.)But circumstances soon forced her to considerthe matter more narrowly.

One day she was pouring out tea for MrPope while, as anyone can tell from the versesquoted above, he sat very bright-eyed, obser-vant, and all crumpled up in a chair by her side.

‘Lord,’ she thought, as she raised the sugartongs, ‘how women in ages to come will envyme! And yet–’ she paused; for Mr Pope neededher attention. And yet–let us finish her thoughtfor her–when anybody says ‘How future ageswill envy me’, it is safe to say that they are ex-tremely uneasy at the present moment. Wasthis life quite so exciting, quite so flattering,quite so glorious as it sounds when the mem-oir writer has done his work upon it? For one

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thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea;for another, the intellect, divine as it is, andall-worshipful, has a habit of lodging in themost seedy of carcases, and often, alas, actsthe cannibal among the other faculties so thatoften, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart,the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance,Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely haveroom to breathe. Then the high opinion po-ets have of themselves; then the low one theyhave of others; then the enmities, injuries, en-vies, and repartees in which they are constantlyengaged; then the volubility with which theyimpart them; then the rapacity with which theydemand sympathy for them; all this, one maywhisper, lest the wits may overhear us, makespouring out tea a more precarious and, indeed,arduous occupation than is generally allowed.Added to which (we whisper again lest the

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women may overhear us), there is a little secretwhich men share among them; Lord Chester-field whispered it to his son with strict injunc-tions to secrecy, ‘Women are but children of alarger growth...A man of sense only trifles withthem, plays with them, humours and flattersthem’, which, since children always hear whatthey are not meant to, and sometimes, even,grow up, may have somehow leaked out, sothat the whole ceremony of pouring out teais a curious one. A woman knows very wellthat, though a wit sends her his poems, praisesher judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinksher tea, this by no means signifies that he re-spects her opinions, admires her understand-ing, or will refuse, though the rapier is deniedhim, to run her through the body with his pen.All this, we say, whisper it as low as we can,may have leaked out by now; so that even with

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the cream jug suspended and the sugar tongsdistended the ladies may fidget a little, lookout of the window a little, yawn a little, andso let the sugar fall with a great plop–as Or-lando did now–into Mr Pope’s tea. Never wasany mortal so ready to suspect an insult or soquick to avenge one as Mr Pope. He turned toOrlando and presented her instantly with therough draught of a certain famous line in the‘Characters of Women’. Much polish was after-wards bestowed on it, but even in the original itwas striking enough. Orlando received it witha curtsey. Mr Pope left her with a bow. Or-lando, to cool her cheeks, for really she felt asif the little man had struck her, strolled in thenut grove at the bottom of the garden. Soonthe cool breezes did their work. To her amaze-ment she found that she was hugely relievedto find herself alone. She watched the merry

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boatloads rowing up the river. No doubt thesight put her in mind of one or two incidents inher past life. She sat herself down in profoundmeditation beneath a fine willow tree. Thereshe sat till the stars were in the sky. Then sherose, turned, and went into the house, whereshe sought her bedroom and locked the door.Now she opened a cupboard in which hungstill many of the clothes she had worn as ayoung man of fashion, and from among themshe chose a black velvet suit richly trimmedwith Venetian lace. It was a little out of fash-ion, indeed, but it fitted her to perfection anddressed in it she looked the very figure of a no-ble Lord. She took a turn or two before the mir-ror to make sure that her petticoats had not losther the freedom of her legs, and then let herselfsecretly out of doors.

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It was a fine night early in April. A myr-iad stars mingling with the light of a sicklemoon, which again was enforced by the streetlamps, made a light infinitely becoming to thehuman countenance and to the architecture ofMr Wren. Everything appeared in its tender-est form, yet, just as it seemed on the point ofdissolution, some drop of silver sharpened itto animation. Thus it was that talk should be,thought Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie);that society should be, that friendship shouldbe, that love should be. For, Heaven knowswhy, just as we have lost faith in human inter-course some random collocation of barns andtrees or a haystack and a waggon presents uswith so perfect a symbol of what is unattain-able that we begin the search again.

She entered Leicester Square as she made

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these observations. The buildings had an airyyet formal symmetry not theirs by day. Thecanopy of the sky seemed most dexterouslywashed in to fill up the outline of roof andchimney. A young woman who sat dejectedlywith one arm drooping by her side, the otherreposing in her lap, on a seat beneath a planetree in the middle of the square seemed thevery figure of grace, simplicity, and desolation.Orlando swept her hat off to her in the mannerof a gallant paying his addresses to a lady offashion in a public place. The young womanraised her head. It was of the most exquisiteshapeliness. The young woman raised hereyes. Orlando saw them to be of a lustre suchas is sometimes seen on teapots but rarely ina human face. Through this silver glaze theyoung woman looked up at him (for a man hewas to her) appealing, hoping, trembling, fear-

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ing. She rose; she accepted his arm. For–needwe stress the point?–she was of the tribe whichnightly burnishes their wares, and sets them inorder on the common counter to wait the high-est bidder. She led Orlando to the room in Ger-rard Street which was her lodging. To feel herhanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm,roused in Orlando all the feelings which be-come a man. She looked, she felt, she talkedlike one. Yet, having been so lately a womanherself, she suspected that the girl’s timidityand her hesitating answers and the very fum-bling with the key in the latch and the fold ofher cloak and the droop of her wrist were allput on to gratify her masculinity. Upstairs theywent, and the pains which the poor creaturehad been at to decorate her room and hide thefact that she had no other deceived Orlando nota moment. The deception roused her scorn;

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the truth roused her pity. One thing showingthrough the other bred the oddest assortmentof feeling, so that she did not know whetherto laugh or to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girlcalled herself, unbuttoned her gloves; carefullyconcealed the left-hand thumb, which wantedmending; then drew behind a screen, where,perhaps, she rouged her cheeks, arranged herclothes, fixed a new kerchief round her neck–all the time prattling as women do, to amuseher lover, though Orlando could have sworn,from the tone of her voice, that her thoughtswere elsewhere. When all was ready, out shecame, prepared–but here Orlando could standit no longer. In the strangest torment of anger,merriment, and pity she flung off all disguiseand admitted herself a woman.

At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laugh-

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ter as might have been heard across the way.

‘Well, my dear,’ she said, when she hadsomewhat recovered, ‘I’m by no means sorryto hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matteris’ (and it was remarkable how soon, on discov-ering that they were of the same sex, her man-ner changed and she dropped her plaintive, ap-pealing ways), ‘the plain Dunstable of the mat-ter is, that I’m not in the mood for the society ofthe other sex to-night. Indeed, I’m in the devilof a fix.’ Whereupon, drawing up the fire andstirring a bowl of punch, she told Orlando thewhole story of her life. Since it is Orlando’s lifethat engages us at present, we need not relatethe adventures of the other lady, but it is cer-tain that Orlando had never known the hoursspeed faster or more merrily, though MistressNell had not a particle of wit about her, and

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when the name of Mr Pope came up in talkasked innocently if he were connected with theperruque maker of that name in Jermyn Street.Yet, to Orlando, such is the charm of ease andthe seduction of beauty, this poor girl’s talk,larded though it was with the commonest ex-pressions of the street corners, tasted like wineafter the fine phrases she had been used to, andshe was forced to the conclusion that there wassomething in the sneer of Mr Pope, in the con-descension of Mr Addison, and in the secret ofLord Chesterfield which took away her relishfor the society of wits, deeply though she mustcontinue to respect their works.

These poor creatures, she ascertained, forNell brought Prue, and Prue Kitty, and KittyRose, had a society of their own of which theynow elected her a member. Each would tell

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the story of the adventures which had landedher in her present way of life. Several werethe natural daughters of earls and one was agood deal nearer than she should have been tothe King’s person. None was too wretched ortoo poor but to have some ring or handkerchiefin her pocket which stood her in lieu of pedi-gree. So they would draw round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it her business tofurnish generously, and many were the finetales they told and many the amusing obser-vations they made, for it cannot be denied thatwhen women get together–but hist–they are al-ways careful to see that the doors are shut andthat not a word of it gets into print. All they de-sire is–but hist again–is that not a man’s step onthe stair? All they desire, we were about to saywhen the gentleman took the very words out ofour mouths. Women have no desires, says this

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gentleman, coming into Nell’s parlour; only af-fectations. Without desires (she has served himand he is gone) their conversation cannot beof the slightest interest to anyone. ‘It is wellknown’, says Mr S. W., ‘that when they lack thestimulus of the other sex, women can find noth-ing to say to each other. When they are alone,they do not talk, they scratch.’ And since theycannot talk together and scratching cannot con-tinue without interruption and it is well known(Mr T. R. has proved it) ‘that women are inca-pable of any feeling of affection for their ownsex and hold each other in the greatest aver-sion’, what can we suppose that women dowhen they seek out each other’s society?

As that is not a question that can engage theattention of a sensible man, let us, who enjoythe immunity of all biographers and historians

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from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merelystate that Orlando professed great enjoymentin the society of her own sex, and leave it tothe gentlemen to prove, as they are very fondof doing, that this is impossible.

But to give an exact and particular accountof Orlando’s life at this time becomes more andmore out of the question. As we peer and gropein the ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyardsthat lay about Gerrard Street and Drury Laneat that time, we seem now to catch sight of herand then again to lose it. The task is made stillmore difficult by the fact that she found it con-venient at this time to change frequently fromone set of clothes to another. Thus she oftenoccurs in contemporary memoirs as ‘Lord’ So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bountyis ascribed to him, and it is he who is said to

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have written the poems that were really hers.She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustainingthe different parts, for her sex changed far morefrequently than those who have worn only oneset of clothing can conceive; nor can there beany doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest bythis device; the pleasures of life were increasedand its experiences multiplied. For the probityof breeches she exchanged the seductiveness ofpetticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexesequally.

So then one may sketch her spending hermorning in a China robe of ambiguous gen-der among her books; then receiving a clientor two (for she had many scores of suppli-ants) in the same garment; then she would takea turn in the garden and clip the nut trees–for which knee-breeches were convenient; then

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she would change into a flowered taffeta whichbest suited a drive to Richmond and a pro-posal of marriage from some great nobleman;and so back again to town, where she woulddon a snuff-coloured gown like a lawyer’s andvisit the courts to hear how her cases weredoing,–for her fortune was wasting hourly andthe suits seemed no nearer consummation thanthey had been a hundred years ago; and so,finally, when night came, she would more of-ten than not become a nobleman complete fromhead to toe and walk the streets in search of ad-venture.

Returning from some of these junketings–ofwhich there were many stories told at the time,as, that she fought a duel, served on one of theKing’s ships as a captain, was seen to dancenaked on a balcony, and fled with a certain lady

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to the Low Countries where the lady’s husbandfollowed them–but of the truth or otherwise ofthese stories, we express no opinion–returningfrom whatever her occupation may have been,she made a point sometimes of passing beneaththe windows of a coffee house, where she couldsee the wits without being seen, and thus couldfancy from their gestures what wise, witty, orspiteful things they were saying without hear-ing a word of them; which was perhaps anadvantage; and once she stood half an hourwatching three shadows on the blind drinkingtea together in a house in Bolt Court.

Never was any play so absorbing. Shewanted to cry out, Bravo! Bravo! For, to besure, what a fine drama it was–what a pagetorn from the thickest volume of human life!There was the little shadow with the pouting

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lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair,uneasy, petulant, officious; there was the bentfemale shadow, crooking a finger in the cupto feel how deep the tea was, for she wasblind; and there was the Roman-looking rollingshadow in the big armchair–he who twisted hisfingers so oddly and jerked his head from sideto side and swallowed down the tea in suchvast gulps. Dr Johnson, Mr Boswell, and MrsWilliams,–those were the shadows’ names. Soabsorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot tothink how other ages would have envied her,though it seems probable that on this occasionthey would. She was content to gaze and gaze.At length Mr Boswell rose. He saluted the oldwoman with tart asperity. But with what hu-mility did he not abase himself before the greatRoman shadow, who now rose to its full heightand rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled

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out the most magnificent phrases that ever lefthuman lips; so Orlando thought them, thoughshe never heard a word that any of the threeshadows said as they sat there drinking tea.

At length she came home one night after oneof these saunterings and mounted to her bed-room. She took off her laced coat and stoodthere in shirt and breeches looking out of thewindow. There was something stirring in theair which forbade her to go to bed. A whitehaze lay over the town, for it was a frostynight in midwinter and a magnificent vista layall round her. She could see St Paul’s, theTower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spiresand domes of the city churches, the smoothbulk of its banks, the opulent and ample curvesof its halls and meeting-places. On the northrose the smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead,

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and in the west the streets and squares of May-fair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon thisserene and orderly prospect the stars lookeddown, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloud-less sky. In the extreme clearness of the at-mosphere the line of every roof, the cowl ofevery chimney, was perceptible; even the cob-bles in the streets showed distinct one from an-other, and Orlando could not help comparingthis orderly scene with the irregular and hud-dled purlieus which had been the city of Lon-don in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, sheremembered, the city, if such one could call it,lay crowded, a mere huddle and conglomera-tion of houses, under her windows at Black-friars. The stars reflected themselves in deeppits of stagnant water which lay in the mid-dle of the streets. A black shadow at the cor-ner where the wine shop used to stand was, as

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likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man.She could remember the cries of many a onewounded in such night brawlings, when shewas a little boy, held to the diamond-panedwindow in her nurse’s arms. Troops of ruffi-ans, men and women, unspeakably interlaced,lurched down the streets, trolling out wildsongs with jewels flashing in their ears, andknives gleaming in their fists. On such a nightas this the impermeable tangle of the forestson Highgate and Hampstead would be out-lined, writhing in contorted intricacy againstthe sky. Here and there, on one of the hillswhich rose above London, was a stark gallowstree, with a corpse nailed to rot or parch on itscross; for danger and insecurity, lust and vio-lence, poetry and filth swarmed over the tor-tuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed andstank–Orlando could remember even now the

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smell of them on a hot night–in the little roomsand narrow pathways of the city. Now–sheleant out of her window–all was light, order,and serenity. There was the faint rattle of acoach on the cobbles. She heard the far-awaycry of the night watchman–‘Just twelve o’clockon a frosty morning’. No sooner had the wordsleft his lips than the first stroke of midnightsounded. Orlando then for the first time no-ticed a small cloud gathered behind the domeof St Paul’s. As the strokes sounded, the cloudincreased, and she saw it darken and spreadwith extraordinary speed. At the same timea light breeze rose and by the time the sixthstroke of midnight had struck the whole ofthe eastern sky was covered with an irregularmoving darkness, though the sky to the westand north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloudspread north. Height upon height above the

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city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, withall its lights shining. burnt more brilliantlythan ever by contrast. With the eighth stroke,some hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled overPiccadilly. They seemed to mass themselvesand to advance with extraordinary rapiditytowards the west end. As the ninth, tenth,and eleventh strokes struck, a huge blacknesssprawled over the whole of London. With thetwelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness wascomplete. A turbulent welter of cloud coveredthe city. All was darkness; all was doubt; allwas confusion. The Eighteenth century wasover; the Nineteenth century had begun.

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THE GREAT CLOUD which hung, not onlyover London, but over the whole of the BritishIsles on the first day of the nineteenth centurystayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buf-feted about constantly by blustering gales, longenough to have extraordinary consequencesupon those who lived beneath its shadow. A

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change seemed to have come over the climateof England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fit-ful gusts, which were no sooner over than theybegan again. The sun shone, of course, but itwas so girt about with clouds and the air wasso saturated with water, that its beams werediscoloured and purples, oranges, and reds ofa dull sort took the place of the more posi-tive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Un-der this bruised and sullen canopy the green ofthe cabbages was less intense, and the white ofthe snow was muddied. But what was worse,damp now began to make its way into everyhouse–damp, which is the most insidious of allenemies, for while the sun can be shut out byblinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, dampsteals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imper-ceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood,furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So

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gradual is the process, that it is not until wepick up some chest of drawers, or coal scut-tle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in ourhands, that we suspect even that the disease isat work.

Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, nonemarking the exact day or hour of the change,the constitution of England was altered andnobody knew it. Everywhere the effects werefelt. The hardy country gentleman, who hadsat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in aroom designed, perhaps by the brothers Adam,with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs ap-peared; beards were grown; trousers were fas-tened tight under the instep. The chill whichhe felt in his legs the country gentleman soontransferred to his house; furniture was muf-fled; walls and tables were covered; nothing

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was left bare. Then a change of diet became es-sential. The muffin was invented and the crum-pet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port,and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in whichto drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases,and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artifi-cial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpiecesto pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skip-ping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs,mats, and china ornaments, the home–whichhad become extremely important–was com-pletely altered.

Outside the house–it was another effect ofthe damp–ivy grew in unparalleled profusion.Houses that had been of bare stone weresmothered in greenery. No garden, howeverformal its original design, lacked a shrubbery,

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a wilderness, a maze. What light penetratedto the bedrooms where children were born wasnaturally of an obfusc green, and what lightpenetrated to the drawing-rooms where grownmen and women lived came through curtainsof brown and purple plush. But the change didnot stop at outward things. The damp struckwithin. Men felt the chill in their hearts; thedamp in their minds. In a desperate effort tosnuggle their feelings into some sort of warmthone subterfuge was tried after another. Love,birth, and death were all swaddled in a vari-ety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further andfurther apart. No open conversation was tol-erated. Evasions and concealments were sed-ulously practised on both sides. And just asthe ivy and the evergreen rioted in the dampearth outside, so did the same fertility showitself within. The life of the average woman

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was a succession of childbirths. She marriedat nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen childrenby the time she was thirty; for twins abounded.Thus the British Empire came into existence;and thus–for there is no stopping damp; it getsinto the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork–sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyricsbecame epics, and little trifles that had been es-says a column long were now encyclopaediasin ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubbshall be our witness to the effect this all hadupon the mind of a sensitive man who coulddo nothing to stop it. There is a passage to-wards the end of his memoirs where he de-scribes how, after writing thirty-five folio pagesone morning ‘all about nothing’ he screwed thelid of his inkpot and went for a turn in his gar-den. Soon he found himself involved in theshrubbery. Innumerable leaves creaked and

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glistened above his head. He seemed to himself‘to crush the mould of a million more under hisfeet’. Thick smoke exuded from a damp bon-fire at the end of the garden. He reflected thatno fire on earth could ever hope to consumethat vast vegetable encumbrance. Whereverhe looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucum-bers ‘came scrolloping across the grass to hisfeet’. Giant cauliflowers towered deck abovedeck till they rivalled, to his disordered imag-ination, the elm trees themselves. Hens laidincessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, re-membering with a sigh his own fecundity andhis poor wife Jane, now in the throes of herfifteenth confinement indoors, how, he askedhimself, could he blame the fowls? He lookedupwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, orthat great frontispiece of heaven, which is thesky, indicate the assent, indeed, the instigation

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of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winteror summer, year in year out, the clouds turnedand tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or ele-phants rather; but no, there was no escapingthe simile which was pressed upon him froma thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as itspread wide above the British Isles was nothingbut a vast feather bed; and the undistinguishedfecundity of the garden, the bedroom and thehenroost was copied there. He went indoors,wrote the passage quoted above, laid his headin a gas oven, and when they found him laterhe was past revival.

While this went on in every part of Eng-land, it was all very well for Orlando to mewherself in her house at Blackfriars and pre-tend that the climate was the same; that onecould still say what one liked and wear knee-

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breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Evenshe, at length, was forced to acknowledge thattimes were changed. One afternoon in the earlypart of the century she was driving through StJames’s Park in her old panelled coach whenone of those sunbeams, which occasionally,though not often, managed to come to earth,struggled through, marbling the clouds withstrange prismatic colours as it passed. Sucha sight was sufficiently strange after the clearand uniform skies of the eighteenth century tocause her to pull the window down and lookat it. The puce and flamingo clouds madeher think with a pleasurable anguish, whichproves that she was insensibly afflicted withthe damp already, of dolphins dying in Ionianseas. But what was her surprise when, as itstruck the earth, the sunbeam seemed to callforth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or

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trophy (for it had something of a banquet-tableair)–a conglomeration at any rate of the mostheterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piledhiggledy-piggledy in a vast mound where thestatue of Queen Victoria now stands! Drapedabout a vast cross of fretted and floriatedgold were widow’s weeds and bridal veils;hooked on to other excrescences were crystalpalaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memo-rial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, weddingcakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes,extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants,and mathematical instruments–the whole sup-ported like a gigantic coat of arms on theright side by a female figure clothed in flowingwhite; on the left by a portly gentleman wear-ing a frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers. Theincongruity of the objects, the association of thefully clothed and the partly draped, the garish-

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ness of the different colours and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with themost profound dismay. She had never, in allher life, seen anything at once so indecent, sohideous, and so monumental. It might, andindeed it must be, the effect of the sun on thewater-logged air; it would vanish with the firstbreeze that blew; but for all that, it looked, asshe drove past, as if it were destined to en-dure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking backinto the corner of her coach, no wind, rain,sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that gar-ish erection. Only the noses would mottle andthe trumpets would rust; but there they wouldremain, pointing east, west, south, and north,eternally. She looked back as her coach sweptup Constitution Hill. Yes, there it was, stillbeaming placidly in a light which–she pulledher watch out of her fob–was, of course, the

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light of twelve o’clock mid-day. None othercould be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so imper-vious to any hint of dawn or sunset, so seem-ingly calculated to last for ever. She was de-termined not to look again. Already she feltthe tides of her blood run sluggishly. But whatwas more peculiar a blush, vivid and singular,overspread her cheeks as she passed Bucking-ham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by asuperior power down upon her knees. Sud-denly she saw with a start that she was wear-ing black breeches. She never ceased blushingtill she had reached her country house, which,considering the time it takes four horses to trotthirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signalproof of her chastity.

Once there, she followed what had now be-come the most imperious need of her nature

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and wrapped herself as well as she could ina damask quilt which she snatched from herbed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew(who had succeeded good old Grimsditch ashousekeeper) that she felt chilly.

‘So do we all, m’lady,’ said the Widow, heav-ing a profound sigh. ‘The walls is sweating,’she said, with a curious, lugubrious compla-cency, and sure enough, she had only to lay herhand on the oak panels for the finger-prints tobe marked there. The ivy had grown so pro-fusely that many windows were now sealedup. The kitchen was so dark that they couldscarcely tell a kettle from a cullender. A poorblack cat had been mistaken for coals and shov-elled on the fire. Most of the maids were al-ready wearing three or four red-flannel petti-coats, though the month was August.

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‘But is it true, m’lady,’ the good womanasked, hugging herself, while the golden cruci-fix heaved on her bosom, ‘that the Queen, blessher, is wearing a what d’you call it, a–,’ thegood woman hesitated and blushed.

‘A crinoline,’ Orlando helped her out withit (for the word had reached Blackfriars). MrsBartholomew nodded. The tears were alreadyrunning down her cheeks, but as she wept shesmiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were theynot all of them weak women? wearing crino-lines the better to conceal the fact; the great fact;the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorablefact; which every modest woman did her bestto deny until denial was impossible; the factthat she was about to bear a child? to bear fif-teen or twenty children indeed, so that most ofa modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in

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denying what, on one day at least of every year,was made obvious.

‘The muffins is keepin’ ‘ot,’ said MrsBartholomew, mopping up her tears, ‘in theliberry.’

And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to adish of muffins Orlando now sat down.

‘The muffins is keepin’ ‘ot in the liberry’–Orlando minced out the horrid cockney phrasein Mrs Bartholomew’s refined cockney accentsas she drank–but no, she detested the mildfluid–her tea. It was in this very room, sheremembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stoodastride the fireplace with a flagon of beer inher hand, which she suddenly dashed on thetable when Lord Burghley tactlessly used theimperative instead of the subjunctive. ‘Littleman, little man,’–Orlando could hear her say–

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‘is “must” a word to be addressed to princes?’And down came the flagon on the table: therewas the mark of it still.

But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as themere thought of that great Queen commanded,the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fellback in her arm-chair with a curse. Tomor-row she would have to buy twenty yards ormore of black bombazine, she supposed, tomake a skirt. And then (here she blushed),she would have to buy a crinoline, and then(here she blushed) a bassinette, and then an-other crinoline, and so on...The blushes cameand went with the most exquisite iteration ofmodesty and shame imaginable. One mightsee the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, nowcold, upon her cheeks. And if the spirit of theage blew a little unequally, the crinoline being

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blushed for before the husband, her ambiguousposition must excuse her (even her sex was stillin dispute) and the irregular life she had livedbefore.

At length the colour on her cheeks resumedits stability and it seemed as if the spirit of theage–if such indeed it were–lay dormant for atime. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of hershirt as if for some locket or relic of lost af-fection, and drew out no such thing, but aroll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained–the manuscript of her poem, ‘The OakTree’. She had carried this about with her forso many years now, and in such hazardouscircumstances, that many of the pages werestained, some were torn, while the straits shehad been in for writing paper when with thegipsies, had forced her to overscore the mar-

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gins and cross the lines till the manuscriptlooked like a piece of darning most conscien-tiously carried out. She turned back to the firstpage and read the date, 1586, written in herown boyish hand. She had been working atit for close three hundred years now. It wastime to make an end. Meanwhile she beganturning and dipping and reading and skippingand thinking as she read, how very little shehad changed all these years. She had been agloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are;and then she had been amorous and florid; andthen she had been sprightly and satirical; andsometimes she had tried prose and sometimesshe had tried drama. Yet through all thesechanges she had remained, she reflected, fun-damentally the same. She had the same brood-ing meditative temper, the same love of ani-mals and nature, the same passion for the coun-

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try and the seasons.

‘After all,’ she thought, getting up and go-ing to the window, ‘nothing has changed. Thehouse, the garden are precisely as they were.Not a chair has been moved, not a trinket sold.There are the same walks, the same lawns, thesame trees, and the same pool, which, I daresay, has the same carp in it. True, Queen Vic-toria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth,but what difference...’

No sooner had the thought taken shape,than, as if to rebuke it, the door was flung wideand in marched Basket, the butler, followed byBartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear awaytea. Orlando, who had just dipped her pen inthe ink, and was about to indite some reflec-tion upon the eternity of all things, was muchannoyed to be impeded by a blot, which spread

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and meandered round her pen. It was some in-firmity of the quill, she supposed; it was split ordirty. She dipped it again. The blot increased.She tried to go on with what she was saying;no words came. Next she began to decorate theblot with wings and whiskers, till it became around-headed monster, something between abat and a wombat. But as for writing poetrywith Basket and Bartholomew in the room, itwas impossible. No sooner had she said ‘Im-possible’ than, to her astonishment and alarm,the pen began to curve and caracole with thesmoothest possible fluency. Her page was writ-ten in the neatest sloping Italian hand with themost insipid verse she had ever read in her life:

I am myself but a vile link Amid life’s wearychain, But I have spoken hallow’d words, Oh,do not say in vain!

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Will the young maiden, when her tears,Alone in moonlight shine, Tears for the absentand the loved, Murmur–

she wrote without a stop as Bartholomewand Basket grunted and groaned about theroom, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.

Again she dipped her pen and off it went:–She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud

Once mantling o’er her cheek like that whicheve Hangs o’er the sky, glowing with roseatehue, Had faded into paleness, broken by Brightburning blushes, torches of the tomb,

but here, by an abrupt movement she spiltthe ink ever the page and blotted it from hu-man sight she hoped for ever. She was all of aquiver, all of a stew. Nothing more repulsivecould be imagined than to feel the ink flow-ing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration.

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What had happened to her? Was it the damp,was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what wasit? she demanded. But the room was empty.No one answered her, unless the dripping ofthe rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.

Meanwhile, she became conscious, as shestood at the window, of an extraordinary tin-gling and vibration all over her, as if shewere made of a thousand wires upon whichsome breeze or errant fingers were playingscales. Now her toes tingled; now her mar-row. She had the queerest sensations about thethigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect them-selves. Her arms sang and twanged as the tele-graph wires would be singing and twangingin twenty years or so. But all this agitationseemed at length to concentrate in her hands;and then in one hand, and then in one finger

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of that hand, and then finally to contract it-self so that it made a ring of quivering sensi-bility about the second finger of the left hand.And when she raised it to see what causedthis agitation, she saw nothing–nothing but thevast solitary emerald which Queen Elizabethhad given her. And was that not enough?she asked. It was of the finest water. It wasworth ten thousand pounds at least. The vibra-tion seemed, in the oddest way (but remem-ber we are dealing with some of the darkestmanifestations of the human soul) to say No,that is not enough; and, further, to assume anote of interrogation, as though it were asking,what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange over-sight? till poor Orlando felt positively ashamedof the second finger of her left hand withoutin the least knowing why. At this moment,Bartholomew came in to ask which dress she

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should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whosesenses were much quickened, instantly glancedat Bartholomew’s left hand, and instantly per-ceived what she had never noticed before–athick ring of rather jaundiced yellow circlingthe third finger where her own was bare.

‘Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew,’ shesaid, stretching her hand to take it.

At this, Bartholomew made as if she hadbeen struck in the breast by a rogue. She startedback a pace or two, clenched her hand andflung it away from her with a gesture that wasnoble in the extreme. ‘No,’ she said, with res-olute dignity, her Ladyship might look if shepleased, but as for taking off her wedding ring,not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor QueenVictoria on her throne could force her to dothat. Her Thomas had put it on her finger

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twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago;she had slept in it; worked in it; washed in it;prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it.In fact, Orlando understood her to say, but hervoice was much broken with emotion; that itwas by the gleam on her wedding ring that shewould be assigned her station among the an-gels and its lustre would be tarnished for everif she let it out of her keeping for a second.

‘Heaven help us,’ said Orlando, standing atthe window and watching the pigeons at theirpranks, ‘what a world we live in! What a worldto be sure!’ Its complexities amazed her. It nowseemed to her that the whole world was ringedwith gold. She went in to dinner. Weddingrings abounded. She went to church. Wed-ding rings were everywhere. She drove out.Gold, or pinchbeck, thin, thick, plain, smooth,

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they glowed dully on every hand. Rings filledthe jewellers’ shops, not the flashing pastes anddiamonds of Orlando’s recollection, but sim-ple bands without a stone in them. At thesame time, she began to notice a new habitamong the town people. In the old days, onewould meet a boy trifling with a girl under ahawthorn hedge frequently enough. Orlandohad flicked many a couple with the tip of herwhip and laughed and passed on. Now, all thatwas changed. Couples trudged and ploddedin the middle of the road indissolubly linkedtogether. The woman’s right hand was invari-ably passed through the man’s left and her fin-gers were firmly gripped by his. Often it wasnot till the horses’ noses were on them that theybudged, and then, though they moved it wasall in one piece, heavily, to the side of the road.Orlando could only suppose that some new

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discovery had been made about the race; thatthey were somehow stuck together, couple af-ter couple, but who had made it and when, shecould not guess. It did not seem to be Nature.She looked at the doves and the rabbits and theelk-hounds and she could not see that Naturehad changed her ways or mended them, sincethe time of Elizabeth at least. There was no in-dissoluble alliance among the brutes that shecould see. Could it be Queen Victoria then, orLord Melbourne? Was it from them that thegreat discovery of marriage proceeded? Yet theQueen, she pondered, was said to be fond ofdogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, wassaid to be fond of women. It was strange–itwas distasteful; indeed, there was somethingin this indissolubility of bodies which was re-pugnant to her sense of decency and sanitation.Her ruminations, however, were accompanied

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by such a tingling and twanging of the afflictedfinger that she could scarcely keep her ideasin order. They were languishing and oglinglike a housemaid’s fancies. They made herblush. There was nothing for it but to buy oneof those ugly bands and wear it like the rest.This she did, slipping it, overcome with shame,upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; butwithout avail. The tingling persisted more vi-olently, more indignantly than ever. She didnot sleep a wink that night. Next morningwhen she took up the pen to write, either shecould think of nothing, and the pen made onelarge lachrymose blot after another, or it am-bled off, more alarmingly still, into melliflu-ous fluencies about early death and corruption,which were worse than no thinking at all. For itwould seem–her case proved it–that we write,not with the fingers, but with the whole per-

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son. The nerve which controls the pen windsitself about every fibre of our being, threads theheart, pierces the liver. Though the seat of hertrouble seemed to be the left hand, she couldfeel herself poisoned through and through, andwas forced at length to consider the most des-perate of remedies, which was to yield com-pletely and submissively to the spirit of the age,and take a husband.

That this was much against her natural tem-perament has been sufficiently made plain.When the sound of the Archduke’s chariotwheels died away, the cry that rose to her lipswas ‘Life! A Lover!’ not ‘Life! A Husband!’and it was in pursuit of this aim that she hadgone to town and run about the world as hasbeen shown in the previous chapter. Such isthe indomitable nature of the spirit of the age,

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however, that it batters down anyone who triesto make stand against it far more effectuallythan those who bend its own way. Orlando hadinclined herself naturally to the Elizabethanspirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit ofthe eighteenth century, and had in consequencescarcely been aware of the change from one ageto the other. But the spirit of the nineteenthcentury was antipathetic to her in the extreme,and thus it took her and broke her, and shewas aware of her defeat at its hands as she hadnever been before. For it is probable that thehuman spirit has its place in time assigned toit; some are born of this age, some of that; andnow that Orlando was grown a woman, a yearor two past thirty indeed, the lines of her char-acter were fixed, and to bend them the wrongway was intolerable.

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So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so christenedthe library) dragged down by the weight of thecrinoline which she had submissively adopted.It was heavier and more drab than any dressshe had yet worn. None had ever so im-peded her movements. No longer could shestride through the garden with her dogs, or runlightly to the high mound and fling herself be-neath the oak tree. Her skirts collected dampleaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed onthe breeze. The thin shoes were quickly soakedand mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pli-ancy. She became nervous lest there should berobbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for thefirst time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors.All these things inclined her, step by step, tosubmit to the new discovery, whether QueenVictoria’s or another’s, that each man and each

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woman has another allotted to it for life, whomit supports, by whom it is supported, till deaththem do part. It would be a comfort, she felt,to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never,never, never to get up again. Thus did the spiritwork upon her, for all her past pride, and as shecame sloping down the scale of emotion to thislowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, thosetwangings and tinglings which had been socaptious and so interrogative modulated intothe sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if an-gels were plucking harp-strings with white fin-gers and her whole being was pervaded by aseraphic harmony.

But whom could she lean upon? She askedthat question of the wild autumn winds. Forit was now October, and wet as usual. Notthe Archduke; he had married a very great

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lady and had hunted hares in Roumania thesemany years now; nor Mr M.; he was become aCatholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he made sacksin Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had longbeen food for fishes. One way or another, allher old cronies were gone now, and the Nellsand the Kits of Drury Lane, much though shefavoured them, scarcely did to lean upon.

‘Whom’, she asked, casting her eyes uponthe revolving clouds, clasping her hands as sheknelt on the window-sill, and looking the veryimage of appealing womanhood as she did so,‘can I lean upon?’ Her words formed them-selves, her hands clasped themselves, involun-tarily, just as her pen had written of its own ac-cord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but thespirit of the age. But whichever it was, no-body answered it. The rooks were tumbling

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pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn.The rain had stopped at last and there was aniridescence in the sky which tempted her to puton her plumed hat and her little stringed shoesand stroll out before dinner.

‘Everyone is mated except myself,’ shemused, as she trailed disconsolately across thecourtyard. There were the rooks; Canute andPippin even–transitory as their alliances were,still each this evening seemed to have a part-ner. ‘Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all,’ Or-lando thought, glancing as she passed at theinnumerable emblazoned windows of the hall,‘am single, am mateless, am alone.’

Such thoughts had never entered her headbefore. Now they bore her down unescapably.Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tappedwith a gloved hand for the porter to unfas-

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ten it for her. One must lean on someone,she thought, if it is only on a porter; and halfwished to stay behind and help him to grillhis chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but wastoo timid to ask it. So she strayed out into thepark alone, faltering at first and apprehensivelest there might be poachers or gamekeepers oreven errand-boys to marvel that a great ladyshould walk alone.

At every step she glanced nervously lestsome male form should be hiding behind afurze bush or some savage cow be lowering itshorns to toss her. But there were only the rooksflaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume fromone of them fell among the heather. She lovedwild birds’ feathers. She had used to collectthem as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it inher hat. The air blew upon her spirit somewhat

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and revived it. As the rooks went whirlingand wheeling above her head and feather af-ter feather fell gleaming through the purplishair, she followed them, her long cloak floatingbehind her, over the moor, up the hill. Shehad not walked so far for years. Six feathershad she picked from the grass and drawn be-tween her fingers and pressed to her lips to feeltheir smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw,gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, myste-rious as the lake into which Sir Bedivere flungthe sword of Arthur. A single feather quiveredin the air and fell into the middle of it. Then,some strange ecstasy came over her. Some wildnotion she had of following the birds to the rimof the world and flinging herself on the spongyturf and there drinking forgetfulness, while therooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her. Shequickened her pace; she ran; she tripped; the

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tough heather roots flung her to the ground.Her ankle was broken. She could not rise. Butthere she lay content. The scent of the bog myr-tle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils.The rooks’ hoarse laughter was in her ears. ‘Ihave found my mate,’ she murmured. ‘It is themoor. I am nature’s bride,’ she whispered, giv-ing herself in rapture to the cold embraces ofthe grass as she lay folded in her cloak in thehollow by the pool. ‘Here will I lie. (A featherfell upon her brow.) I have found a greener lau-rel than the bay. My forehead will be cool al-ways. These are wild birds’ feathers–the owl’s,the nightjar’s. I shall dream wild dreams. Myhands shall wear no wedding ring,’ she con-tinued, slipping it from her finger. ‘The rootsshall twine about them. Ah!’ she sighed, press-ing her head luxuriously on its spongy pillow,‘I have sought happiness through many ages

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and not found it; fame and missed it; love andnot known it; life–and behold, death is better. Ihave known many men and many women,’ shecontinued; ‘none have I understood. It is bet-ter that I should lie at peace here with only thesky above me–as the gipsy told me years ago.That was in Turkey.’ And she looked straightup into the marvellous golden foam into whichthe clouds had churned themselves, and sawnext moment a track in it, and camels passingin single file through the rocky desert amongclouds of red dust; and then, when the camelshad passed, there were only mountains, veryhigh and full of clefts and with pinnacles ofrock, and she fancied she heard goat bells ring-ing in their passes, and in their folds were fieldsof irises and gentian. So the sky changed andher eyes slowly lowered themselves down anddown till they came to the rain-darkened earth

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and saw the great hump of the South Downs,flowing in one wave along the coast; and wherethe land parted, there was the sea, the sea withships passing; and she fancied she heard a gunfar out at sea, and thought at first, ‘That’s theArmada,’ and then thought ‘No, it’s Nelson’,and then remembered how those wars wereover and the ships were busy merchant ships;and the sails on the winding river were thoseof pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle sprinkledon the dark fields, sheep and cows, and shesaw the lights coming here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving amongthe cattle as the shepherd went his rounds andthe cowman; and then the lights went out andthe stars rose and tangled themselves about thesky. Indeed, she was falling asleep with thewet feathers on her face and her ear pressed tothe ground when she heard, deep within, some

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hammer on an anvil, or was it a heart beating?Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat,the anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth;until, as she listened, she thought it changed tothe trot of a horse’s hoofs; one, two, three, four,she counted; then she heard a stumble; then, asit came nearer and nearer, she could hear thecrack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog inits hoofs. The horse was almost on her. Shesat upright. Towering dark against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers risingand falling about him, she saw a man on horse-back. He started. The horse stopped.

‘Madam,’ the man cried, leaping to theground, ‘you’re hurt!’

‘I’m dead, sir!’ she replied.A few minutes later, they became engaged.The morning after, as they sat at breakfast,

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he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bon-throp Shelmerdine, Esquire.

‘I knew it!’ she said, for there was somethingromantic and chivalrous, passionate, melan-choly, yet determined about him which wentwith the wild, dark-plumed name–a namewhich had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam ofrooks’ wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws,the snake-like twisting descent of their feathersin a silver pool, and a thousand other thingswhich will be described presently.

‘Mine is Orlando,’ she said. He had guessedit. For if you see a ship in full sail comingwith the sun on it proudly sweeping across theMediterranean from the South Seas, one says atonce, ‘Orlando’, he explained.

In fact, though their acquaintance had beenso short, they had guessed, as always happens

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between lovers, everything of any importanceabout each other in two seconds at the utmost,and it now remained only to fill in such unim-portant details as what they were called; wherethey lived; and whether they were beggars orpeople of substance. He had a castle in the He-brides, but it was ruined, he told her. Gannetsfeasted in the banqueting hall. He had beena soldier and a sailor, and had explored theEast. He was on his way now to join his brig atFalmouth, but the wind had fallen and it wasonly when the gale blew from the South-westthat he could put out to sea. Orlando lookedhastily from the breakfast-room window at thegilt leopard on the weather vane. Mercifullyits tail pointed due east and was steady as arock. ‘Oh! Shel, don’t leave me!’ she cried. ‘I’mpassionately in love with you,’ she said. Nosooner had the words left her mouth than an

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awful suspicion rushed into both their mindssimultaneously.

‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried.

‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried.

Never was there such a scene of protestationand demonstration as then took place since theworld began. When it was over and they wereseated again she asked him, what was this talkof a South-west gale? Where was he bound for?

‘For the Horn,’ he said briefly, and blushed.(For a man had to blush as a woman had, onlyat rather different things.) It was only by dintof great pressure on her side and the use ofmuch intuition that she gathered that his lifewas spent in the most desperate and splendidof adventures–which is to voyage round CapeHorn in the teeth of a gale. Masts had been

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snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had todrag the admission from him). Sometimes theship had sunk, and he had been left the onlysurvivor on a raft with a biscuit.

‘It’s about all a fellow can do nowadays,’ hesaid sheepishly, and helped himself to greatspoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision whichshe had thereupon of this boy (for he was lit-tle more) sucking peppermints, for which hehad a passion, while the masts snapped andthe stars reeled and he roared brief orders tocut this adrift, to heave that overboard, broughtthe tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finerflavour than any she had cried before: ‘I am awoman,’ she thought, ‘a real woman, at last.’She thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of herheart for having given her this rare and unex-pected delight. Had she not been lame in the

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left foot, she would have sat upon his knee.

‘Shel, my darling,’ she began again, ‘tellme...’ and so they talked two hours or more,perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and re-ally it would profit little to write down whatthey said, for they knew each other so well thatthey could say anything, which is tantamountto saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosythings as how to cook an omelette, or whereto buy the best boots in London, things whichhave no lustre taken from their setting, yet arepositively of amazing beauty within it. For ithas come about, by the wise economy of na-ture, that our modern spirit can almost dis-pense with language; the commonest expres-sions do, since no expressions do; hence themost ordinary conversation is often the mostpoetic, and the most poetic is precisely that

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which cannot be written down. For which rea-sons we leave a great blank here, which mustbe taken to indicate that the space is filled torepletion.

After some days more of this kind of talk,‘Orlando, my dearest,’ Shel was beginning,

when there was a scuffling outside, and Bas-ket the butler entered with the information thatthere was a couple of Peelers downstairs witha warrant from the Queen.

‘Show ‘em up,’ said Shelmerdine briefly, as ifon his own quarter-deck, taking up, by instinct,a stand with his hands behind him in front ofthe fireplace. Two officers in bottlegreen uni-forms with truncheons at their hips then en-tered the room and stood at attention. Formal-ities being over, they gave into Orlando’s ownhands, as their commission was, a legal docu-

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ment of some very impressive sort; judging bythe blobs of sealing wax, the ribbons, the oaths,and the signatures, which were all of the high-est importance.

Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, us-ing the first finger of her right hand as pointer,read out the following facts as being most ger-mane to the matter.

‘The lawsuits are settled,’ she readout...‘some in my favour, as for exam-ple...others not. Turkish marriage annulled (Iwas ambassador in Constantinople, Shel,’ sheexplained) ‘Children pronounced illegitimate,(they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanishdancer). So they don’t inherit, which is allto the good...Sex? Ah! what about sex? Mysex’, she read out with some solemnity, ‘ispronounced indisputably, and beyond the

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shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you amoment ago, Shel?), female. The estates whichare now desequestrated in perpetuity descendand are tailed and entailed upon the heirs maleof my body, or in default of marriage’–but hereshe grew impatient with this legal verbiage,and said, ‘but there won’t be any default ofmarriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest canbe taken as read.’ Whereupon she appendedher own signature beneath Lord Palmerston’sand entered from that moment into the undis-turbed possession of her titles, her house, andher estate–which was now so much shrunk, forthe cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious,that, though she was infinitely noble again, shewas also excessively poor.

When the result of the lawsuit was madeknown (and rumour flew much quicker than

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the telegraph which has supplanted it), thewhole town was filled with rejoicings.

[Horses were put into carriages for the solepurpose of being taken out. Empty barouchesand landaus were trundled up and down theHigh Street incessantly. Addresses were readfrom the Bull. Replies were made from theStag. The town was illuminated. Gold casketswere securely sealed in glass cases. Coins werewell and duly laid under stones. Hospitalswere founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were in-augurated. Turkish women by the dozen wereburnt in effigy in the market-place, togetherwith scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I ama base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths.The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soonseen trotting up the avenue with a commandto Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that

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very same night. Her table, as on a previousoccasion, was snowed under with invitationsfrom the Countess if R., Lady Q., Lady Palmer-ston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs W.E. Gladstoneand others, beseeching the pleasure of her com-pany, reminding her of ancient alliances be-tween their family and her own, etc.]–all ofwhich is properly enclosed in square brackets,as above, for the good reason that a parenthe-sis it was without any importance in Orlando’slife. She skipped it, to get on with the text. Forwhen the bonfires were blazing in the market-place, she was in the dark woods with Shelmer-dine alone. So fine was the weather that thetrees stretched their branches motionless abovethem, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red andgold, so slowly that one could watch it for halfan hour fluttering and falling till it came to restat last, on Orlando’s foot.

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‘Tell me, Mar,’ she would say (and here itmust be explained, that when she called himby the first syllable of his first name, she was ina dreamy, amorous, acquiescent mood, domes-tic, languid a little, as if spiced logs were burn-ing, and it was evening, yet not time to dress,and a thought wet perhaps outside, enoughto make the leaves glisten, but a nightingalemight be singing even so among the azaleas,two or three dogs barking at distant farms, acock crowing–all of which the reader shouldimagine in her voice)–‘Tell me, Mar,’ she wouldsay, ‘about Cape Horn.’ Then Shelmerdinewould make a little model on the ground of theCape with twigs and dead leaves and an emptysnail shell or two.

‘Here’s the north,’ he would say. ‘There’s thesouth. The wind’s coming from hereabouts.

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Now the brig is sailing due west; we’ve justlowered the top-boom mizzen: and so you see–here, where this bit of grass is, she enters thecurrent which you’ll find marked–where’s mymap and compasses, Bo’sun? Ah! thanks,that’ll do, where the snail shell is. The cur-rent catches her on the starboard side, so wemust rig the jib-boom or we shall be carriedto the larboard, which is where that beech leafis,–for you must understand my dear–’ and sohe would go on, and she would listen to ev-ery word; interpreting them rightly, so as tosee, that is to say, without his having to tellher, the phosphorescence on the waves; the ici-cles clanking in the shrouds; how he went tothe top of the mast in a gale; there reflected onthe destiny of man; came down again; had awhisky and soda; went on shore; was trappedby a black woman; repented; reasoned it out;

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read Pascal; determined to write philosophy;bought a monkey; debated the true end of life;decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on.All this and a thousand other things she un-derstood him to say, and so when she replied,Yes, negresses are seductive, aren’t they? hehaving told her that the supply of biscuits nowgave out, he was surprised and delighted tofind how well she had taken his meaning.

‘Are you positive you aren’t a man?’ hewould ask anxiously, and she would echo,

‘Can it be possible you’re not a woman?’ andthen they must put it to the proof without moreado. For each was so surprised at the quicknessof the other’s sympathy, and it was to each sucha revelation that a woman could be as tolerantand free-spoken as a man, and a man as strangeand subtle as a woman, that they had to put the

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matter to the proof at once.

And so they would go on talking or rather,understanding, which has become the main artof speech in an age when words are grow-ing daily so scanty in comparison with ideasthat ‘the biscuits ran out’ has to stand forkissing a negress in the dark when one hasjust read Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy for thetenth time. (And from this it follows that onlythe most profound masters of style can tellthe truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without anydoubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)

So they would talk; and then, when herfeet were fairly covered with spotted autumnleaves, Orlando would rise and stroll awayinto the heart of the woods in solitude, leavingBonthrop sitting there among the snail shells,

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making models of Cape Horn. ‘Bonthrop,’ shewould say, ‘I’m off,’ and when she called himby his second name, ‘Bonthrop’, it should sig-nify to the reader that she was in a solitarymood, felt them both as specks on a desert, wasdesirous only of meeting death by herself, forpeople die daily, die at dinner tables, or likethis, out of doors in the autumn woods; andwith the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerstonor Lady Derby asking her out every night todinner, the desire for death would overcomeher, and so saying ‘Bonthrop’, she said in ef-fect, ‘I’m dead’, and pushed her way as a spiritmight through the spectre-pale beech trees, andso oared herself deep into solitude as if the littleflicker of noise and movement were over andshe were free now to take her way–all of whichthe reader should hear in her voice when shesaid ‘Bonthrop,’ and should also add, the better

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to illumine the word, that for him too the sameword signified, mystically, separation and iso-lation and the disembodied pacing the deck ofhis brig in unfathomable seas.

After some hours of death, suddenly ajay shrieked ‘Shelmerdine’, and stooping, shepicked up one of those autumn crocuses whichto some people signify that very word, andput it with the jay’s feather that came tumblingblue through the beech woods, in her breast.Then she called ‘Shelmerdine’ and the wordwent shooting this way and that way throughthe woods and struck him where he sat, mak-ing models out of snail shells in the grass. Hesaw her, and heard her coming to him with thecrocus and the jay’s feather in her breast, andcried ‘Orlando’, which meant (and it must beremembered that when bright colours like blue

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and yellow mix themselves in our eyes, someof it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bow-ing and swaying of bracken as if somethingwere breaking through; which proved to be aship in full sail, heaving and tossing a littledreamily, rather as if she had a whole year ofsummer days to make her voyage in; and sothe ship bears down, heaving this way, heav-ing that way, nobly, indolently, and rides overthe crest of this wave and sinks into the hollowof that one, and so, suddenly stands over you(who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, look-ing up at her) with all her sails quivering, andthen, behold, they drop all of a heap on deck–as Orlando dropped now into the grass besidehim.

Eight or nine days had been spent thus, buton the tenth, which was the 26th of October, Or-

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lando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmer-dine recited Shelley (whose entire works hehad by heart), when a leaf which had startedto fall slowly enough from a treetop whippedbriskly across Orlando’s foot. A second leaf fol-lowed and then a third. Orlando shivered andturned pale. It was the wind. Shelmerdine–but it would be more proper now to call himBonthrop–leapt to his feet.

‘The wind!’ he cried.

Together they ran through the woods, thewind plastering them with leaves as they ran,to the great court and through it and the lit-tle courts, frightened servants leaving theirbrooms and their saucepans to follow after tillthey reached the Chapel, and there a scatter-ing of lights was lit as fast as could be, oneknocking over this bench, another snuffing out

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that taper. Bells were rung. People were sum-moned. At length there was Mr Dupper catch-ing at the ends of his white tie and askingwhere was the prayer book. And they thrustQueen Mary’s prayer book in his hands andhe searched, hastily fluttering the pages, andsaid, ‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, andLady Orlando, kneel down’; and they kneltdown, and now they were bright and now theywere dark as the light and shadow came flyinghelter-skelter through the painted windows;and among the banging of innumerable doorsand a sound like brass pots beating, the organsounded, its growl coming loud and faint alter-nately, and Mr Dupper, who was grown a veryold man, tried now to raise his voice abovethe uproar and could not be heard and thenall was quiet for a moment, and one word–it might be ‘the jaws of death’–rang out clear,

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while all the estate servants kept pressing inwith rakes and whips still in their hands to lis-ten, and some sang loud and others prayed,and now a bird was dashed against the pane,and now there was a clap of thunder, so that noone heard the word Obey spoken or saw, ex-cept as a golden flash, the ring pass from handto hand. All was movement and confusion.And up they rose with the organ booming andthe lightning playing and the rain pouring, andthe Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger,went out into the court in her thin dress andheld the swinging stirrup, for the horse wasbitted and bridled and the foam was still onhis flank, for her husband to mount, which hedid with one bound, and the horse leapt for-ward and Orlando, standing there, cried outMarmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and heanswered her Orlando! and the words went

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dashing and circling like wild hawks togetheramong the belfries and higher and higher, fur-ther and further, faster and faster they circled,till they crashed and fell in a shower of frag-ments to the ground; and she went in.

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ORLANDO WENT INDOORS. It was com-pletely still. It was very silent. There wasthe ink pot: there was the pen; there was themanuscript of her poem, broken off in the mid-dle of a tribute to eternity. She had been aboutto say, when Basket and Bartholomew inter-rupted with the tea things, nothing changes.

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And then, in the space of three seconds and ahalf, everything had changed–she had brokenher ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.

There was the wedding ring on her fingerto prove it. It was true that she had put itthere herself before she met Shelmerdine, butthat had proved worse than useless. She nowturned the ring round and round, with super-stitious reverence, taking care lest it should slippast the joint of her finger.

‘The wedding ring has to be put on the thirdfinger of the left hand’, she said, like a childcautiously repeating its lesson, ‘for it to be ofany use at all.’

She spoke thus, aloud and rather morepompously than was her wont, as if she wishedsomeone whose good opinion she desired tooverhear her. Indeed, she had in mind, now

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that she was at last able to collect her thoughts,the effect that her behaviour would have hadupon the spirit of the age. She was extremelyanxious to be informed whether the steps shehad taken in the matter of getting engaged toShelmerdine and marrying him met with itsapproval. She was certainly feeling more her-self. Her finger had not tingled once, or noth-ing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet,she could not deny that she had her doubts.She was married, true; but if one’s husbandwas always sailing round Cape Horn, was itmarriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? Ifone liked other people, was it marriage? Andfinally, if one still wished, more than anythingin the whole world, to write poetry, was it mar-riage? She had her doubts.

But she would put it to the test. She looked

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at the ring. She looked at the ink pot. Did shedare? No, she did not. But she must. No, shecould not. What should she do then? Faint, ifpossible. But she had never felt better in herlife.

‘Hang it all!’ she cried, with a touch of herold spirit. ‘Here goes!’

And she plunged her pen neck deep in theink. To her enormous surprise, there was no ex-plosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, butnot dripping. She wrote. The words were a lit-tle long in coming, but come they did. Ah! butdid they make sense? she wondered, a paniccoming over her lest the pen might have beenat some of its involuntary pranks again. Sheread,

And then I came to a field where the spring-ing grass Was dulled by the hanging cups

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of fritillaries, Sullen and foreign-looking, thesnaky flower, Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyp-tian girls:–

As she wrote she felt some power (remem-ber we are dealing with the most obscure man-ifestations of the human spirit) reading overher shoulder, and when she had written ‘Egyp-tian girls’, the power told her to stop. Grass,the power seemed to say, going back with aruler such as governesses use to the beginning,is all right; the hanging cups of fritillaries–admirable; the snaky flower–a thought, strongfrom a lady’s pen, perhaps, but Wordsworth nodoubt, sanctions it; but–girls? Are girls neces-sary? You have a husband at the Cape, yousay? Ah, well, that’ll do.

And so the spirit passed on.Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this

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took place in spirit) a deep obeisance to thespirit of her age, such as–to compare greatthings with small–a traveller, conscious thathe has a bundle of cigars in the corner of hissuit case, makes to the customs officer whohas obligingly made a scribble of white chalkon the lid. For she was extremely doubtfulwhether, if the spirit had examined the con-tents of her mind carefully, it would not havefound something highly contraband for whichshe would have had to pay the full fine. Shehad only escaped by the skin of her teeth. Shehad just managed, by some dexterous defer-ence to the spirit of the age, by putting on a ringand finding a man on a moor, by loving natureand being no satirist, cynic, or psychologist–any one of which goods would have been dis-covered at once–to pass its examination suc-cessfully. And she heaved a deep sigh of re-

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lief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transac-tion between a writer and the spirit of the ageis one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice ar-rangement between the two the whole fortuneof his works depends. Orlando had so orderedit that she was in an extremely happy position;she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it;she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, there-fore, she could write, and write she did. Shewrote. She wrote. She wrote.

It was now November. After November,comes December. Then January, February,March, and April. After April comes May.June, July, August follow. Next is September.Then October, and so, behold, here we are backat November again, with a whole year accom-plished.

This method of writing biography, though

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it has its merits, is a little bare, perhaps, andthe reader, if we go on with it, may complainthat he could recite the calendar for himself andso save his pocket whatever sum the HogarthPress may think proper to charge for this book.But what can the biographer do when his sub-ject has put him in the predicament into whichOrlando has now put us? Life, it has beenagreed by everyone whose opinion is worthconsulting, is the only fit subject for novelist orbiographer; life, the same authorities have de-cided, has nothing whatever to do with sittingstill in a chair and thinking. Thought and lifeare as the poles asunder. Therefore–since sit-ting in a chair and thinking is precisely whatOrlando is doing now–there is nothing for itbut to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blowone’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window,until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you

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could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed,that a pin had dropped! That would have beenlife of a kind. Or if a butterfly had flutteredthrough the window and settled on her chair,one could write about that. Or suppose shehad got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once,we could out with our pens and write. Forthere would be blood shed, if only the bloodof a wasp. Where there is blood there is life.And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle com-pared with killing a man, still it is a fitter sub-ject for novelist or biographer than this merewool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in achair day in, day out, with a cigarette and asheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. Ifonly subjects, we might complain (for our pa-tience is wearing thin), had more considerationfor their biographers! What is more irritatingthan to see one’s subject, on whom one has lav-

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ished so much time and trouble, slipping out ofone’s grasp altogether and indulging–witnessher sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings,her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard asdawns–what is more humiliating than to seeall this dumb show of emotion and excitementgone through before our eyes when we knowthat what causes it–thought and imagination–are of no importance whatsoever?

But Orlando was a woman–Lord Palmerstonhad just proved it. And when we are writingthe life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waiveour demand for action, and substitute love in-stead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’swhole existence. And if we look for a momentat Orlando writing at her table, we must admitthat never was there a woman more fitted forthat calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and

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a beautiful woman, and a woman in the primeof life, she will soon give over this pretence ofwriting and thinking and begin at least to thinkof a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks ofa man, nobody objects to a woman thinking).And then she will write him a little note (andas long as she writes little notes nobody objectsto a woman writing either) and make an assig-nation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk willcome; and the gamekeeper will whistle underthe window–all of which is, of course, the verystuff of life and the only possible subject for fic-tion. Surely Orlando must have done one ofthese things? Alas,–a thousand times, alas, Or-lando did none of them. Must it then be ad-mitted that Orlando was one of those monstersof iniquity who do not love? She was kind todogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to adozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry.

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But love–as the male novelists define it–andwho, after all, speak with greater authority?–has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fi-delity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slippingoff one’s petticoat and–But we all know whatlove is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compelsus to say no, she did not. If then, the subject ofone’s biography will neither love nor kill, butwill only think and imagine, we may concludethat he or she is no better than a corpse and soleave her.

The only resource now left us is to look out ofthe window. There were sparrows; there werestarlings; there were a number of doves, andone or two rooks, all occupied after their fash-ion. One finds a worm, another a snail. Oneflutters to a branch, another takes a little runon the turf. Then a servant crosses the court-

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yard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumablyhe is engaged on some intrigue with one of themaids in the pantry, but as no visible proof isoffered us, in the courtyard, we can but hopefor the best and leave it. Clouds pass, thin orthick, with some disturbance of the colour ofthe grass beneath. The sun-dial registers thehour in its usual cryptic way. One’s mind be-gins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,about this same life. Life, it sings, or croonsrather, like a kettle on a hob. Life, life, what artthou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of theunder-footman or the shadow of the starling onthe grass?

Let us go, then, exploring, this summermorning, when all are adoring the plum blos-som and the bee. And humming and hawing,let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable

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bird than the lark) what he may think on thebrink of the dustbin, whence he picks amongthe sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’slife, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, andknew precisely, what we meant by this both-ering prying habit of ours of asking questionsindoors and out and peeping and picking atdaisies as the way is of writers when they don’tknow 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 thehigh brow of the wine-blue purple-dark hill,and fling ourselves down there, and dreamthere and see there a grasshopper, carting backto his home in the hollow, a straw. And he says(if sawings like his can be given a name so sa-

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cred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we inter-pret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. Andthe ant agrees and the bees, but if we lie herelong enough to ask the moths, when they comeat evening, stealing among the paler heatherbells, they will breathe in our ears such wildnonsense as one hears from telegraph wiresin snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter,Laughter! the moths say.

Having asked then of man and of bird andthe insects, for fish, men tell us, who have livedin green caves, solitary for years to hear themspeak, never, never say, and so perhaps knowwhat life is–having asked them all and grownno wiser, but only older and colder (for did wenot pray once in a way to wrap up in a booksomething so hard, so rare, one could swear itwas life’s meaning?) back we must go and say

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straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe tohear what life is–alas, we don’t know.

At this moment, but only just in time tosave the book from extinction, Orlando pushedaway her chair, stretched her arms, droppedher pen, came to the window, and exclaimed,‘Done!’

She was almost felled to the ground by theextraordinary sight which now met her eyes.There was the garden and some birds. Theworld was going on as usual. All the time shewas writing the world had continued.

‘And if I were dead, it would be just thesame!’ she exclaimed.

Such was the intensity of her feelings thatshe could even imagine that she had suffereddissolution, and perhaps some faintness actu-

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ally attacked her. For a moment she stood look-ing at the fair, indifferent spectacle with star-ing eyes. At length she was revived in a singu-lar way. The manuscript which reposed aboveher heart began shuffling and beating as if itwere a living thing, and, what was still odder,and showed how fine a sympathy was betweenthem, Orlando, by inclining her head, couldmake out what it was that it was saying. Itwanted to be read. It must be read. It woulddie in her bosom if it were not read. For thefirst time in her life she turned with violenceagainst nature. Elk-hounds and rose busheswere about her in profusion. But elk-houndsand rose bushes can none of them read. It is alamentable oversight on the part of Providencewhich had never struck her before. Humanbeings alone are thus gifted. Human beingshad become necessary. She rang the bell. She

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ordered the carriage to take her to London atonce.

‘There’s just time to catch the eleven fortyfive, M’Lady,’ said Basket. Orlando had notyet realized the invention of the steam engine,but such was her absorption in the sufferingsof a being, who, though not herself, yet en-tirely depended on her, that she saw a railwaytrain for the first time, took her seat in a railwaycarriage, and had the rug arranged about herknees without giving a thought to ‘that stupen-dous invention, which had (the historians say)completely changed the face of Europe in thepast twenty years’ (as, indeed, happens muchmore frequently than historians suppose). Shenoticed only that it was extremely smutty; rat-tled horribly; and the windows stuck. Lostin thought, she was whirled up to London in

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something less than an hour and stood on theplatform at Charing Cross, not knowing whereto go.

The old house at Blackfriars, where she hadspent so many pleasant days in the eighteenthcentury, was now sold, part to the SalvationArmy, part to an umbrella factory. She hadbought another in Mayfair which was sanitary,convenient, and in the heart of the fashionableworld, but was it in Mayfair that her poemwould be relieved of its desire? Pray God,she thought, remembering the brightness oftheir ladyships’ eyes and the symmetry of theirlordship’s legs, they haven’t taken to readingthere. For that would be a thousand pities.Then there was Lady R.‘s. The same sort oftalk would be going on there still, she had nodoubt. The gout might have shifted from the

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General’s left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr L.might have stayed ten days with R. instead ofT. Then Mr Pope would come in. Oh! butMr Pope was dead. Who were the wits now,she wondered–but that was not a question onecould put to a porter, and so she moved on. Herears were now distracted by the jingling of in-numerable bells on the heads of innumerablehorses. Fleets of the strangest little boxes onwheels were drawn up by the pavement. Shewalked out into the Strand. There the uproarwas even worse. Vehicles of all sizes, drawnby blood horses and by dray horses, convey-ing one solitary dowager or crowded to the topby whiskered men in silk hats, were inextri-cably mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibusesseemed to her eyes, so long used to the look ofa plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at logger-heads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratch-

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ing, the uproar of the street sounded violentlyand hideously cacophonous. Every inch of thepavement was crowded. Streams of people,threading in and out between their own bod-ies and the lurching and lumbering traffic withincredible agility, poured incessantly east andwest. Along the edge of the pavement stoodmen, holding out trays of toys, and bawled.At corners, women sat beside great baskets ofspring flowers and bawled. Boys running inand out of the horses’ noses, holding printedsheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster!Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that shehad arrived at some moment of national cri-sis; but whether it was happy or tragic, shecould not tell. She looked anxiously at peo-ple’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 terri-

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ble sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering his way along as if itwere a festival for all the world. Indeed, shecame to the conclusion that there was neitherrhyme nor reason in any of it. Each man andeach woman was bent on his own affairs. Andwhere was she to go?

She walked on without thinking, up onestreet and down another, by vast windowspiled with handbags, and mirrors, and dress-ing gowns, and flowers, and fishing rods, andluncheon baskets; while stuff of every hueand pattern, thickness or thinness, was loopedand festooned and ballooned across and across.Sometimes she passed down avenues of se-date mansions, soberly numbered ‘one’, ‘two’,‘three’, and so on right up to two or three hun-dred, each the copy of the other, with two pil-

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lars and six steps and a pair of curtains neatlydrawn and family luncheons laid on tables,and a parrot looking out of one window anda man servant out of another, until her mindwas dizzied with the monotony. Then she cameto great open squares with black shiny, tightlybuttoned statues of fat men in the middle, andwar horses prancing, and columns rising andfountains falling and pigeons fluttering. So shewalked and walked along pavements betweenhouses until she felt very hungry, and some-thing fluttering above her heart rebuked herwith having forgotten all about it. It was hermanuscript. ‘The Oak Tree’.

She was confounded at her own neglect. Shestopped dead where she stood. No coach wasin sight. The street, which was wide and hand-some, was singularly empty. Only one elderly

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gentleman was approaching. There was some-thing vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As hecame nearer, she felt certain that she had methim at some time or other. But where? Couldit be that this gentleman, so neat, so portly,so prosperous, with a cane in his hand and aflower in his button-hole, with a pink, plumpface, and combed white moustaches, could itbe, Yes, by jove, it was!–her old, her very oldfriend, Nick Greene!

At the same time he looked at her; remem-bered her; recognized her. ‘The Lady Orlando!’he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in thedust.

‘Sir Nicholas!’ she exclaimed. For she wasmade aware intuitively by something in hisbearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, whohad lampooned her and many another in the

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time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen inthe world and become certainly a Knight anddoubtless a dozen other fine things into the bar-gain.

With another bow, he acknowledged that herconclusion was correct; he was a Knight; hewas a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was theauthor of a score of volumes. He was, in short,the most influential critic of the Victorian age.

A violent tumult of emotion besieged her atmeeting the man who had caused her, yearsago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy,restless fellow who had burnt holes in her car-pets, and toasted cheese in the Italian fireplaceand told such merry stories of Marlowe and therest that they had seen the sun rise nine nightsout of ten? He was now sprucely dressed ina grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his

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button-hole, and grey suede gloves to match.But even as she marvelled, he made anotherbow, and asked her whether she would hon-our him by lunching with him? The bow wasa thought overdone perhaps, but the imitationof fine breeding was creditable. She followedhim, wondering, into a superb restaurant, allred plush, white table-cloths, and silver cruets,as unlike as could be the old tavern or cof-fee house with its sanded floor, its woodenbenches, its bowls of punch and chocolate,and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid hisgloves neatly on the table beside him. Stillshe could hardly believe that he was the sameman. His nails were clean; where they used tobe an inch long. His chin was shaved; wherea black beard used to sprout. He wore goldsleeve-links; where his ragged linen used todip in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he

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had ordered the wine, which he did with a carethat reminded her of his taste in Malmsey longago, that she was convinced he was the sameman. ‘Ah!’ he said, heaving a little sigh, whichwas yet comfortable enough, ‘ah! my dearlady, the great days of literature are over. Mar-lowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson–those were thegiants. Dryden, Pope, Addison–those were theheroes. All, all are dead now. And whom havethey left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!’–he threw an immense amount of scorn into hisvoice. ‘The truth of it is,’ he said, pouring him-self a glass of wine, ‘that all our young writ-ers are in the pay of the booksellers. They turnout any trash that serves to pay their tailor’sbills. It is an age’, he said, helping himself tohors-d’oeuvres, ‘marked by precious conceitsand wild experiments–none of which the Eliz-abethans would have tolerated for an instant.’

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‘No, my dear lady,’ he continued, passingwith approval the turbot au gratin, which thewaiter exhibited for his sanction, ‘the greatdays are over. We live in degenerate times. Wemust cherish the past; honour those writers–there are still a few left of ‘em–who take antiq-uity for their model and write, not for pay but–’ Here Orlando almost shouted ‘Glawr!’ In-deed she could have sworn that she had heardhim say the very same things three hundredyears ago. The names were different, of course,but the spirit was the same. Nick Greene hadnot changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,some change there was. For while he ran onabout taking Addison as one’s model (it hadbeen Cicero once, she thought) and lying in bedof a morning (which she was proud to thinkher pension paid quarterly enabled him to do)rolling the best works of the best authors round

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and round on one’s tongue for an hour, at least,before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgar-ity of the present time and the deplorable con-dition of our native tongue (he had lived longin America, she believed) might be purified–while he ran on in much the same way thatGreene had run on three hundred years ago,she had time to ask herself, how was it thenthat he had changed? He had grown plump;but he was a man verging on seventy. He hadgrown sleek: literature had been a prosperouspursuit evidently; but somehow the old rest-less, uneasy vivacity had gone. His stories, bril-liant as they were, were no longer quite so freeand easy. He mentioned, it is true, ‘my dearfriend Pope’ or ‘my illustrious friend Addison’every other second, but he had an air of re-spectability about him which was depressing,and he preferred, it seemed, to enlighten her

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about the doings and sayings of her own bloodrelations 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 herexcuse) as something wild as the wind, hot asfire, swift as lightning; something errant, incal-culable, abrupt, and behold, literature was anelderly gentleman in a grey suit talking aboutduchesses. The violence of her disillusionmentwas such that some hook or button fasteningthe upper part of her dress burst open, and outupon the table fell ‘The Oak Tree’, a poem.

‘A manuscript!’ said Sir Nicholas, puttingon his gold pince-nez. ‘How interesting, howexcessively interesting! Permit me to look atit.’ And once more, after an interval of some

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three hundred years, Nicholas Greene took Or-lando’s poem and, laying it down among thecoffee cups and the liqueur glasses, began toread it. But now his verdict was very differ-ent from what it had been then. It remindedhim, he said as he turned over the pages, of Ad-dison’s “Cato”. It compared favourably withThomson’s “Seasons”. There was no trace init, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit.It was composed with a regard to truth, to na-ture, to the dictates of the human heart, whichwas rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulouseccentricity. It must, of course, be published in-stantly.

Really Orlando did not know whathe meant. She had always carried hermanuscripts about with her in the bosomof her dress. The idea tickled Sir Nicholas

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considerably.‘But what about royalties?’ he asked.Orlando’s mind flew to Buckingham Palace

and some dusky potentates who happened tobe staying there.

Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He ex-plained that he was alluding to the fact thatMessrs – (here he mentioned a well-knownfirm of publishers) would be delighted, if hewrote them a line, to put the book on their list.He could probably arrange for a royalty of tenper cent on all copies up to two thousand; afterthat it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers,he would himself write a line to Mr –, who wasthe most influential; then a compliment–say alittle puff of her own poems–addressed to thewife of the editor of the – never did any harm.He would call –. So he ran on. Orlando un-

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derstood nothing of all this, and from old ex-perience did not altogether trust his good na-ture, but there was nothing for it but to submitto what was evidently his wish and the ferventdesire of the poem itself. So Sir Nicholas madethe blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flat-tened it into his breast pocket, lest it should dis-turb the set of his coat; and with many compli-ments on both sides, they parted.

Orlando walked up the street. Now that thepoem was gone,–and she felt a bare place in herbreast where she had been used to carry it–shehad nothing to do but reflect upon whatevershe liked–the extraordinary chances it might beof the human lot. Here she was in St James’sStreet; a married woman; with a ring on herfinger; where there had been a coffee houseonce there was now a restaurant; it was about

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half past three in the afternoon; the sun wasshining; there were three pigeons; a mongrelterrier dog; two hansom cabs and a barouchelandau. What then, was Life? The thoughtpopped into her head violently, irrelevantly(unless old Greene were somehow the cause ofit). And it may be taken as a comment, ad-verse or favourable, as the reader chooses toconsider it upon her relations with her hus-band (who was at the Horn), that wheneveranything popped violently into her head, shewent straight to the nearest telegraph officeand wired to him. There was one, as it hap-pened, close at hand. ‘My God Shel’, she wired;‘life literature Greene toady–’ here she droppedinto a cypher language which they had in-vented between them so that a whole spiritualstate of the utmost complexity might be con-veyed in a word or two without the telegraph

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clerk being any wiser, and added the words‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’, which summed it upprecisely. For not only had the events of themorning made a deep impression on her, but itcannot have escaped the reader’s attention thatOrlando was growing up–which is not nec-essarily growing better–and ‘Rattigan Glum-phoboo’ described a very complicated spiritualstate–which if the reader puts all his intelli-gence at our service he may discover for him-self.

There could be no answer to her telegramfor some hours; indeed, it was probable, shethought, glancing at the sky, where the up-per clouds raced swiftly past, that there was agale at Cape Horn, so that her husband wouldbe at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cut-ting away some tattered spar, or even alone

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in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving thepost office, she turned to beguile herself intothe next shop, which was a shop so commonin our day that it needs no description, yet,to her eyes, strange in the extreme; a shopwhere they sold books. All her life long Or-lando had known manuscripts; she had heldin her hands the rough brown sheets on whichSpenser had written in his little crabbed hand;she had seen Shakespeare’s script and Milton’s.She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartosand folios, often with a sonnet in her praise inthem and sometimes a lock of hair. But theseinnumerable little volumes, bright, identical,ephemeral, for they seemed bound in card-board and printed on tissue paper, surprisedher infinitely. The whole works of Shakespearecost half a crown, and could be put in yourpocket. One could hardly read them, indeed,

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the print was so small, but it was a marvel,none the less. ‘Works’–the works of everywriter she had known or heard of and manymore stretched from end to end of the longshelves. On tables and chairs, more ‘works’were piled and tumbled, and these she saw,turning a page or two, were often works aboutother works by Sir Nicholas and a score ofothers whom, in her ignorance, she supposed,since they were bound and printed, to be verygreat writers too. So she gave an astoundingorder to the bookseller to send her everythingof any importance in the shop and left.

She turned into Hyde Park, which she hadknown of old (beneath that cleft tree, she re-membered, the Duke of Hamilton fell runthrough the body by Lord Mohun), and herlips, which are often to blame in the matter, be-

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gan framing the words of her telegram into asenseless singsong; life literature Greene toadyRattigan Glumphoboo; so that several parkkeepers looked at her with suspicion and wereonly brought to a favourable opinion of hersanity by noticing the pearl necklace which shewore. She had carried off a sheaf of papersand critical journals from the book shop, and atlength, flinging herself on her elbow beneatha tree, she spread these pages round her anddid her best to fathom the noble art of prosecomposition as these masters practised it. Forstill the old credulity was alive in her; eventhe blurred type of a weekly newspaper hadsome sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lyingon her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on thecollected works of a man she had once known–John Donne. But she had pitched herself, with-out knowing it, not far from the Serpentine.

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The barking of a thousand dogs sounded inher ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselesslyin a circle. Leaves sighed overhead. Now andagain a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlettrousers crossed the grass within a few steps ofher. Once a gigantic rubber ball bounced on thenewspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and bluesbroke through the interstices of the leaves andsparkled in the emerald on her finger. She reada sentence and looked up at the sky; she lookedup at the sky and looked down at the news-paper. Life? Literature? One to be made intothe other? But how monstrously difficult! For–here came by a pair of tight scarlet trousers–how would Addison have put that? Here cametwo dogs dancing on their hind legs. Howwould Lamb have described that? For readingSir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in theintervals of looking about her), she somehow

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got the impression–here she rose and walked–they made one feel–it was an extremely un-comfortable feeling–one must never, never saywhat one thought. (She stood on the banks ofthe Serpentine. It was a bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.)They made one feel, she continued, that onemust always, always write like somebody else.(The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) Forreally, she thought, pushing a little boat offwith her toe, I don’t think I could (here thewhole of Sir Nicholas’ article came before heras articles do, ten minutes after they are read,with the look of his room, his head, his cat, hiswriting-table, and the time of the day thrownin), I don’t think I could, she continued, con-sidering the article from this point of view, sitin a study, no, it’s not a study, it’s a mouldykind of drawing-room, all day long, and talk

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to pretty young men, and tell them little anec-dotes, which they mustn’t repeat, about whatTupper said about Smiles; and then, she con-tinued, weeping bitterly, they’re all so manly;and then, I do detest Duchesses; and I don’tlike cake; and though I’m spiteful enough, Icould never learn to be as spiteful as all that, sohow can I be a critic and write the best Englishprose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed,launching a penny steamer so vigorously thatthe poor little boat almost sank in the bronze-coloured waves.

Now, the truth is that when one has beenin a state of mind (as nurses call it)–and thetears still stood in Orlando’s eyes–the thing oneis looking at becomes, not itself, but anotherthing, which is bigger and much more impor-tant and yet remains the same thing. If one

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looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind,the waves soon become just as big as the waveson the Atlantic; the toy boats become indis-tinguishable from ocean liners. So Orlandomistook the toy boat for her husband’s brig;and the wave she had made with her toe fora mountain of water off Cape Horn; and asshe watched the toy boat climb the ripple, shethought she saw Bonthrop’s ship climb up andup a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a whitecrest with a thousand deaths in it arched overit; and through the thousand deaths it wentand disappeared–‘It’s sunk!’ she cried out inan agony–and then, behold, there it was againsailing along safe and sound among the duckson the other side of the Atlantic.

‘Ecstasy!’ she cried. ‘Ecstasy! Where’s thepost office?’ she wondered. ‘For I must wire at

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once to Shel and tell him...’ And repeating ‘Atoy boat on the Serpentine’, and ‘Ecstasy’, alter-nately, for the thoughts were interchangeableand meant exactly the same thing, she hurriedtowards Park Lane.

‘A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat,’ she re-peated, thus enforcing upon herself the factthat it is not articles by Nick Greene on JohnDonne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants norfactory acts that matter; it’s something use-less, sudden, violent; something that costs alife; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; likethose hyacinths (she was passing a fine bedof them); free from taint, dependence, soilureof humanity or care for one’s kind; somethingrash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband Imean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is–a toy boaton the Serpentine, ecstasy–it’s ecstasy that mat-

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ters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the car-riages to pass at Stanhope Gate, for the conse-quence of not living with one’s husband, ex-cept when the wind is sunk, is that one talksnonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would nodoubt have been different had she lived all theyear round with him as Queen Victoria recom-mended. As it was the thought of him wouldcome upon her in a flash. She found it abso-lutely necessary to speak to him instantly. Shedid not care in the least what nonsense it mightmake, or what dislocation it might inflict on thenarrative. Nick Greene’s article had plungedher in the depths of despair; the toy boat hadraised her to the heights of joy. So she repeated:‘Ecstasy, ecstasy’, as she stood waiting to cross.

But the traffic was heavy that spring after-noon, and kept her standing there, repeating,

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ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine,while the wealth and power of England sat, asif sculptured, in hat and cloak, in four-in-hand,victoria and barouche landau. It was as if agolden river had coagulated and massed itselfin golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladiesheld card-cases between their fingers; the gen-tlemen balanced gold-mounted canes betweentheir knees. She stood there gazing, admiring,awe-struck. One thought only disturbed her,a thought familiar to all who behold great ele-phants, or whales of an incredible magnitude,and that is: how do these leviathans to whomobviously stress, change, and activity are re-pugnant, propagate their kind? Perhaps, Or-lando thought, looking at the stately, still faces,their time of propagation is over; this is thefruit; this is the consummation. What she nowbeheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and

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splendid there they sat. But now, the police-man let fall his hand; the stream became liquid;the massive conglomeration of splendid objectsmoved, dispersed, and disappeared into Pic-cadilly.

So she crossed Park Lane and went to herhouse in Curzon Street, where, when themeadow-sweet blew there, she could remem-ber curlew calling and one very old man witha gun.

She could remember, she thought, steppingacross the threshold of her house, how LordChesterfield had said–but her memory waschecked. Her discreet eighteenth-century hall,where she could see Lord Chesterfield puttinghis hat down here and his coat down therewith an elegance of deportment which it wasa pleasure to watch, was now completely lit-

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tered with parcels. While she had been sittingin Hyde Park the bookseller had delivered herorder, and the house was crammed–there wereparcels slipping down the staircase–with thewhole of Victorian literature done up in greypaper and neatly tied with string. She car-ried as many of these packets as she could toher room, ordered footmen to bring the others,and, rapidly cutting innumerable strings, wassoon surrounded by innumerable volumes.

Accustomed to the little literatures of the six-teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,Orlando was appalled by the consequencesof her order. For, of course, to the Victori-ans themselves Victorian literature meant notmerely four great names separate and distinctbut four great names sunk and embedded ina mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks,

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Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers,Jamesons–all vocal, clamorous, prominent, andrequiring as much attention as anybody else.Orlando’s reverence for print had a tough jobset before it but drawing her chair to the win-dow to get the benefit of what light might filterbetween the high houses of Mayfair, she triedto come to a conclusion.

And now it was clear that there are only twoways of coming to a conclusion upon Victo-rian literature–one is to write it out in sixtyvolumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it intosix lines of the length of this one. Of the twocourses, economy, since time runs short, leadsus to choose the second; and so we proceed.Orlando then came to the conclusion (openinghalf-a-dozen books) that it was very odd thatthere was not a single dedication to a noble-

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man among them; next (turning over a vast pileof memoirs) that several of these writers hadfamily trees half as high as her own; next, thatit would be impolitic in the extreme to wrapa ten-pound note round the sugar tongs whenMiss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next (herewere half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate cen-tenaries by dining) that literature since it ateall these dinners must be growing very corpu-lent; next (she was invited to a score of lectureson the Influence of this upon that; the Classi-cal revival; the Romantic survival, and othertitles of the same engaging kind) that litera-ture since it listened to all these lectures mustbe growing very dry; next (here she attendeda reception given by a peeress) that literaturesince it wore all those fur tippets must be grow-ing very respectable; next (here she visited Car-lyle’s sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius

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since it needed all this coddling must be grow-ing very delicate; and so at last she reached herfinal conclusion, which was of the highest im-portance but which, as we have already muchoverpassed our limit of six lines, we must omit.

Orlando, having come to this conclusion,stood looking out of the window for a con-siderable space of time. For, when anybodycomes to a conclusion it is as if they had tossedthe ball over the net and must wait for theunseen antagonist to return it to them. Whatwould be sent her next from the colourless skyabove Chesterfield House, she wondered? Andwith her hands clasped, she stood for a con-siderable space of time wondering. Suddenlyshe started–and here we could only wish that,as on a former occasion, Purity, Chastity, andModesty would push the door ajar and pro-

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vide, at least, a breathing space in which wecould think how to wrap up what now has tobe told delicately, as a biographer should. Butno! Having thrown their white garment at thenaked Orlando and seen it fall short by sev-eral inches, these ladies had given up all in-tercourse with her these many years; and werenow otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, go-ing to happen this pale March morning to miti-gate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to shroud thisundeniable event whatever it may be? For af-ter giving that sudden, violent start, Orlando–but Heaven be praised, at this very momentthere struck up outside one of these frail, reedy,fluty, jerky, old-fashioned barrel-organs whichare still sometimes played by Italian organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the in-tervention, humble though it is, as if it werethe music of the spheres, and allow it, with

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all its gasps and groans, to fill this page withsound until the moment comes when it is im-possible to deny its coming; which the foot-man has seen coming and the maid-servant;and the reader will have to see too; for Or-lando herself is clearly unable to ignore it anylonger–let the barrel-organ sound and trans-port us on thought, which is no more than alittle boat, when music sounds, tossing on thewaves; on thought, which is, of all carriers, themost clumsy, the most erratic, over the rooftops and the back gardens where washing ishanging to–what is this place? Do you recog-nize the Green and in the middle the steeple,and the gate with a lion couchant on eitherside? 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,

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on the almond tree; so that to walk there is tobe thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust intothe earth in October; flowering now; and to bedreaming of more than can rightly be said, andto be taking from its case a cigarette or cigareven, and to be flinging a cloak under (as therhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, wait-ing the kingfisher, which, it is said, was seenonce to cross in the evening from bank to bank.

Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the king-fisher comes not.

Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneysand their smoke; behold the city clerks flash-ing by in their outrigger. Behold the old ladytaking her dog for a walk and the servant girlwearing her new hat for the first time not at theright angle. Behold them all. Though Heavenhas mercifully decreed that the secrets of all

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hearts are hidden so that we are lured on forever to suspect something, perhaps, that doesnot exist; still through our cigarette smoke, wesee blaze up and salute the splendid fulfilmentof natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for arat in a ditch; as once one saw blazing–suchsilly hops and skips the mind takes when itslops like this all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays–saw blazing a fire in a field againstminarets near Constantinople.

Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! di-vine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flow-ers and wine, though one fades and the otherintoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of Lon-don on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapelhymns about death, and anything, anythingthat interrupts and confounds the tapping oftypewriters and filing of letters and forging of

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links and chains, binding the Empire together.Hail even the crude, red bows on shop girls’lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped histhumb in red ink and scrawled a token in pass-ing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing frombank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural de-sire, whether it is what the male novelist saysit is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whateverform it comes, and may there be more forms,and stranger. For dark flows the stream–wouldit 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, habit-ual, under trees whose shade of an olive greendrowns the blue of the wing of the vanishingbird when he darts of a sudden from bank tobank.

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness,

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hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp im-age as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the wholeand tear us asunder and wound us and split usapart in the night when we would sleep; butsleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are groundto dust of infinite softness, water of dimnessinscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, likea mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on thesand at the bottom of sleep.

But wait! but wait! we are not going, thistime, visiting the blind land. Blue, like a matchstruck right in the ball of the innermost eye, heflies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the king-fisher; so that now floods back refluent like atide, the red, thick stream of life again; bub-bling, dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (forhow handy a rhyme is to pass us safe over the

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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 Bant-ing, the midwife, putting her first-born childinto Orlando’s arms. In other words Orlandowas 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 thesame sort is going to happen to-day, which isnot, by any means, the same day. No–for ifwe look out of the window, as Orlando wasdoing at the moment, we shall see that ParkLane itself has considerably changed. Indeedone might stand there ten minutes or more,as Orlando stood now, without seeing a singlebarouche landau. ‘Look at that!’ she exclaimed,some days later when an absurd truncated car-

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riage without any horses began to glide aboutof its own accord. A carriage without anyhorses indeed! She was called away just as shesaid that, but came back again after a time andhad another look out of the window. It was oddsort of weather nowadays. The sky itself, shecould not help thinking, had changed. It wasno longer so thick, so watery, so prismatic nowthat King Edward–see, there he was, steppingout of his neat brougham to go and visit a cer-tain lady opposite–had succeeded Queen Vic-toria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze;the sky seemed made of metal, which in hotweather tarnished verdigris, copper colour ororange as metal does in a fog. It was a littlealarming–this shrinkage. Everything seemedto have shrunk. Driving past BuckinghamPalace last night, there was not a trace of thatvast erection which she had thought everlast-

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ing; top hats, widows’ weeds, trumpets, tele-scopes, wreaths, all had vanished and left nota stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement.But it was now–after another interval she hadcome back again to her favourite station in thewindow–now, in the evening, that the changewas most remarkable. Look at the lights inthe houses! At a touch, a whole room was lit;hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was pre-cisely the same as the other. One could seeeverything in the little square-shaped boxes;there was no privacy; none of those lingeringshadows and odd corners that there used to be;none of those women in aprons carrying wob-bly lamps which they put down carefully onthis table and on that. At a touch, the wholeroom was bright. And the sky was bright allnight long; and the pavements were bright; ev-erything was bright. She came back again at

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mid-day. How narrow women have grownlately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight,shining, identical. And men’s faces were asbare as the palm of one’s hand. The drynessof the atmosphere brought out the colour ineverything and seemed to stiffen the musclesof the cheeks. It was harder to cry now. Wa-ter was hot in two seconds. Ivy had perishedor been scraped off houses. Vegetables wereless fertile; families were much smaller. Cur-tains and covers had been frizzled up and thewalls were bare so that new brilliantly colouredpictures of real things like streets, umbrellas,apples, were hung in frames, or painted uponthe wood. There was something definite anddistinct about the age, which reminded her ofthe eighteenth century, except that there wasa distraction, a desperation–as she was think-ing this, the immensely long tunnel in which

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she seemed to have been travelling for hun-dreds of years widened; the light poured in; herthoughts became mysteriously tightened andstrung up as if a piano tuner had put his keyin her back and stretched the nerves very taut;at the same time her hearing quickened; shecould hear every whisper and crackle in theroom so that the clock ticking on the mantel-piece beat like a hammer. And so for someseconds the light went on becoming brighterand brighter, and she saw everything more andmore clearly and the clock ticked louder andlouder until there was a terrific explosion rightin her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been vi-olently struck on the head. Ten times she wasstruck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning.It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. Itwas the present moment.

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No one need wonder that Orlando started,pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale.For what more terrifying revelation can therebe than that it is the present moment? Thatwe survive the shock at all is only possiblebecause the past shelters us on one side andthe future on another. But we have no timenow for reflections; Orlando was terribly latealready. She ran downstairs, she jumped intoher motorcar, she pressed the self-starter andwas off. Vast blue blocks of building roseinto the air; the red cowls of chimneys werespotted irregularly across the sky; the roadshone like silver-headed nails; omnibuses boredown upon her with sculptured white-faceddrivers; she noticed sponges, bird-cages, boxesof green American cloth. But she did not al-low these sights to sink into her mind even thefraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow

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plank of the present, lest she should fall intothe raging torrent beneath. ‘Why don’t youlook where you’re going to?...Put your handout, can’t you?’–that was all she said sharply,as if the words were jerked out of her. Forthe streets were immensely crowded; peoplecrossed without looking where they were go-ing. People buzzed and hummed round theplate-glass windows within which one couldsee a glow of red, a blaze of yellow, as if theywere bees, Orlando thought–but her thoughtthat they were bees was violently snipped offand she saw, regaining perspective with oneflick of her eye, that they were bodies. ‘Whydon’t you look where you’re going?’ shesnapped out.

At last, however, she drew up at Marshall& Snelgrove’s and went into the shop.

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Shade and scent enveloped her. The presentfell from her like drops of scalding water. Lightswayed up and down like thin stuffs puffedout by a summer breeze. She took a list fromher bag and began reading in a curious stiffvoice at first, as if she were holding the words–boy’s boots, bath salts, sardines–under a tapof many-coloured water. She watched themchange as the light fell on them. Bath and bootsbecame blunt, obtuse; sardines serrated itselflike a saw. So she stood in the ground-floordepartment of Messrs Marshall & Snel-grove; looked this way and that; snuffed thissmell and that and thus wasted some seconds.Then she got into the lift, for the good rea-son that the door stood open; and was shotsmoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now,she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eigh-teenth century we knew how everything was

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done; but here I rise through the air; I listen tovoices in America; I see men flying–but howits done I can’t even begin to wonder. So mybelief in magic returns. Now the lift gave alittle jerk as it stopped at the first floor; andshe had a vision of innumerable coloured stuffsflaunting in a breeze from which came distinct,strange smells; and each time the lift stoppedand flung its doors open, there was anotherslice of the world displayed with all the smellsof that world clinging to it. She was remindedof the river off Wapping in the time of Eliz-abeth, where the treasure ships and the mer-chant ships used to anchor. How richly and cu-riously they had smelt! How well she remem-bered the feel of rough rubies running throughher fingers when she dabbled them in a trea-sure sack! And then lying with Sukey–or what-ever her name was–and having Cumberland’s

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lantern flashed on them! The Cumberlandshad a house in Portland Place now and she hadlunched with them the other day and ventureda little joke with the old man about almshousesin the Sheen Road. He had winked. But hereas the lift could go no higher, she must get out–Heaven knows into what ‘department’ as theycalled it. She stood still to consult her shoppinglist, but was blessed if she could see, as the listbade her, bath salts, or boy’s boots anywhereabout. And indeed, she was about to descendagain, without buying anything, but was savedfrom that outrage by saying aloud automati-cally the last item on her list; which happenedto be ‘sheets for a double bed’.

‘Sheets for a double bed,’ she said to a manat a counter and, by a dispensation of Provi-dence, it was sheets that the man at that partic-

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ular counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch,no, Grimsditch was dead; Bartholomew, no,Bartholomew was dead; Louise then–Louisehad come to her in a great taking the otherday, for she had found a hole in the bottomof the sheet in the royal bed. Many kingsand queens had slept there–Elizabeth; James;Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonderthe sheet had a hole in it. But Louise was pos-itive she knew who had done it. It was thePrince Consort.

‘Sale bosch!’ she said (for there had been an-other war; this time against the Germans).

‘Sheets for a double bed,’ Orlando repeateddreamily, for a double bed with a silver coun-terpane in a room fitted in a taste which shenow thought perhaps a little vulgar–all in sil-ver; but she had furnished it when she had a

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passion for that metal. While the man went toget sheets for a double bed, she took out a lit-tle looking-glass and a powder puff. Womenwere not nearly as roundabout in their ways,she thought, powdering herself with the great-est unconcern, as they had been when she her-self first turned woman and lay on the deckof the “Enamoured Lady”. She gave her nosethe right tint deliberately. She never touchedher cheeks. Honestly, though she was nowthirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. Shelooked just as pouting, as sulky, as handsome,as rosy (like a million-candled Christmas tree,Sasha had said) as she had done that day on theice, when the Thames was frozen and they hadgone skating–

‘The best Irish linen, Ma’am,’ said the shop-man, spreading the sheets on the counter,–and

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they had met an old woman picking up sticks.Here, as she was fingering the linen abstract-edly, one of the swing-doors between the de-partments opened and let through, perhapsfrom the fancy-goods department, a whiff ofscent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles,and the scent curved like a shell round a figure–was it a boy’s or was it a girl’s–young, slender,seductive–a girl, by God! furred, pearled, inRussian trousers; but faithless, faithless!

‘Faithless!’ cried Orlando (the man hadgone) and all the shop seemed to pitch and tosswith yellow water and far off she saw the mastsof the Russian ship standing out to sea, andthen, miraculously (perhaps the door openedagain) the conch which the scent had made be-came a platform, a dais, off which stepped a fat,furred woman, marvellously well preserved,

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seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke’s mistress;she who, leaning over the banks of the Volga,eating sandwiches, had watched men drown;and began walking down the shop towardsher.

‘Oh Sasha!’ Orlando cried. Really, she wasshocked that she should have come to this; shehad grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowedher head over the linen so that this apparitionof a grey woman in fur, and a girl in Russiantrousers, with all these smells of wax candles,white flowers, and old ships that it broughtwith it might pass behind her back unseen.

‘Any napkins, towels, dusters today,Ma’am?’ the shopman persisted. And it isenormously to the credit of the shoppinglist, which Orlando now consulted, that shewas able to reply with every appearance of

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composure, that there was only one thing inthe world she wanted and that was bath salts;which was in another department.

But descending in the lift again–so insid-ious is the repetition of any scene–she wasagain sunk far beneath the present moment;and thought when the lift bumped on theground, that she heard a pot broken againsta river bank. As for finding the right de-partment, whatever it might be, she stoodengrossed among the handbags, deaf to thesuggestions of all the polite, black, combed,sprightly shop assistants, who descending asthey did equally and some of them, perhaps,as proudly, even from such depths of the pastas she did, chose to let down the imperviousscreen of the present so that today they ap-peared shop assistants in Marshall & Snel-

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grove’s merely. Orlando stood there hesitating.Through the great glass doors she could see thetraffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed topile itself upon omnibus and then to jerk itselfapart. So the ice blocks had pitched and tossedthat day on the Thames. An old nobleman–in furred slippers had sat astride one of them.There he went–she could see him now–callingdown maledictions upon the Irish rebels. Hehad sunk there, where her car stood.

‘Time has passed over me,’ she thought, try-ing to collect herself; ‘this is the oncome of mid-dle age. How strange it is! Nothing is anylonger one thing. I take up a handbag and Ithink of an old bumboat woman frozen in theice. Someone lights a pink candle and I seea girl in Russian trousers. When I step outof doors–as I do now,’ here she stepped on to

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the pavement of Oxford Street, ‘what is it thatI taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I seemountains. Turkey? India? Persia?’ Her eyesfilled with tears.

That Orlando had gone a little too far fromthe present moment will, perhaps, strike thereader who sees her now preparing to get intoher motor-car with her eyes full of tears and vi-sions of Persian mountains. And indeed, it can-not be denied that the most successful practi-tioners of the art of life, often unknown peopleby the way, somehow contrive to synchronizethe sixty or seventy different times which beatsimultaneously in every normal human systemso that when eleven strikes, all the rest chimein unison, and the present is neither a vio-lent disruption nor completely forgotten in thepast. Of them we can justly say that they live

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precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two yearsallotted them on the tombstone. Of the restsome we know to be dead though they walkamong us; some are not yet born though theygo through the forms of life; others are hun-dreds of years old though they call themselvesthirty-six. The true length of a person’s life,whatever the “Dictionary of National Biogra-phy” may say, is always a matter of dispute.For it is a difficult business–this time-keeping;nothing more quickly disorders it than contactwith any of the arts; and it may have beenher love of poetry that was to blame for mak-ing Orlando lose her shopping list and starthome without the sardines, the bath salts, orthe boots. Now as she stood with her handon the door of her motor-car, the present againstruck her on the head. Eleven times she wasviolently assaulted.

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‘Confound it all!’ she cried, for it is a greatshock to the nervous system, hearing a clockstrike–so much so that for some time nowthere is nothing to be said of her save thatshe frowned slightly, changed her gears ad-mirably, and cried out, as before, ‘Look whereyou’re going!’ ‘Don’t you know your ownmind?’ ‘Why didn’t you say so then?’ whilethe motor-car shot, swung, squeezed, and slid,for she was an expert driver, down RegentStreet, down Haymarket, down Northumber-land Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to theleft, straight on, to the right, straight on again...

The Old Kent Road was very crowded onThursday, the eleventh of October 1928. Peo-ple spilt off the pavement. There were womenwith shopping bags. Children ran out. Therewere sales at drapers’ shops. Streets widened

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and narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk to-gether. Here was a market. Here a funeral.Here a procession with banners upon whichwas written ‘Ra–Un’, but what else? Meat wasvery red. Butchers stood at the door. Womenalmost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin–that was over a porch. A woman looked outof a bedroom window, profoundly contempla-tive, and very still. Applejohn and Applebed,Undert–. Nothing could be seen whole or readfrom start to finish. What was seen begun–liketwo friends starting to meet each other acrossthe street–was never seen ended. After twentyminutes the body and mind were like scraps oftorn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed,the process of motoring fast out of London somuch resembles the chopping up small of iden-tity which precedes unconsciousness and per-haps death itself that it is an open question in

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what sense Orlando can be said to have existedat the present moment. Indeed we should havegiven her over for a person entirely disassem-bled were it not that here, at last, one greenscreen was held out on the right, against whichthe little bits of paper fell more slowly; andthen another was held out on the left so thatone could see the separate scraps now turningover by themselves in the air; and then greenscreens were held continuously on either side,so that her mind regained the illusion of hold-ing things within itself and she saw a cottage, afarmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.

When this happened, Orlando heaved a sighof relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minuteor two in silence. Then she called hesitat-ingly, as if the person she wanted might notbe there, ‘Orlando? For if there are (at a ven-

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ture) seventy-six different times all ticking inthe mind at once, how many different peo-ple are there not–Heaven help us–all havinglodgment at one time or another in the humanspirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two.So that it is the most usual thing in the worldfor a person to call, directly they are alone, Or-lando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that,Come, come! I’m sick to death of this partic-ular self. I want another. Hence, the aston-ishing changes we see in our friends. But it isnot altogether plain sailing, either, for thoughone may say, as Orlando said (being out in thecountry and needing another self presumably)Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may notcome; these selves of which we are built up,one on top of another, as plates are piled ona waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere,sympathies, little constitutions and rights of

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their own, call them what you will (and formany of these things there is no name) so thatone will only come if it is raining, another ina room with green curtains, another when MrsJones is not there, another if you can promise ita glass of wine–and so on; for everybody canmultiply from his own experience the differ-ent terms which his different selves have madewith him–and some are too wildly ridiculousto be mentioned in print at all.

So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called‘Orlando?’ with a note of interrogation in hervoice and waited. Orlando did not come.

‘All right then,’ Orlando said, with the goodhumour people practise on these occasions;and tried another. For she had a great varietyof selves to call upon, far more than we havebeen able to find room for, since a biography

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is considered complete if it merely accounts forsix or seven selves, whereas a person may wellhave as many thousand. Choosing then, onlythose selves we have found room for, Orlandomay now have called on the boy who cut thenigger’s head down; the boy who strung it upagain; the boy who sat on the hill; the boywho saw the poet; the boy who handed theQueen the bowl of rose water; or she may havecalled upon the young man who fell in lovewith Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon theAmbassador; or upon the Soldier; or upon theTraveller; or she may have wanted the womanto come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; theHermit; the girl in love with life; the Patronessof Letters; the woman who called Mar (mean-ing hot baths and evening fires) or Shelmerdine(meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bon-throp (meaning the death we die daily) or all

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three together–which meant more things thanwe have space to write out–all were differentand she may have called upon any one of them.

Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for weare now in the region of ‘perhaps’ and ‘ap-pears’) was that the one she needed most keptaloof, for she was, to hear her talk, changingher selves as quickly as she drove–there was anew one at every corner–as happens when, forsome unaccountable reason, the conscious self,which is the uppermost, and has the power todesire, wishes to be nothing but one self. Thisis what some people call the true self, and it is,they say, compact of all the selves we have itin us to be; commanded and locked up by theCaptain self, the Key self, which amalgamatesand controls them all. Orlando was certainlyseeking this self as the reader can judge from

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overhearing her talk as she drove (and if it isrambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, andsometimes unintelligible, it is the reader’s faultfor listening to a lady talking to herself; we onlycopy her words as she spoke them, adding inbrackets which self in our opinion is speaking,but in this we may well be wrong).

‘What then? Who then?’ she said. ‘Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman. Yes, but a mil-lion other things as well. A snob am I? Thegarter in the hall? The leopards? My ances-tors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxuri-ous, vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in).Don’t care a damn if I am. Truthful? I thinkso. Generous? Oh, but that don’t count (herea new self came in). Lying in bed of a morn-ing listening to the pigeons on fine linen; sil-ver dishes; wine; maids; footmen. Spoilt? Per-

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haps. Too many things for nothing. Hence mybooks (here she mentioned fifty classical titles;which represented, so we think, the early ro-mantic works that she tore up). Facile, glib,romantic. But (here another self came in) aduffer, a fumbler. More clumsy I couldn’t be.And–and–(here she hesitated for a word and ifwe suggest ‘Love’ we may be wrong, but cer-tainly she laughed and blushed and then criedout–) A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Arch-duke! Blue-bottles on the ceiling! (here anotherself came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she wassunk in gloom: tears actually shaped them-selves and she had long given over crying).Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.)I love trees (she was passing a clump) grow-ing there a thousand years. And barns (shepassed a tumbledown barn at the edge of theroad). And sheep dogs (here one came trotting

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across the road. She carefully avoided it). Andthe night. But people (here another self camein). People? (She repeated it as a question.) Idon’t know. Chattering, spiteful, always tellinglies. (Here she turned into the High Street ofher native town, which was crowded, for it wasmarket day, with farmers, and shepherds, andold women with hens in baskets.) I like peas-ants. I understand crops. But (here another selfcame skipping over the top of her mind like thebeam from a lighthouse). Fame! (She laughed.)Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographsin the evening papers (here she alluded to the‘Oak Tree’ and ‘The Burdett Coutts’ MemorialPrize which she had won; and we must snatchspace to remark how discomposing it is for herbiographer that this culmination to which thewhole book moved, this peroration with whichthe book was to end, should be dashed from

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us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth isthat when we write of a woman, everything isout of place–culminations and perorations; theaccent never falls where it does with a man).Fame! she repeated. A poet–a charlatan; bothevery morning as regularly as the post comesin. To dine, to meet; to meet, to dine; fame–fame! (She had here to slow down to passthrough the crowd of market people. But noone noticed her. A porpoise in a fishmonger’sshop attracted far more attention than a ladywho had won a prize and might, had she cho-sen, have worn three coronets one on top of an-other on her brow.) Driving very slowly shenow hummed as if it were part of an old song,‘With my guineas I’ll buy flowering trees, flow-ering trees, flowering trees and walk amongmy flowering trees and tell my sons what fameis’. So she hummed, and now all her words be-

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gan to sag here and there like a barbaric neck-lace of heavy beads. ‘And walk among myflowering trees,’ she sang, accenting the wordsstrongly, ‘and see the moon rise slow, the wag-gons go...’ Here she stopped short and lookedahead of her intently at the bonnet of the car inprofound meditation.

‘He sat at Twitchett’s table,’ she mused, ‘witha dirty ruff on...Was it old Mr Baker come tomeasure the timber? Or was it Sh-p–re? (forwhen we speak names we deeply reverence toourselves we never speak them whole.) Shegazed for ten minutes ahead of her, letting thecar come almost to a standstill.

‘Haunted!’ she cried, suddenly pressing theaccelerator. ‘Haunted! ever since I was a child.There flies the wild goose. It flies past the win-dow out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the

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steering-wheel tighter) and stretched after it.But the goose flies too fast. I’ve seen it, here–there–there–England, Persia, Italy. Always itflies fast out to sea and always I fling after itwords like nets (here she flung her hand out)which shrivel as I’ve seen nets shrivel drawnon deck with only sea-weed in them; and some-times there’s an inch of silver–six words–in thebottom of the net. But never the great fish wholives in the coral groves.’ Here she bent herhead, pondering deeply.

And it was at this moment, when she hadceased to call ‘Orlando’ and was deep inthoughts of something else, that the Orlandowhom she had called came of its own accord; aswas proved by the change that now came overher (she had passed through the lodge gatesand was entering the park).

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The whole of her darkened and settled, aswhen some foil whose addition makes theround and solidity of a surface is added to it,and the shallow becomes deep and the neardistant; and all is contained as water is con-tained by the sides of a well. So she was nowdarkened, stilled, and become, with the ad-dition of this Orlando, what is called, rightlyor wrongly, a single self, a real self. And shefell silent. For it is probable that when peopletalk aloud, the selves (of which there may bemore than two thousand) are conscious of dis-severment, and are trying to communicate, butwhen communication is established they fallsilent.

Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curv-ing drive between the elms and oaks throughthe falling turf of the park whose fall was so

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gentle that had it been water it would havespread the beach with a smooth green tide.Planted here and in solemn groups were beechtrees and oak trees. The deer stepped amongthem, one white as snow, another with its headon one side, for some wire netting had caughtin its horns. All this, the trees, deer, and turf,she observed with the greatest satisfaction as ifher mind had become a fluid that flowed roundthings and enclosed them completely. Nextminute she drew up in the courtyard where,for so many hundred years she had come, onhorseback or in coach and six, with men rid-ing before or coming after; where plumes hadtossed, torches flashed, and the same floweringtrees that let their leaves drop now had shakentheir blossoms. Now she was alone. The au-tumn leaves were falling. The porter openedthe great gates. ‘Morning, James,’ she said,

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‘there’re some things in the car. Will you bring‘em in?’ words of no beauty, interest, or signifi-cance themselves, it will be conceded, but nowso plumped out with meaning that they fell likeripe nuts from a tree, and proved that whenthe shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed outwith meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly.This was true indeed of every movement andaction now, usual though they were; so that tosee Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whip-cord breeches and leather jacket, which she didin less than three minutes, was to be ravishedwith the beauty of movement as if MadameLopokova were using her highest art. Thenshe strode into the dining-room where her oldfriends Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison regardedher demurely at first as who should say Here’sthe prize winner! but when they reflected thattwo hundred guineas was in question, they

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nodded their heads approvingly. Two hun-dred guineas, they seemed to say; two hundredguineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herselfa slice of bread and ham, clapped the two to-gether and began to eat, striding up and downthe room, thus shedding her company habitsin a second, without thinking. After five or sixsuch turns, she tossed off a glass of red Span-ish wine, and, filling another which she carriedin her hand, strode down the long corridor andthrough a dozen drawing-rooms and so begana perambulation of the house, attended by suchelk-hounds and spaniels as chose to follow her.

This, too, was all in the day’s routine. Assoon would she come home and leave her owngrandmother without a kiss as come back andleave the house unvisited. She fancied thatthe rooms brightened as she came in; stirred,

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opened their eyes as if they had been dozing inher absence. She fancied, too, that, hundredsand thousands of times as she had seen them,they never looked the same twice, as if so longa life as theirs had stored in them a myriadmoods which changed with winter and sum-mer, bright weather and dark, and her own for-tunes and the people’s characters who visitedthem. Polite, they always were to strangers, buta little weary: with her, they were entirely openand at their ease. Why not indeed? They hadknown each other for close on four centuriesnow. They had nothing to conceal. She knewtheir sorrows and joys. She knew what ageeach part of them was and its little secrets–ahidden drawer, a concealed cupboard, or somedeficiency perhaps, such as a part made up,or added later. They, too, knew her in all hermoods and changes. She had hidden noth-

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ing from them; had come to them as boy andwoman, crying and dancing, brooding and gay.In this window-seat, she had written her firstverses; in that chapel, she had been married.And she would be buried here, she reflected,kneeling on the window-sill in the long galleryand sipping her Spanish wine. Though shecould hardly fancy it, the body of the heraldicleopard would be making yellow pools on thefloor the day they lowered her to lie amongher ancestors. She, who believed in no im-mortality, could not help feeling that her soulwould come and go forever with the reds onthe panels and the greens on the sofa. For theroom–she had strolled into the Ambassador’sbedroom–shone like a shell that has lain at thebottom of the sea for centuries and has beencrusted over and painted a million tints by thewater; it was rose and yellow, green and sand-

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coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescentand as empty. No Ambassador would eversleep there again. Ah, but she knew where theheart of the house still beat. Gently openinga door, she stood on the threshold so that (asshe fancied) the room could not see her andwatched the tapestry rising and falling on theeternal faint breeze which never failed to moveit. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. Theheart still beat, she thought, however faintly,however far withdrawn; the frail indomitableheart of the immense building.

Now, calling her troop of dogs to her shepassed down the gallery whose floor was laidwith whole oak trees sawn across. Rows ofchairs with all their velvets faded stood rangedagainst the wall holding their arms out forElizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might

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be, for Cecil, who never came. The sightmade her gloomy. She unhooked the rope thatfenced them off. She sat on the Queen’s chair;she opened a manuscript book lying on LadyBetty’s table; she stirred her fingers in the agedrose leaves; she brushed her short hair withKing James’ silver brushes: she bounced upand down upon his bed (but no King wouldever sleep there again, for all Louise’s newsheets) and pressed her cheek against the wornsilver counterpane that lay upon it. But ev-erywhere were little lavender bags to keep themoth out and printed notices, ‘Please do nottouch’, which, though she had put them thereherself, seemed to rebuke her. The house wasno longer hers entirely, she sighed. It belongedto time now; to history; was past the touchand control of the living. Never would beer bespilt here any more, she thought (she was in the

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bedroom that had been old Nick Greene’s), orholes burnt in the carpet. Never two hundredservants come running and brawling downthe corridors with warming pans and greatbranches for the great fireplaces. Never wouldale be brewed and candles made and sad-dles fashioned and stone shaped in the work-shops outside the house. Hammers and malletswere silent now. Chairs and beds were empty;tankards of silver and gold were locked in glasscases. The great wings of silence beat up anddown the empty house.

So she sat at the end of the gallery with herdogs couched round her, in Queen Elizabeth’shard armchair. The gallery stretched far awayto a point where the light almost failed. Itwas as a tunnel bored deep into the past. Asher eyes peered down it, she could see people

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laughing and talking; the great men she hadknown; Dryden, Swift, and Pope; and states-men in colloquy; and lovers dallying in thewindow-seats; and people eating and drinkingat the long tables; and the wood smoke curl-ing round their heads and making them sneezeand cough. Still further down, she saw sets ofsplendid dancers formed for the quadrille. Afluty, frail, but nevertheless stately music beganto play. An organ boomed. A coffin was borneinto the chapel. A marriage procession cameout of it. Armed men with helmets left for thewars. They brought banners back from Flod-den and Poitiers and stuck them on the wall.The long gallery filled itself thus, and still peer-ing further, she thought she could make outat the very end, beyond the Elizabethans andthe Tudors, some one older, further, darker, acowled figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who

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went with his hands clasped, and a book inthem, murmuring–

Like thunder, the stable clock struck four.Never did any earthquake so demolish a wholetown. The gallery and all its occupants fell topowder. Her own face, that had been dark andsombre as she gazed, was lit as by an explo-sion of gunpowder. In this same light every-thing near her showed with extreme distinct-ness. She saw two flies circling round and no-ticed the blue sheen on their bodies; she sawa knot in the wood where her foot was, andher dog’s ear twitching. At the same time,she heard a bough creaking in the garden, asheep coughing in the park, a swift screamingpast the window. Her own body quivered andtingled as if suddenly stood naked in a hardfrost. Yet, she kept, as she had not done when

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the clock struck ten in London, complete com-posure (for she was now one and entire, andpresented, it may be, a larger surface to theshock of time). She rose, but without precipita-tion, called her dogs, and went firmly but withgreat alertness of movement down the stair-case and out into the garden. Here the shad-ows of the plants were miraculously distinct.She noticed the separate grains of earth in theflower beds as if she had a microscope stuckto her eye. She saw the intricacy of the twigsof every tree. Each blade of grass was distinctand the marking of veins and petals. She sawStubbs, the gardener, coming along the path,and every button on his gaiters was visible;she saw Betty and Prince, the cart horses, andnever had she marked so clearly the white staron Betty’s forehead, and the three long hairsthat fell down below the rest on Prince’s tail.

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Out in the quadrangle the old grey walls ofthe house looked like a scraped new photo-graph; she heard the loud speaker condensingon the terrace a dance tune that people werelistening to in the red velvet opera house at Vi-enna. Braced and strung up by the present mo-ment she was also strangely afraid, as if when-ever the gulf of time gaped and let a secondthrough some unknown danger might comewith it. The tension was too relentless and toorigorous to be endured long without discom-fort. She walked more briskly than she liked,as if her legs were moved for her, through thegarden and out into the park. Here she forcedherself, by a great effort, to stop by the carpen-ter’s shop, and to stand stock-still watching JoeStubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was stand-ing with her eye fixed on his hand when thequarter struck. It hurtled through her like a

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meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. Shesaw with disgusting vividness that the thumbon Joe’s right hand was without a finger nailand there was a raised saucer of pink fleshwhere the nail should have been. The sightwas so repulsive that she felt faint for a mo-ment, but in that moment’s darkness, whenher eyelids flickered, she was relieved of thepressure of the present. There was somethingstrange in the shadow that the flicker of hereyes cast, something which (as anyone can testfor himself by looking now at the sky) is alwaysabsent from the present–whence its terror, itsnondescript character–something one tremblesto pin through the body with a name and callbeauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow with-out substance or quality of its own, yet has thepower to change whatever it adds itself to. Thisshadow now, while she flickered her eye in her

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faintness in the carpenter’s shop, stole out, andattaching itself to the innumerable sights shehad been receiving, composed them into some-thing tolerable, comprehensible. Her mind be-gan to toss like the sea. Yes, she thought, heav-ing a deep sigh of relief, as she turned fromthe carpenter’s shop to climb the hill, I can be-gin to live again. I am by the Serpentine, shethought, the little boat is climbing through thewhite arch of a thousand deaths. I am about tounderstand...

Those were her words, spoken quite dis-tinctly, but we cannot conceal the fact thatshe was now a very indifferent witness to thetruth of what was before her and might eas-ily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an oldman called Smith for one who was called Jonesand was no relation of his whatever. For the

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shadow of faintness which the thumb withouta nail had cast had deepened now, at the backof her brain (which is the part furthest fromsight), into a pool where things dwell in dark-ness so deep that what they are we scarcelyknow. She now looked down into this poolor sea in which everything is reflected–and, in-deed, some say that all our most violent pas-sions, and art and religion, are the reflectionswhich we see in the dark hollow at the back ofthe head when the visible world is obscured forthe time. She looked there now, long, deeply,profoundly, and immediately the ferny path upthe hill along which she was walking becamenot entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine;the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies andgentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall May-fair houses; everything was partly something

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else, as if her mind had become a forest withglades branching here and there; things camenearer, and further, and mingled and sepa-rated and made the strangest alliances andcombinations in an incessant chequer of lightand shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound, chased a rabbit and so reminded herthat it must be about half past four–it was in-deed twenty-three minutes to six–she forgotthe time.

The ferny path led, with many turns andwindings, higher and higher to the oak tree,which stood on the top. The tree had grownbigger, sturdier, and more knotted since shehad known it, somewhere about the year 1588,but it was still in the prime of life. The lit-tle sharply frilled leaves were still flutteringthickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the

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ground, she felt the bones of the tree runningout like ribs from a spine this way and that be-neath her. She liked to think that she was rid-ing the back of the world. She liked to attachherself to something hard. As she flung herselfdown a little square book bound in red clothfell from the breast of her leather jacket–herpoem ‘The Oak Tree’. ‘I should have broughta trowel,’ she reflected. The earth was so shal-low over the roots that it seemed doubtful ifshe could do as she meant and bury the bookhere. Besides, the dogs would dig it up. Noluck ever attends these symbolical celebrations,she thought. Perhaps it would be as well thento do without them. She had a little speechon the tip of her tongue which she meant tospeak over the book as she buried it. (It was acopy of the first edition, signed by author andartist.) ‘I bury this as a tribute,’ she was go-

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ing to have said, ‘a return to the land of whatthe land has given me,’ but Lord! once onebegan mouthing words aloud, how silly theysounded! She was reminded of old Greene get-ting upon a platform the other day comparingher with Milton (save for his blindness) andhanding her a cheque for two hundred guineas.She had thought then, of the oak tree here onits hill, and what has that got to do with this,she had wondered? What has praise and fameto do with poetry? What has seven editions(the book had already gone into no less) got todo with the value of it? Was not writing po-etry a secret transaction, a voice answering avoice? So that all this chatter and praise andblame and meeting people who admired oneand meeting people who did not admire onewas as ill suited as could be to the thing itself–avoice answering a voice. What could have been

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more secret, she thought, more slow, and likethe intercourse of lovers, than the stammeringanswer she had made all these years to the oldcrooning song of the woods, and the farms andthe brown horses standing at the gate, neck toneck, and the smithy and the kitchen and thefields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips,grass, and the garden blowing irises and frit-illaries?

So she let her book lie unburied and di-shevelled on the ground, and watched the vastview, varied like an ocean floor this eveningwith the sun lightening it and the shadowsdarkening it. There was a village with a churchtower among elm trees; a grey domed manorhouse in a park; a spark of light burning onsome glass-house; a farmyard with yellow cornstacks. The fields were marked with black tree

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clumps, and beyond the fields stretched longwoodlands, and there was the gleam of a river,and then hills again. In the far distance Snow-don’s crags broke white among the clouds; shesaw the far Scottish hills and the wild tidesthat swirl about the Hebrides. She listenedfor the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No–only the wind blew. There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. ‘Andthere’, she thought, letting her eyes, which hadbeen looking at these far distances, drop oncemore to the land beneath her, ‘was my landonce: that Castle between the downs was mine;and all that moor running almost to the seawas mine.’ Here the landscape (it must havebeen some trick of the fading light) shook it-self, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance ofhouses, castles, and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey

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were before her. It was blazing noon. Shelooked straight at the baked hill-side. Goatscropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eaglesoared above. The raucous voice of old Rus-tum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, ‘What isyour antiquity and your race, and your posses-sions compared with this? What do you needwith four hundred bedrooms and silver lids onall your dishes, and housemaids dusting?’

At this moment some church clock chimedin the valley. The tent-like landscape collapsedand fell. The present showered down upon herhead once more, but now that the light wasfading, gentlier than before, calling into viewnothing detailed, nothing small, but only mistyfields, cottages with lamps in them, the slum-bering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped lightpushing the darkness before it along some lane.

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Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, shecould not say. Night had come–night that sheloved of all times, night in which the reflectionsin the dark pool of the mind shine more clearlythan by day. It was not necessary to faint nowin order to look deep into the darkness wherethings shape themselves and to see in the poolof the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl inRussian trousers, now a toy boat on the Ser-pentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where itstorms in great waves past Cape Horn. Shelooked into the darkness. There was her hus-band’s brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, itwent, and up and up. The white arch of a thou-sand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridicu-lous man, always sailing, so uselessly, roundCape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brigwas through the arch and out on the other side;it was safe at last!

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‘Ecstasy!’ she cried, ‘ecstasy!’ And then thewind sank, the waters grew calm; and she sawthe waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.

‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!’ shecried, standing by the oak tree.

The beautiful, glittering name fell out of thesky like a steel-blue feather. She watched itfall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling ar-row that cleaves the deep air beautifully. Hewas coming, as he always came, in momentsof dead calm; when the wave rippled and thespotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in theautumn woods; when the leopard was still; themoon was on the waters, and nothing movedin between sky and sea. Then he came.

All was still now. It was near midnight. Themoon rose slowly over the weald. Its lightraised a phantom castle upon earth. There

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stood the great house with all its windowsrobed in silver. Of wall or substance there wasnone. All was phantom. All was still. All waslit as for the coming of a dead Queen. Gazingbelow her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing inthe courtyard, and torches flickering and shad-ows kneeling. A Queen once more steppedfrom her chariot.

‘The house is at your service, Ma’am,’ shecried, curtseying deeply. ‘Nothing has beenchanged. The dead Lord, my father, shall leadyou in.’

As she spoke, the first stroke of midnightsounded. The cold breeze of the presentbrushed her face with its little breath of fear.She looked anxiously into the sky. It was darkwith clouds now. The wind roared in her ears.But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar

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of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer.‘Here! Shel, here!’ she cried, baring her

breast to the moon (which now showed bright)so that her pearls glowed–like the eggs of somevast moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out ofthe clouds and stood over her head. It hoveredabove her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphores-cent flare in the darkness.

And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine seacaptain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leaptto the ground, there sprang up over his heada single wild bird.

‘It is the goose!’ Orlando cried. ‘The wildgoose...’

And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded;the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, theeleventh of October, Nineteen hundred andTwenty Eight.

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THE END

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