cks torn from the
shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the
damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt
Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the
strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground.
Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the
first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said
(reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought
and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir
Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and
Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that
drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating,
what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of
Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table - and again he paused. Like
an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and
the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they
should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead,
embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing - and
Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out
that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words
were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the
rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so
arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the
English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition
will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed
good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was
in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at
ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted
his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now
laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic
and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the
fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest
genius or the greatest fool in the world.
It was to settle this last question that he decided after many months
of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and communicate with
the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham, of Norfolk,
who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless
put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred,
fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory
about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all
the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the
bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured.
They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow
between their lips - which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr
Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit
behind a curtain and hear them talk. Even the imagination of that bold and
various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used
to talk about - a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards - seem brutish in
the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a
scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books. He had never
been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still, blush, and stride
like a grenadier in a ladies' drawing-room. He had twice fallen, in sheer
abstraction, from his horse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea's fan once while
making a rhyme. Eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness
for the life of society, an ineffable hope, that all the turbulence of his
youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the
country proved that he himself belonged to 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 night of the great flood he was happy.
He now commissioned Mr Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr Nicholas
Greene of Clifford's Inn a document which set forth Orlando's admiration for
his works (for Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time) and his
desire to make his acquaintance; which he scarcely dared ask; for he had
nothing to offer in return; but if Mr Nicholas Greene would condescend to
visit him, a coach and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at
whatever hour Mr Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando's
house. One may fill up the phrases which then followed; and figure Orlando's
delight when, in no long time, Mr Greene signified his acceptance of the
Noble Lord's invitation; took his place in the coach and was set down in the
hall to the south of the main building punctually at seven o'clock on
Monday, April the twenty-first.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had
stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the land had come
there; and the sternest warriors. Banners hung there which had been at
Flodden and at Agincourt. There were displayed the painted coats of arms
with their lions and their leopards and their coronets. There were the long
tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast
fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with
its million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes.
Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his slouched
hat and black doublet, carrying in one hand a small bag.
That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly disappointed was
inevitable. The poet was not above middle height; was of a mean figure; was
lean and stooped somewhat, and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering, the
dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled
where to place him. There was something about him which belonged neither to
servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and beaked
nose was fine, but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant, but the lips
hung loose and slobbered. It was the expression of the face - as a whole,
however, that was disquieting. There was none of that stately composure
which makes the faces of the nobility so pleasing to look at; nor had it
anything of the dignified servility of a well-trained domestic's face; it
was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn together. Poet though he was, it
seemed as if he were more used to scold than to flatter; to 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 his movements; and by
something fiery and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken
aback. But they went to dinner.
Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for the
first time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the
splendour of his table. Stranger still, he bethought him with pride - for
the thought was generally distasteful - of that great grandmother Moll who
had milked the cows. He was about somehow to allude to this humble woman and
her milk-pails, when the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd,
seeing how common the name of Greene was, that the family had come over with
the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they
had come down in the world and done little more than leave their name to the
royal borough of Greenwich. Further talk of the same sort, about lost
castles, coats of arms, cousins who were baronets in the north,
intermarriage with noble families in the west, how some Greens spelt the
name with an e at the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was
on the table. Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll
and her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time the
wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey was passing
freely that Orlando dared mention what he could not help thinking a more
important matter than the Greens or the cows; that is to say the sacred
subject of poetry. At the first mention of the word, the poet's eyes flashed
fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airs he had worn; thumped his glass on
the table, and launched into one of the longest, most intricate, most
passionate, and bitterest stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the
lips of a jilted woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of
the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to
sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the
writing. So the talk went on with ramifications interminable, until Orlando
ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write - but here the
poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wainscot, he said.
The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a state where a mouse's
squeak upset them for a fortnight. Doubtless the house was full of vermin,
but Orlando had not heard them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of
his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could
only marvel that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague,
the dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he
had an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, above all,
he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which defied description.
There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire;
another about second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he
woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers
were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a
rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about
London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so
finely made and curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if
unconsciously, and indeed it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it
confounded him to think that he had only sold five hundred copies of his
poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All
he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the
art of poetry was dead in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne,
all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of
his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some
scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe.
Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he
was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose, and people
soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped
up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style
would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson - Ben Jonson
was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of
literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect
to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might
call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first
catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers
and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender
in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age,
he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - neither of
which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him
to say it - for he loved literature as he loved his life - he could see no
good in the present and had no hope for the future. Here he poured himself
out another glass of wine.
Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing
that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the
more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could
remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit
Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk,
which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him
now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, "Stap my
vitals, Bill" (this was to Shakespeare), "there's a great wave coming and
you're on the top of it," by which he meant, Greene explained, that they
were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that
Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was
killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how
this prediction turned out. "Poor foolish fellow," said Greene, "to go and
say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth - the Elizabethan a great age!"
"So, my dear Lord," he continued, settling himself comfortably in his
chair and rubbing the wine-glass between his fingers, "we must make the best
of it, cherish the past and honour those writers - there are still a few of
'em - who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for
Glawr." (Orlando could have wished him a better accent.) "Glawr," said
Greene, "is the spur of noble minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds
a year paid quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed
every morning reading Cicero. I would imitate his style so that you couldn't
tell the difference between us. That's what I call fine writing," said
Greene; "that's what I call Glawr. But it's necessary to have a pension to
do it."
By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of discussing his own work
with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now got upon the lives
and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene
had known intimately and about whom he had a thousand anecdotes of the most
amusing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These,
then, were his gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them
quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an intrigue
of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of
washing bills held to the heads of printer's devils at the street door. Thus
Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said,
that these plays show the faults they do. The rest of the time was spent in
carousings and junketings in taverns and in beer gardens, when things were
said that passed belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost
frolic of the courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this Greene told with a
spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power
of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of
books provided they were written three hundred years ago.
So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of
liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as something too
indefinite to be called by any one name, but had something of fear in it and
something of fascination. He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such
good company that one could listen to the story of his ague for ever. Then
he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he made so free with the
names of God and Woman; then he was so full of queer crafts and had such
strange lore in his head; could make salad in three hundred different ways;
knew all that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen
musical instruments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to
toast cheese in the great Italian fireplace. That he did not know a geranium
from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a
teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow; was ignorant of
the rotation of the crops; thought oranges grew underground and turnips on
trees; preferred any townscape to any landscape, - all this and much more
amazed Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the
maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants, who
loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never
been so lively as now that he was there - all of which gave Orlando a great
deal to think about, and caused him to compare this way of life with the
old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of
Spain's apoplexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day
passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the
Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He
bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and
timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable to strike a proper
balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a
plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.
At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite
conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between the
smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf which for
centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock weed, he thought that unless
he could somehow make his escape, he should be smothered alive. Getting up
and hearing the pigeons coo, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he
thought that unless he could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet
Street, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he
thought, hearing the footman mend the fire and spread the table with silver
dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious yawn)
sleeping die.
So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been
able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed, the house
was surrounded by a park fifteen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet
high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his
nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando's leave, that very morning.
Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go.
The house, he thought, would seem very dull without him. On parting (for he
had never yet liked to mention the subject), he had the temerity to press
his play upon the Death of Hercules upon the poet and ask his opinion of it.
The poet took it; muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando
cut short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene, with
many protestations of affection, jumped into the coach and was gone.
The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty as
the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have the heart to
make toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace again. He would never have the
wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch
as it should be mixed; a thousand good quips and cranks would be lost to
him. Yet what a relief to be out of the sound of that querulous voice, what
a luxury to be alone once more, so he could not help reflecting, as he
unloosed the mastiff which had been tied up these six weeks because it never
saw the poet without biting him.
Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same
afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs Greene,
that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was
drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner -
such as it was - was set on a dressing-table where the children had been
making mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing, here
he could write, and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord
at home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country - his new poem was to have
some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was
tickling the cat's ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for
inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then. It was so
done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted
was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and
follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of
rolling his r's, were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt
about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any
disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules,
which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid the
expenses of Mrs Greene's tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take
care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did
with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman;
delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop
it in the filthiest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when
the man was turning to go he stopped him, "Take the swiftest horse in the
stable," he said, "ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship
which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King's own kennels
the finest elk-hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back
without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to
his books, "I have done with men."
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and
disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efficiently that he was back that day
three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk-hounds, one of
whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner-table to a
litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando 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, this young Nobleman had not
only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the
worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all
equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit
to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven
poetical works, only retaining "The Oak Tree", which was his boyish dream
and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any
trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and 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 feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and
very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through
the Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half
forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he
reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of
Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his
favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or
woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of
speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what
years remained to him in tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns
unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw - but probably the
reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and
plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons
rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night
succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine
weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years
or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can
sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might
have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed"
(here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever
happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom
and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind
of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the
body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human
spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on
the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of
the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the
clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves
fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have
said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when
a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is
thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes
inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his
vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the
oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they
would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest
variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems
which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship?
What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which
seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second,
swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and
filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent
months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he
would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man
of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no
more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the
length of human life (of the animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our
capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it
is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces
which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment,
dominate our unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was
sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the
gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it
went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments
swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity,
there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those scored
parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his
heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree
had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the
process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by
Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled -
What is Love? - back it would come at the least provocation or none, and
hustle Books or Metaphors of What one lives for into the margin, there to
wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the
process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with
pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in
rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted
sword by her side, but with scents - she was strongly perfumed - and with
sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter's day. And so,
the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log
fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with
old King James' slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds
of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge
it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like
the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown
about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned
women.
"Another metaphor by Jupiter!" he would exclaim as he said this (which
will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and
explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any
conclusion about Love). "And what's the point of it?" he would ask himself.
"Why not say simply in so many words?" and then he would try to think for
half an hour, - or was it two years and a half? - how to say simply in so
many words what love is. "A figure like that is manifestly untruthful," he
argued, "for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances,
could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and
Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all," he cried, "why say
Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means
and leave it?"
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so
to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great
distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the
grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like
the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the
grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of
hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had
fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more
true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able
to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a
deep dejection.
And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd
it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to
reflect that this fine fellow with all his faculties about him and a healthy
body, witness cheeks and limbs - a man who never thought twice about heading
a charge or fighting a duel - should be so subject to the lethargy of
thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question
of poetry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl
behind her mother's cottage door. In our belief, Greene's ridicule of his
tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess' ridicule of his love. But to
return:
Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky
and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in
London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile (whose habits have already
been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as
if that sardonic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself,
were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So
Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain,
others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and
muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our
time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold)
Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound
him to a servitude than which none is stricter. "I'll be blasted," he said,
"if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick
Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day
forward, to please myself"; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole
budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering
loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at
him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted
for it - nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to
think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one rending,
the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own favour
in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints
Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age,
conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave
among laurels and the intangible banners of a people's reverence
perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the
dustbin. "Fame," he said. "is like" (and since there was no Nick Greene to
stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or
two of the quietest) "a braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of
silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,"
etc. etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and
constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark,
ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the
obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where
he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he
alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood,
under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground,
seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity,
and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to
the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of
envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of
generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks
offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he
supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out),
for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church
builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but
only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night? "What an
admirable life this is," he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak
tree. "And why not enjoy it this very moment?" The thought struck him like a
bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected
love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the
nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no
longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had
been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in
the hollow beneath him, his house.
There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather
than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this man wished
or that, but circumspectly, by a single architect with one idea in his head.
Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical;
the courts were some of them oblong and some square; in this was a fountain;
in that a statue; the buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here
was a chapel, there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between
and clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright flowers; all were clasped - yet
so well set out was it that it seemed that every part had room to spread
itself fittingly - by the roll of a massive wall; while smoke from
innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air. This vast, yet ordered
building, which could house a thousand men and perhaps two thousand horses,
was built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown. Here have
lived, for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my
own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths has
left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their
spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have
left this.
Never had the house looked more noble and humane.
Why, then, had he wished to raise himself above them? For it seemed
vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anonymous work of
creation; the labours of those vanished hands. Better was it to go unknown
and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen,
than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust. For after all, he said,
kindling as he looked at the great house on the greensward below, the
unknown lords and ladies who lived there never forgot to set aside something
for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that
will fall. There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the
kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their goblets were polished,
though they lay sick, and their windows were lit though they lay dying.
Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the
molecatcher and the stone-mason. Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders - thus
he apostrophized them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as
called him cold, indifferent, slothful (the truth being that a quality often
lies just on the other side of the wall from where we seek it) - thus he
apostrophized his house and race in terms of the most moving eloquence; but
when it came to the peroration - and what is eloquence that lacks a
peroration? - he fumbled. He would have liked to have ended with a flourish
to the effect that he would follow in their footsteps and add another stone
to their building. Since, however, the building already covered nine acres,
to add even a single stone seemed superfluous. Could one mention furniture
in a peroration? Could one speak of chairs and tables and mats to lie beside
people's beds? For whatever the peroration wanted, that was what the house
stood in need of. Leaving his speech unfinished for the moment, he strode
down hill again resolved henceforward to devote himself to the furnishing of
the mansion. The news - that she was to attend him instantly - brought tears
to the eyes of good old Mrs Grimsditch, now grown somewhat old. Together
they perambulated the house.
The towel horse in the King's bedroom ("and that was King Jamie, my
Lord," she said, hinting that it was many a day since a King had slept under
their roof; but the odious Parliament days were over and there was now a
Crown in England again) lacked a leg; there were no stands to the ewers in
the little closet leading into the waiting room of the Duchess's page; Mr
Greene had made a stain on the carpet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she
and Judy, for all their scrubbing, had never been able to wash out. Indeed,
when Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood chairs
and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian
carpets, every one of the three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms which the
house contained, he saw that it would be no light one; and if some thousands
of pounds of his estate remained over, these would do little more than hang
a few galleries with tapestry, set the dining hall with fine, carved chairs
and provide mirrors of solid silver and chairs of the same metal (for which
he had an inordinate passion) for the furnishing of the royal bedchambers.
He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove beyond a doubt if we
look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he bought at this
time, with the expenses totted up in the margin - but these we omit.
"To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and
white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson
and white silk...
"To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their
buckram covers to them all...
"To sixty seven walnut tree tables...
"To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice
glasses...
"To one hundred and two mats, each thirty yards long...
"To ninety seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchment
lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs suitable...
"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, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it
is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it and the total sum
disbursed ran into many thousands - that is to say millions of our money.
And if his day was spent like this, at night again, Lord Orlando might be
found reckoning out what it would cost to level a million molehills, if the
men were paid tenpence an hour; and again, how many hundredweight of nails
at fivepence halfpenny a gill were needed to repair the fence round the
park, which was fifteen miles in circumference. And so on and so on.
The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another,
and one molehill not much different from a million. Some pleasant journeys
it cost him; and some fine adventures. As, for instance, when he set a whole
city of blind women near Bruges to stitch hangings for a silver canopied
bed; and the story of his adventure with a Moor in Venice of whom he bought
(but only at the sword's point) his lacquered cabinet, might, in other
hands, prove worth the telling. Nor did the work lack variety; for here
would come, drawn by teams from Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across and
laid along the gallery for flooring; and then a chest from Persia, stuffed
with wool and sawdust. from which, at last, he would take a single plate, or
one topaz ring.
At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another
table; no room on te tables for another cabinet; no room in the cabinet for
another rose-bowl; no room in the bowl for another handful of potpourri;
there was no room for anything anywhere; in short the house was furnished.
In the garden snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses, lilies,
asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, pear trees and apple trees and
cherry trees and mulberry trees, with an enormous quantity of rare and
flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each
other's roots that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no
stretch of sward without its shade. In addition, he had imported wild fowl
with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose manners
concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts.
All now was ready; and when it was evening and the innumerable silver
sconces were lit and the light airs which for ever moved about the galleries
stirred the blue and green arras, so that it looked as if the huntsmen were
riding and Daphne flying; when the silver shone and lacquer glowed and wood
kindled; when the carved chairs held their arms out and dolphins swam upon
the walls with mermaids on their backs; when all this and much more than all
this was complete and to his liking, Orlando walked through the house with
his elk-hounds following and felt content. He had matter now, he thought, to
fill out his peroration. Perhaps it would be well to begin the speech all
over again. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt that still something
was lacking. Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas,
resting on lions' paws with swans' necks curving under them, beds even of
the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them,
people lying in them improve them amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now began a
series of very splendid entertainments to the nobility and gentry of the
neighbourhood. The three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms were full for a
month at a time. Guests jostled each other on the fifty-two staircases.
Three hundred servants bustled about the pantries. Banquets took place
almost nightly. Thus, in a very few years, Orlando had worn the nap off his
velvet, and spent the half of his fortune; but he had earned the good
opinion of his neighbours, held a score of offices in the county, and was
annually presented with perhaps a dozen volumes dedicated to his Lordship in
rather fulsome terms by grateful poets. For though he was careful not to
consort with writers at that time and kept himself always aloof from ladies
of foreign blood, still, he was excessively generous both to women and to
poets, and both adored him.
But when the feasting was at its height and his guests were at their
revels, he was apt to take himself off to his private room alone. There when
the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he would have out an old
writing book, stitched together with silk stolen from his mother's workbox,
and labelled in a round schoolboy hand, "The Oak Tree, A Poem". In this he
would write till midnight chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as
many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the
year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process
of writing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the
historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His
floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was
congealing those warm fountains. The very landscape outside was less stuck
about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and
intricate. Perhaps the senses were a little duller and honey and cream less
seductive to the palate. Also that the streets were better drained and the
houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.
One day he was adding a line or two with enormous labour to "The Oak
Tree, A Poem", when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was no shadow,
he soon saw, but the figure of a very tall lady in riding hood and mantle
crossing the quadrangle on which his room looked out. As this was the most
private of the courts, and the lady was a stranger to him, Orlando marvelled
how she had got there. Three days later the same apparition appeared again;
and on Wednesday noon appeared once more. This time, Orlando was determined
to follow her, nor apparently was she afraid to be found, for she slackened
her steps as he came up and looked him full in the face. Any other woman
thus caught in a Lord's private grounds would have been afraid; any other
woman with that face, head-dress, and aspect would have thrown her mantilla
across her shoulders to hide it. For this lady resembled nothing so much as
a hare; a hare startled, but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is overcome by
an immense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers at its
pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering, with nose
pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was six feet high and wore a
head-dress into the bargain of some antiquated kind which made her look
still taller. Thus confronted, she stared at Orlando with a stare in which
timidity and audacity were most strangely combined.
First, she asked him, with a proper, but somewhat clumsy curtsey, to
forgive her her intrusion. Then, rising to her full height again, which must
have been something over six feet two, she went on to say - but with such a
cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando
thought she must have escaped from a lunatic asylum - that she was the
Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the
Roumanian territory. She desired above all things to make his acquaintance,
she said. She had taken lodging over a baker's shop at the Park Gates. She
had seen his picture and it was the image of a sister of hers who was - here
she guffawed - long since dead. She was visiting the English court. The
Queen was her Cousin. The King was a very good fellow but seldom went to bed
sober. Here she tee-heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing
for it but to ask her in and give her a glass of wine.
Indoors, her manners regained the hauteur natural to a Roumanian
Archduchess; and had she not shown a knowledge of wines rare in a lady, and
made some observations upon firearms and the customs of sportsmen in her
country, which were sensible enough, the talk would have lacked spontaneity.
Jumping to her feet at last, she announced that she would call the following
day, swept another prodigious curtsey and departed. The following day,
Orlando rode out. The next, he turned his back; on the third he drew his
curtain. On the fourth it rained, and as he could not keep a lady in the
wet, nor was altogether averse to company, he invited her in and asked her
opinion whether a suit of armour, which belonged to an ancestor of his, was
the work of Jacobi or of Topp. He inclined to Topp. She held another opinion
- it matters very little which. But it is of some importance to the course
of our story that, in illustrating her argument, which had to do with the
working of the tie pieces, the Archduchess Harriet took the golden shin case
and fitted it to Orlando's leg.
That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever
stood upright upon has already been said.
Perhaps something in the way she fastened the ankle buckle; or her
stooping posture; or Orlando's long seclusion; or the natural sympathy which
is between the sexes; or the Burgundy; or the fire - any of these causes may
have been to blame; for certainly blame there is on one side or another,
when a Nobleman of Orlando's breeding, entertaining a lady in his house, and
she his elder by many years, with a face a yard long and staring eyes,
dressed somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the
season was warm - blame there is when such a Nobleman is so suddenly and
violently overcome by passion of some sort that he has to leave the room.
But what sort of passion, it may well be asked, could this be? And the
answer is double faced as Love herself. For Love - but leaving Love out of
the argument for a moment, the actual event was this:
When the Archduchess Harriet Griselda stooped to fasten the buckle,
Orlando heard, suddenly and unaccountably, far off the beating of Love's
wings. The distant stir of that soft plumage roused in him a thousand
memories of rushing waters, of loveliness in the snow and faithlessness in
the flood; and the sound came nearer; and he blushed and trembled; and he
was moved as he had thought never to be moved again; and he was ready to
raise his hands and let the bird of beauty alight upon his shoulders, when -
horror! - a creaking sound like that the crows make tumbling over the trees
began to reverberate; the air seemed dark with coarse black wings; voices
croaked; bits of straw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and there pitched down
upon his shoulders the heaviest and foulest of the birds; which is the
vulture. Thus he rushed from the room and sent the footman to see the
Archduchess Harriet to her carriage.
For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the
other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two
feet, two nails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact
opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you
cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando's love began her flight towards
him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards.
Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a
sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about,
turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was
Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise, that flopped, foully and
disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the
footman.
But the harpy is not so easily banished as all that. Not only did the
Archduchess continue to lodge at the Baker's, but Orlando was haunted every
day and night by phantoms of the foulest kind. Vainly, it seemed, had he
furnished his house with silver and hung the walls with arras, when at any
moment a dung-bedraggled fowl could settle upon his writing table. There she
was, flopping about among the chairs; he saw her waddling ungracefully
across the galleries. Now, she perched, top heavy upon a fire screen. When
he chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke it.
Thus realizing that his home was uninhabitable, and that steps must be
taken to end the matter instantly, he did what any other young man would
have done in his place, and asked King Charles to send him as Ambassador
Extraordinary to Constantinople. The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell
Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. 'Twas a thousand
pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the
country.
Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss
over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.
CHAPTER 3.
It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at
this stage of Orlando's career, when he played a most important part in the
public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. We know
that he discharged his duties to admiration - witness his Bath and his
Dukedom. We know that he had a finger in some of the most delicate
negotiations between King Charles and the Turks - to that, treaties in the
vault of the Record Office bear testimony. But the revolution which broke
out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so
damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record
could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the
paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important
sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled
historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big
enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a
meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been
necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination.
Orlando's day was passed, it would seem, somewhat in this fashion.
About seven, he would rise, wrap himself in a long Turkish cloak, light a
cheroot, and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he would stand, gazing at
the city beneath him, apparently entranced. At this hour the mist would lie
so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat;
gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be
firmly fixed; there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge; there the
green-turbaned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the
pariah dogs picking up offal; there the shawled women; there the innumerable
donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles. Soon, the whole town would
be astir with the cracking of whips, the beating of gongs, cryings to
prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of brass-bound wheels, while sour
odours, made from bread fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the
heights of Pera itself and seemed the very breath of the strident
multi-coloured and barbaric population.
Nothing, he reflected, gazing at the view which was now sparkling in
the sun, could well be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the
towns of London and Tunbridge Wells. To the right and left rose in bald and
stony prominence the inhospitable Asian mountains, to which the arid castle
of a robber chief or two might hang; but parsonage there was none, nor manor
house, nor cottage, nor oak, elm, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine. There were
no hedges for ferns to grow on, and no fields for sheep to graze. The houses
were white as egg-shells and as bald. That he, who was English root and
fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama,
and gaze and gaze at those passes and far heights planning journeys there
alone on foot where only the goat and shepherd had gone before; should feel
a passion of affection for the bright, unseasonable flowers, love the
unkempt pariah dogs beyond even his elk hounds at home, and snuff the acrid,
sharp smell of the streets eagerly into his nostrils, surprised him. He
wondered if, in the season of the Crusades, one of his ancestors had taken
up with a Circassian peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain
darkness in his complexion; and, going indoors again, withdrew to his bath.
An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed, he would receive
visits from secretaries and other high officials carrying, one after
another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key. Within were
papers of the highest importance, of which only fragments, here a flourish,
there a seal firmly attached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain. Of their
contents then, we cannot speak, but can only testify that Orlando was kept
busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to
be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes
round capital letters, till luncheon came - a splendid meal of perhaps
thirty courses.
After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the
door, and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries running on foot and waving
great ostrich feather fans above their heads, to call upon the other
ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony was always the same. On
reaching the courtyard, the Janissaries struck with their fans upon the main
portal, which immediately flew open revealing a large chamber, splendidly
furnished. Here were seated two figures, generally of the opposite sexes.
Profound bows and curtseys were exchanged. In the first room, it was
permissible only to mention the weather. Having said that it was fine or
wet, hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber, where
again, two figures rose to greet him. Here it was only permissible to
compare Constantinople as a place of residence with London; and the
Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constantinople, and his hosts
naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London. In
the next chamber, King Charles's and the Sultan's healths had to be
discussed at some length. In the next were discussed the Ambassador's health
and that of his host's wife, but more briefly. In the next the Ambassador
complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host complimented the
Ambassador upon his dress. In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host
deploring their badness, the Ambassador extolling their goodness. The
ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drinking of a
glass of coffee; but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone
through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in
the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would
have sunk beneath the surfeit. For, no sooner had the Ambassador despatched
one such visit, than another had to be undertaken. The same ceremonies were
gone through in precisely the same order six or seven times over at the
houses of the other great officials, so that it was often late at night
before the Ambassador reached home. Though Orlando performed these tasks to
admiration and never denied that they are, perhaps, the most important part
of a diplomatist's duties, he was undoubtedly fatigued by them, and often
depressed to such a pitch of gloom that he preferred to take his dinner
alone with his dogs. To them, indeed, he might be heard talking in his own
tongue. And sometimes, it is said, he would pass out of his own gates late
at night so disguised that the sentries did not know him. Then he would
mingle with the crowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll through the bazaars;
or throw aside his shoes and join the worshippers in the Mosques. Once, when
it was given out that he was ill of a fever, shepherds, bringing their goats
to market, reported that they had met an English Lord on the mountain top
and heard him praying to his God. This was thought to be Orlando himself,
and his prayer was, no doubt, a poem said aloud, for it was known that he
still carried about with him, in the bosom of his cloak, a much scored
manuscript; and servants, listening at the door, heard the Ambassador
chanting something in an odd, sing-song voice when he was alone.
It is with fragments such as these that we must do our best to make up
a picture of Orlando's life and character at this time. There exist, even to
this day, rumours, legends, anecdotes of a floating and unauthenticated kind
about Orlando's life in Constantinople (we have quoted but a few of them)
which go to prove that he possessed, now that he was in the prime of life,
the power to stir the fancy and rivet the eye which will keep a memory green
long after all that more durable qualities can do to preserve it is
forgotten. The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and
some rarer gift, which we may call glamour and have done with it. "A million
candles", as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his being at the trouble
of lighting a single one. He moved like a stag, without any need to think
about his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong.
Hence rumours gathered round him. He became the adored of many women and
some men. It was not necessary that they should speak to him or even that
they should see him; they conjured up before them especially when the
scenery was romantic, or the sun was setting, the figure of a noble
gentleman in silk stockings. Upon the poor and uneducated, he had the same
power as upon the rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing songs
about the English Lord "who dropped his emeralds in the well", which
undoubtedly refer to Orlando, who once, it seems, tore his jewels from him
in a moment of rage or intoxication and flung them in a fountain; whence
they were fished by a page boy. But this romantic power, it is well known,
is often associated with a nature of extreme reserve. Orlando seems to have
made no friends. As far as is known, he formed no attachments. A certain
great lady came all the way from England in order to be near him, and
pestered him with her attentions, but he continued to discharge his duties
so indefatigably that he had not been Ambassador at the Horn for more than
two years and a half before King Charles signified his intention of raising
him to the highest rank in the peerage. The envious said that this was Nell
Gwyn's tribute to the memory of a leg. But, as she had seen him once only,
and was then busily engaged in pelting her royal master with nutshells, it
is likely that it was his merits that won him his Dukedom, not his calves.
Here we must pause, for we have reached a moment of great significance
in his career. For the conferring of the Dukedom was the occasion of a very
famous, and indeed, much disputed incident, which we must now describe,
picking our way among burnt papers and little bits of tape as best we may.
It was at the end of the great fast of Ramadan that the Order of the Bath
and the patent of nobility arrived in a frigate commanded by Sir Adrian
Scrope; and Orlando made this the occasion for an entertainment more
splendid than any that has been known before or since in Constantinople. The
night was fine; the crowd immense, and the windows of the Embassy
brilliantly illuminated. Again, details are lacking, for the fire had its
way with all such records, and has left only tantalizing fragments which
leave the most important points obscure. From the diary of John Fenner
Brigge, however, an English naval officer, who was among the guests, we
gather that people of all nationalities "were packed like herrings in a
barrel" in the courtyard. The crowd pressed so unpleasantly close that
Brigge soon climbed into a Judas tree, the better to observe the
proceedings. The rumour had got about among the natives (and here is
additional proof of Orlando's mysterious power over the imagination) that
some kind of miracle was to be performed. "Thus," writes Brigge (but his
manuscript is full of burns and holes, some sentences being quite
illegible), "when the rockets began to soar into the air, there was
considerable uneasiness among us lest the native population should be
seized...fraught with unpleasant consequences to all...English ladies in the
company, I own that my hand went to my cutlass. Happily," he continues in
his somewhat long-winded style, "these fears seemed, for the moment,
groundless and, observing the demeanour of the natives...I came to the
conclusion that this demonstration of our skill in the art of pyrotechny was
valuable, if only because it impressed upon them...the superiority of the
British...Indeed, the sight was one of indescribable magnificence. I found
myself alternately praising the Lord that he had permitted...and wishing
that my poor, dear mother...By the Ambassador's orders, the long windows,
which are so imposing a feature of Eastern architecture, for though ignorant
in many ways...were thrown wide; and within, we could see a tableau vivant
or theatrical display in which English ladies and gentlemen...represented a
masque the work of one...The words were inaudible, but the sight of so many
of our countrymen and women, dressed with the highest elegance and
distinction...moved me to emotions of which I am certainly not ashamed,
though unable...I was intent upon observing the astonishing conduct of Lady
- which was of a nature to fasten the eyes of all upon her, and to bring
discredit upon her sex and country, when" - unfortunately a branch of the
Judas tree broke, Lieutenant Brigge fell to the ground, and the rest of the
entry records only his gratitude to Providence (who plays a very large part
in the diary) and the exact nature of his injuries.
Happily, Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that name,
saw the scene from inside and carries on the tale in a letter, much defaced
too, which ultimately reached a female friend at Tunbridge Wells. Miss
Penelope was no less lavish in her enthusiasm than the gallant officer.
"Ravishing," she exclaims ten times on one page, "wondrous...utterly beyond
description...gold plate...candelabras...negroes in plush breeches...
pyramids of ice...fountains of negus...jellies made to represent His
Majesty's ships...swans made to represent water lilies...birds in golden
cages...gentlemen in slashed crimson velvet...Ladies' headdresses AT LEAST
six foot high...musical boxes....Mr Peregrine said I looked QUITE lovely
which I only repeat to you, my dearest, because I know...Oh! how I longed
for you all!...surpassing anything we have seen at the Pantiles...oceans to
drink...some gentlemen overcome...Lady Betty ravishing....Poor Lady Bonham
made the unfortunate mistake of sitting down without a chair beneath
her...Gentlemen all very gallant...wished a thousand times for you and
dearest Betsy...But the sight of all others, the cynosure of all eyes...as
all admitted, for none could be so vile as to deny it, was the Ambassador
himself. Such a leg! Such a countenance!! Such princely manners!!! To see
him come into the room! To see him go out again! And something INTERESTING
in the expression, which makes one feel, one scarcely knows why, that he has
SUFFERED! They say a lady was the cause of it. The heartless monster!!! How
can one of our REPUTED TENDER SEX have had the effrontery!!! He is
unmarried, and half the ladies in the place are wild for love of him...A
thousand, thousand kisses to Tom, Gerry, Peter, and dearest Mew" [presumably
her cat].
From the Gazette of the time, we gather that "as the clock struck
twelve, the Ambassador appeared on the centre Balcony which was hung with
priceless rugs. Six Turks of the Imperial Body Guard, each over six foot in
height, held torches to his right and left. Rockets rose into the air at his
appearance, and a great shout went up from the people, which the Ambassador
acknowledged, bowing deeply, and speaking a few words of thanks in the
Turkish language, which it was one of his accomplishments to speak with
fluency. Next, Sir Adrian Scrope, in the full dress of a British Admiral,
advanced; the Ambassador knelt on one knee; the Admiral placed the Collar of
the Most Noble Order of the Bath round his neck, then pinned the Star to his
breast; after which another gentleman of the diplomatic corps advancing in a
stately manner placed on his shoulders the ducal robes, and handed him on a
crimson cushion, the ducal coronet."
At length, with a gesture of extraordinary majesty and grace, first
bowing profoundly, then raising himself proudly erect, Orlando took the
golden circlet of strawberry leaves and placed it, with a gesture which none
that saw it ever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this point that the first
disturbance began. Either the people had expected a miracle - some say a
shower of gold was prophesied to fall from the skies - which did not happen,
or this was the signal chosen for the attack to begin; nobody seems to know;
but as the coronet settled on Orlando's brows a great uproar rose. Bells
began ringing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard above the shouts
of the people; many Turks fell flat to the ground and touched the earth with
their foreheads. A door burst open. The natives pressed into the banqueting
rooms. Women shrieked. A certain lady, who was said to be dying for love of
Orlando, seized a candelabra and dashed it to the ground. What might not
have happened, had it not been for the presence of Sir Adrian Scrope and a
squad of British blue-jackets, nobody can say. But the Admiral ordered the
bugles to be sounded; a hundred blue-jackets stood instantly at attention;
the disorder was quelled, and quiet, at least for the time being, fell upon
the scene.
So far, we are on the firm, if rather narrow, ground of ascertained
truth. But nobody has ever known exactly what took place later that night.
The testimony of the sentries and others seems, however, to prove that the
Embassy was empty of company, and shut up for the night in the usual way by
two A.M. The Ambassador was seen to go to his room, still wearing the
insignia of his rank, and shut the door. Some say he locked it, which was
against his custom. Others maintain that they heard music of a rustic kind,
such as shepherds play, later that night in the courtyard under the
Ambassador's window. A washer-woman, who was kept awake by toothache, said
that she saw a man's figure, wrapped in a cloak or dressing gown, come out
upon the balcony. Then, she said, a woman, much muffled, but apparently of
the peasant class, was drawn up by means of a rope which the man let down to
her on to the balcony. There, the washer-woman said, they embraced
passionately "like lovers", and went into the room together, drawing the
curtains so that no more could be seen.
Next morning, the Duke, as we must now call him, was found by his
secretaries sunk in profound slumber amid bed clothes that were much
tumbled. The room was in some disorder, his coronet having rolled on the
floor, and his cloak and garter being flung all of a heap on a chair. The
table was littered with papers. No suspicion was felt at first, as the
fatigues of the night had been great. But when afternoon came and he still
slept, a doctor was summoned. He applied remedies which had been used on the
previous occasion, plasters, nettles, emetics, etc., but without success.
Orlando slept on. His secretaries then thought it their duty to examine the
papers on the table. Many were scribbled over with poetry, in which frequent
mention was made of an oak tree. There were also various state papers and
others of a private nature concerning the management of his estates in
England. But at length they came upon a document of far greater
significance. It was nothing less, indeed, than a deed of marriage, drawn
up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knight of the
Garter, etc., etc., etc., and Rosina Pepita, a dancer, father unknown, but
reputed a gipsy, mother also unknown but reputed a seller of old iron in the
market-place over against the Galata Bridge. The secretaries looked at each
other in dismay. And still Orlando slept. Morning and evening they watched
him, but, save that his breathing was regular and his cheeks still flushed
their habitual deep rose, he gave no sign of life. Whatever science or
ingenuity could do to waken him they did. But still he slept.
On the seventh day of his trance (Thursday, May the 10th) the first
shot was fired of that terrible and bloody insurrection of which Lieutenant
Brigge had detected the first symptoms. The Turks rose against the Sultan,
set fire to the town, and put every foreigner they could find, either to the
sword or to the bastinado. A few English managed to escape; but, as might
have been expected, the gentlemen of the British Embassy preferred to die in
defence of their red boxes, or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunches of keys
rather than let them fall into the hands of the Infidel. The rioters broke
into Orlando's room, but seeing him stretched to all appearances dead they
left him untouched, and only robbed him of his coronet and the robes of the
Garter.
And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were deeper!
Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it were so deep that
we could see nothing whatever through its opacity! Would that we might here
take the pen and write Finis to our work! Would that we might spare the
reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was
buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who
keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their
silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again
they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth,
The Truth and nothing but the Truth!
At which - Heaven be praised! for it affords us a breathing space - the
doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had
wafted them apart, and three figures enter. First, comes our Lady of Purity;
whose brows are bound with fillets of the whitest lamb's wool; whose hair is
as an avalanche of the driven snow; and in whose hand reposes the white
quill of a virgin goose. Following her, but with a statelier step, comes our
Lady of Chastity; on whose brow is set like a turret of burning but
unwasting fire a diadem of icicles; her eyes are pure stars, and her
fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone. Close behind her,
sheltering indeed in the shadow of her more stately sisters, comes our Lady
of Modesty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose face is only shown as
the young moon shows when it is thin and sickle shaped and half hidden among
clouds. Each advances towards the centre of the room where Orlando still
lies sleeping; and with gestures at once appealing and commanding, OUR LADY
OF PURITY speaks first:
"I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; the snow is dear to me; and
the moon rising; and the silver sea. With my robes I cover the speckled
hen's eggs and the brindled sea shell; I cover vice and poverty. On all
things frail or dark 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 whose glance turns to stone. I have
stayed the star in its dancing, and the wave as it falls. The highest Alps
are my dwelling place; and when I walk, the lightnings flash in my hair;
where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze
him to the bone. Spare, O spare!"
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 fields and the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious to me;
and when the apples burgeon or the flocks breed, I run, I run; I let my
mantle fall. My hair covers 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:
"Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth.
For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown
and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide!
Hide!"
Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The
trumpets, meanwhile, still blare 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 muffle them, but in vain, for now all the trumpets blare
forth together,
"Horrid Sisters, go!"
The sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and
flinging their veils up and down.
"It has not always been so! But men want us no longer; the women detest
us. We go; we go. I (PURITY SAYS THIS) to the hen roost. I (CHASTITY SAYS
THIS) to the still unravished heights of Surrey. I (MODESTY SAYS THIS) to
any cosy nook where there are ivy and curtains in plenty."
"For there, not here (all speak together joining hands and making
gestures of farewell and despair towards the bed where Orlando lies
sleeping) dwell still in nest and boudoir, office and lawcourt those who
love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers and doctors;
those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why;
those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be
praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know
not; love the darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have
given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. To them we go, you we leave.
Come, Sisters, come! This is no place for us here."
They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if to
shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the door behind
them.
We are, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the
sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging themselves side
by side in order, blow one terrific blast:
"THE TRUTH!"
at which Orlando woke.
He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness
before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no
choice left but confess - he was a woman.
The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No
human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form
combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace. As he stood
there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave
the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity,
and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and
threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell
short by several inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long
looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went,
presumably, to his bath.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain
statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in
every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change
of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their
identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the
same. His memory - but in future we must, for convention's sake, say "her"
for "his", and "she" for "he" - her memory then, went back through all the
events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight
haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the
clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that
was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and
completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.
Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex
is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had
always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let
biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the
simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a
woman and has remained so ever since.
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious
subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed herself in
those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either
sex; and was forced to consider her position. That it was precarious and
embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who
has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken
to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate
for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung the
bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of
perturbation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and might
indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation. First, she
carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as seemed to be
written in poetry, and secreted them in her bosom; next she called her
Seleuchi hound, which had never left her bed all these days, though half
famished with hunger, fed and combed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in
her belt; finally wound about her person several strings of emeralds and
pearls of the finest orient which had formed part of her Ambassadorial
wardrobe. This done, she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and
descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the
litter of waste-paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax,
etc., and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant fig
tree, waited an old gipsy on a donkey. He led another by the bridle. Orlando
swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in
company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the
Sultan left Constantinople.
They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of
adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature, in all of
which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a week they reached the
high ground outside Broussa, which was then the chief camping ground of the
gipsy tribe to which Orlando had allied herself. Often she had looked at
those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be
there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a
reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too
well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of having
no documents to seal or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay, was
enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they
moved again. She washed in streams if she washed at all; no boxes, red,
blue, or green, were presented to her; there was not a key, let alone a
golden key, in the whole camp; as for "visiting", the word was unknown. She
milked the goats; she collected brushwood; she stole a hen's egg now and
then, but always put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle;
she stripped vines; she trod the grape; she filled the goat-skin and drank
from it; and when she remembered how, at about this time of day, she should
have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over an empty
coffee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed aloud, cut herself
another hunch of bread, and begged for a puff from old Rustum's pipe, filled
though it was with cow dung.
The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret
communication before the revolution, seem to have looked upon her as one of
themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay), and
her dark hair and dark complexion bore out the belief that she was, by
birth, one of them and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree
when she was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in
houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air. Thus,
though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing to help her to
become more like them; taught her their arts of cheese-making and
basket-weaving, their science of stealing and bird-snaring, and were even
prepared to consider letting her marry among them.
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases
(whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled.
One evening, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset
was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:
"How good to eat!"
(The gipsies have no word for "beautiful". This is the nearest.)
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky
good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners
than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for
whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they
would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no
matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect
that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women
thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and
cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The
English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature
was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its
hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has
been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very
briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She
climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams.
She likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks
of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn
thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in
fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost
threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when,
from the mountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Sea of Marmara, the
plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with
a white streak or two, which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul
expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the majesty
of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such
believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought
her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her
eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made
them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each
watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung
herself upon her mat in the gipsies' tent, she could not help bursting out
again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that
though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they
can only say "good to eat" when they mean "beautiful" and the other way
about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep
any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies laughed. But Rustum el
Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando out of Constantinople on his
donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed
as if from the age-long descent of iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed,
and as he sat tugging at his hookah he observed Orlando narrowly. He had the
deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day he found her in tears.
Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her that he
was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered 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, he shook his head; and when she repeated
it he was angry. He saw that she did not believe what he believed, and that
was enough, wise and ancient as he was, to enrage him.
This difference of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been perfectly
happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then
she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things themselves,
or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her
to truth, which in its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days
on the high mound at home); which meditations, since she could impart no
word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and
ink.
"Oh! if only I could write!" she cried (for she had the odd conceit of
those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but
little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few
margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of "The Oak Tree", managed by
writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the scenery in a long, blank
version poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and
Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But
the gipsies became suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept
than before at milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before
replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling
her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would be felt by the whole
tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the
sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their
vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their
hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be
singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into
the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need
not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we
make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone
who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking's
sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but
sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a
vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin 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 Orlando would leave the tent and never come near
them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned;
and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa.
Slowly, she began to feel that there was some difference between her
and the gipsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down
among them for ever. At first she tried to account for it by saying that she
came of an ancient and civilized race, whereas these gipsies were an
ignorant people, not much better than savages. One night when they were
questioning her about England she could not help with some pride describing
the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the
possession of her family for four or five hundred years. Her ancestors were
earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the gipsies
were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised the beauty of
nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as people of fine breeding
are when a stranger has been made to reveal his low birth or poverty. Rustum
followed her out of the tent alone and said that she need not mind if her
father were a Duke, and possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she
described. They would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she
was seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that
Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years
only the meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or
three thousand years. To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids
centuries before Christ was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets
was no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both
were negligible. Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such
antiquity, there was nothing specially 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 there
was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they
were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around
them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view,
a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who
snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth,
and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and
sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one.
She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field;
house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or
heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the
argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she
understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or
four hundred years ago would be denounced - and by her own family most
loudly - for a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.
She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique method
of finding the gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a short
time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such differences of
opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked
for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield
an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the
breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing
so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense
that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party
and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is
not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter
and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and
subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue -
but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they
are as dull as ditch water.
"Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them," sighed
Orlando.
"She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats," said the gipsies.
What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and
become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally
impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper,
neither reverence for the Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of
bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount
Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either
played her a trick or worked a miracle - again, opinions differ too much for
it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at
the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must
compare the landscape to anything, it would have been to a dry bone; to a
sheep's skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures.
The heat was intense, and the little fig tree under which Orlando lay only
served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.
Suddenly a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared
on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green
hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the
hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank
of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could
see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping
among the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade to
shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle sighs and
shivers of a summer's day in England. After she had gazed entranced for some
time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked
with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts
coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she
knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then appeared the roofs and belfries and
towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and
she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the
roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All
was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the
snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts
and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there
was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was
only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked
bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and striding back to the
gipsies' camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day.
It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had plotted
her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not think as they
did. Yet they would have been sorry to cut her throat; and wel