Orlando (Chapter 4)

With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl on her
string, Orlando bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women
then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that
she now sat on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". It is a strange fact,
but a true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a
thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had
done something to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in
one or two important particulars, differ very little from the gipsy men.
At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs
and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning
spread for her on deck, that she realized with a start the penalties and
the privileges of her position. But that start was not of the kind that
might have been expected.

It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought of
her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal circumstances a
lovely young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole
edifice of female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity
is their jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die
when ravished of. But if one has been a man for thirty years or so, and
an Ambassador into the bargain, if one has held a Queen in one's arms and
one or two other ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one
has married a Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a
very great start about that. Orlando's start was of a very complicated
kind, and not to be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed, ever accused
her of being one of those quick wits who run to the end of things in a
minute. It took her the entire length of the voyage to moralize out the
meaning of her start, and so, at her own pace, we will follow her.

'Lord,' she thought, when she had recovered from her start, stretching
herself out at length under her awning, 'this is a pleasant, lazy way of
life, to be sure. But,' she thought, giving her legs a kick, 'these
skirts are plaguey things to have about one's heels. Yet the stuff
(flowered paduasoy) is the loveliest in the world. Never have I seen my
own skin (here she laid her hand on her knee) look to such advantage as
now. Could I, however, leap overboard and swim in clothes like these? No!
Therefore, I should have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do
I object to that? Now do I?' she wondered, here encountering the first
knot in the smooth skein of her argument.

Dinner came before she had untied it, and then it was the Captain
himself--Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain of
distinguished aspect, who did it for her as he helped her to a slice of
corned beef.

'A little of the fat, Ma'm?' he asked. 'Let me cut you just the tiniest
little slice the size of your fingernail.' At those words a delicious
tremor ran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrents rushed. It
recalled the feeling of indescribable pleasure with which she had first
seen Sasha, hundreds of years ago. Then she had pursued, now she fled.
Which is the greater ecstasy? The man's or the woman's? And are they not
perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking
the Captain but refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would,
if he wished it, have the very thinnest, smallest shiver in the world.
This was the most delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. 'For
nothing,' she thought, regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the
argument, 'is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to
resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else
can. So that I'm not sure', she continued, 'that I won't throw myself
overboard, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket after
all.'

(It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into possession
of a pleasaunce or toy cupboard; her arguments would not commend
themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)

'But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the "Marie Rose" to say
about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of being
rescued by a blue-jacket?' she said. 'We had a word for them. Ah! I have
it...' (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme
and passing strange on a lady's lips.) 'Lord! Lord! she cried again at
the conclusion of her thoughts, 'must I then begin to respect the opinion
of the other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I
can't swim, if I have to be rescued by a blue-jacket, by God!' she cried,
'I must!' Upon which a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse
to all kinds of equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a
roundabout way of going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered
paduasoy--the pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket--if these were
only to be obtained by roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she
supposed. She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women
must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. 'Now I
shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,' she reflected;
'for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex)
obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can
only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the
delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There's the
hairdressing,' she thought, 'that alone will take an hour of my morning,
there's looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there's staying and
lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to lace
and from lace to paduasoy; there's being chaste year in year out...' Here
she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A
sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so
violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin
of his teeth. 'If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow
who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity,
keep them covered,' Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest
beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when
all a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a
mast-head. 'A pox on them!' she said, realizing for the first time what,
in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to
say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.

'And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear,' she thought;
'once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a
man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and
run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or
walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or
prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals
on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour
out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take
cream?' And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low
an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had
once been her pride to belong--'To fall from a mast-head', she thought,
'because you see a woman's ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and
parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman
teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the slave of the frailest chit
in petticoats. and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of
creation.--Heavens!' she thought, 'what fools they make of us--what fools
we are!' And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she
was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and
indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was
woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most
bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of
ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.
Thus it is no great wonder, as she pitted one sex against the other, and
found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was
not sure to which she belonged--it was no great wonder that she was about
to cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again when
the anchor fell with a great splash into the sea; the sails came tumbling
on deck, and she perceived (so sunk had she been in thought that she had
seen nothing for several days) that the ship was anchored off the coast
of Italy. The Captain at once sent to ask the honour of her company
ashore with him in the longboat.

When she returned the next morning, she stretched herself on her couch
under the awning and arranged her draperies with the greatest decorum
about her ankles.

'Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex,' she thought,
continuing the sentence which she had left unfinished the other day,
'armoured with every weapon as they are, while they debar us even from a
knowledge of the alphabet' (and from these opening words it is plain that
something had happened during the night to give her a push towards the
female sex, for she was speaking more as a woman speaks than as a man,
yet with a sort of content after all), 'still--they fall from the
mast-head.' Here she gave a great yawn and fell asleep. When she woke,
the ship was sailing before a fair breeze so near the shore that towns on
the cliffs' edge seemed only kept from slipping into the water by the
interposition of some great rock or the twisted roots of some ancient
olive tree. The scent of oranges wafted from a million trees, heavy with
the fruit, reached her on deck. A score of blue dolphins, twisting their
tails, leapt high now and again into the air. Stretching her arms out
(arms, she had learnt already, have no such fatal effects as legs), she
thanked Heaven that she was not prancing down Whitehall on a warhorse,
nor even sentencing a man to death. 'Better is it', she thought, 'to be
clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the
female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to
others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all
the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted
raptures known to the humane spirit, which are', she said aloud, as her
habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love.'

'Praise God that I'm a woman!' she cried, and was about to run into
extreme folly--than which none is more distressing in woman or man
either--of being proud of her sex, when she paused over the singular
word, which, for all we can do to put it in its place, has crept in at
the end of the last sentence: Love. 'Love,' said Orlando. Instantly--such
is its impetuosity--love took a human shape--such is its pride. For where
other thoughts are content to remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this
one but to put on flesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and
jerkin. And as all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the
culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention,
though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if
the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was
to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now
a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark.
Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable
impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what
the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty
what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she knew Sasha as she was,
and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the pursuit of all those
treasures which were now revealed, she was so rapt and enchanted that it
was as if a cannon ball had exploded at her ear when a man's voice said,
'Permit me, Madam,' a man's hand raised her to her feet; and the fingers
of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the middle finger
pointed to the horizon.

'The cliffs of England, Ma'am,' said the Captain, and he raised the hand
which had pointed at the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave a second
start, even more violent than the first.

'Christ Jesus!' she cried.

Happily, the sight of her native land after long absence excused both
start and exclamation, or she would have been hard put to it to explain
to Captain Bartolus the raging and conflicting emotions which now boiled
within her. How tell him that she, who now trembled on his arm, had been
a Duke and an Ambassador? How explain to him that she, who had been
lapped like a lily in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain
with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on
summer nights when the tulips were abloom and the bees buzzing off
Wapping Old Stairs? Not even to herself could she explain the giant start
she gave, as the resolute right hand of the sea-captain indicated the
cliffs of the British Islands.

'To refuse and to yield,' she murmured, 'how delightful; to pursue and
conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how sublime.' Not one of
these words so coupled together seemed to her wrong; nevertheless, as the
chalky cliffs loomed nearer, she felt culpable; dishonoured; unchaste,
which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange.
Closer and closer they drew, till the samphire gatherers, hanging
half-way down the cliff, were plain to the naked eye. And watching them,
she felt, scampering up and down within her, like some derisive ghost who
in another instant will pick up her skirts and flaunt out of sight, Sasha
the lost, Sasha the memory, whose reality she had proved just now so
surprisingly--Sasha, she felt, mopping and mowing and making all sorts of
disrespectful gestures towards the cliffs and the samphire gatherers; and
when the sailors began chanting, 'So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of
Spain', the words echoed in Orlando's sad heart, and she felt that
however much landing there meant comfort, meant opulence, meant
consequence and state (for she would doubtless pick up some noble Prince
and reign, his consort, over half Yorkshire), still, if it meant
conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love,
fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then
she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the
gipsies.

Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome
of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so
impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has
seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction,
upon the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable. The form of it,
by the hazard of fancy, recalled that earliest, most persistent
memory--the man with the big forehead in Twitchett's sitting-room, the
man who sat writing, or rather looking, but certainly not at her, for he
never seemed to see her poised there in all her finery, lovely boy though
she must have been, she could not deny it--and whenever she thought of
him, the thought spread round it, like the risen moon on turbulent
waters, a sheet of silver calm. Now her hand went to her bosom (the other
was still in the Captain's keeping), where the pages of her poem were
hidden safe. It might have been a talisman that she kept there. The
distraction of sex, which hers was, and what it meant, subsided; she
thought now only of the glory of poetry, and the great lines of Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton began booming and reverberating, as if a
golden clapper beat against a golden bell in the cathedral tower which
was her mind. The truth was that the image of the marble dome which her
eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested a poet's forehead
and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no figment, but a
reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a favouring
gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth, and
revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast
cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.

'St Paul's,' said Captain Bartolus, who stood by her side. 'The Tower of
London,' he continued. 'Greenwich Hospital, erected in memory of Queen
Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William the Third. Westminster
Abbey. The Houses of Parliament.' As he spoke, each of these famous
buildings rose to view. It was a fine September morning. A myriad of
little water-craft plied from bank to bank. Rarely has a gayer, or more
interesting, spectacle presented itself to the gaze of a returned
traveller. Orlando hung over the prow, absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had
been used too long to savages and nature not to be entranced by these
urban glories. That, then, was the dome of St Paul's which Mr Wren had
built during her absence. Near by, a shock of golden hair burst from a
pillar--Captain Bartolus was at her side to inform her that that was the
Monument; there had been a plague and a fire during her absence, he said.
Do what she could to restrain them, the tears came to her eyes, until,
remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep, she let them flow.
Here, she thought, had been the great carnival. Here, where the waves
slapped briskly, had stood the Royal Pavilion. Here she had first met
Sasha. About here (she looked down into the sparkling waters) one had
been used to see the frozen bumboat woman with her apples on her lap. All
that splendour and corruption was gone. Gone, too, was the dark night,
the monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood. Here, where
yellow icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken
wretches on top, a covey of swans floated, orgulous, undulant, superb.
London itself had completely changed since she had last seen it. Then,
she remembered, it had been a huddle of little black, beetle-browed
houses. The heads of rebels had grinned on pikes at Temple Bar. The
cobbled pavements had reeked of garbage and ordure. Now, as the ship
sailed past Wapping, she caught glimpses of broad and orderly
thoroughfares. Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-fed horses stood at
the doors of houses whose bow windows, whose plate glass, whose polished
knockers, testified to the wealth and modest dignity of the dwellers
within. Ladies in flowered silk (she put the Captain's glass to her eye)
walked on raised footpaths. Citizens in broidered coats took snuff at
street corners under lamp-posts. She caught sight of a variety of painted
signs swinging in the breeze and could form a rapid notion from what was
painted on them of the tobacco, of the stuff, of the silk, of the gold,
of the silver ware, of the gloves, of the perfumes, and of a thousand
other articles which were sold within. Nor could she do more as the ship
sailed to its anchorage by London Bridge than glance at coffee-house
windows where, on balconies, since the weather was fine, a great number
of decent citizens sat at ease, with china dishes in front of them, clay
pipes by their sides, while one among them read from a news sheet, and
was frequently interrupted by the laughter or the comments of the others.
Were these taverns, were these wits, were these poets? she asked of
Captain Bartolus, who obligingly informed her that even now--if she
turned her head a little to the left and looked along the line of his
first finger--so--they were passing the Cocoa Tree, where,--yes, there he
was--one might see Mr Addison taking his coffee; the other two
gentlemen--'there, Ma'am, a little to the right of the lamp-post, one of
'em humped, t'other much the same as you or me'--were Mr Dryden and Mr
Pope.' 'Sad dogs,' said the Captain, by which he meant that they were
Papists, 'but men of parts, none the less,' he added, hurrying aft to
superintend the arrangements for landing. (The Captain must have been
mistaken, as a reference to any textbook of literature will show; but the
mistake was a kindly one, and so we let it stand.)

'Addison, Dryden, Pope,' Orlando repeated as if the words were an
incantation. For one moment she saw the high mountains above Broussa, the
next, she had set her foot upon her native shore.

***

But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous flutter of
excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law; how harder
than the stones of London Bridge it is, and than the lips of a cannon
more severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than
she was made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave
emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits
which had been preferred against her during her absence, as well as
innumerable minor litigations, some arising out of, others depending on
them. The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and
therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a
woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English
Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her
three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased,
claimed that all his property descended to them. Such grave charges as
these would, of course, take time and money to dispose of. All her
estates were put in Chancery and her titles pronounced in abeyance while
the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly ambiguous
condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or
nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the
legal judgment, she had the Law's permission to reside in a state of
incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be.

It was a fine evening in December when she arrived and the snow was
falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had seen them
from the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a
house, brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimneys
smoking busily as if inspired with a life of their own. She could not
restrain a cry as she saw it there tranquil and massive, couched upon the
meadows. As the yellow coach entered the park and came bowling along the
drive between the trees, the red deer raised their heads as if
expectantly, and it was observed that instead of showing the timidity
natural to their kind, they followed the coach and stood about the
courtyard when it drew up. Some tossed their antlers, others pawed the
ground as the step was let down and Orlando alighted. One, it is said,
actually knelt in the snow before her. She had not time to reach her hand
towards the knocker before both wings of the great door were flung open,
and there, with lights and torches held above their heads, were Mrs
Grimsditch, Mr Dupper, and a whole retinue of servants come to greet her.
But the orderly procession was interrupted first by the impetuosity of
Canute, the elk-hound, who threw himself with such ardour upon his
mistress that he almost knocked her to the ground; next, by the agitation
of Mrs Grimsditch, who, making as if to curtsey, was overcome with
emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!
until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kiss upon both her cheeks.
After that, Mr Dupper began to read from a parchment, but the dogs
barking, the huntsmen winding their horns, and the stags, who had come
into the courtyard in the confusion, baying the moon, not much progress
was made, and the company dispersed within after crowding about their
Mistress, and testifying in every way to their great joy at her return.

No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando
they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of
the deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb
creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and
character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs Grimsditch, over her dish of
china tea, to Mr Dupper that night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had
never seen a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between
them; one was as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two
peaches on one branch; which, said Mrs Grimsditch, becoming confidential,
she had always had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very
mysteriously), which it was no surprise to her (here she nodded her head
very knowingly), and for her part, a very great comfort; for what with
the towels wanting mending and the curtains in the chaplain's parlour
being moth-eaten round the fringes, it was time they had a Mistress among
them.

'And some little masters and mistresses to come after her,' Mr Dupper
added, being privileged by virtue of his holy office to speak his mind on
such delicate matters as these.

So, while the old servants gossiped in the servants' hall, Orlando took a
silver candle in her hand and roamed once more through the halls, the
galleries, the courts, the bedrooms; saw loom down at her again the dark
visage of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain, among her ancestors;
sat now in this chair of state, now reclined on that canopy of delight;
observed the arras, how it swayed; watched the huntsmen riding and Daphne
flying; bathed her hand, as she had loved to do as a child, in the yellow
pool of light which the moonlight made falling through the heraldic
Leopard in the window; slid along the polished planks of the gallery, the
other side of which was rough timber; touched this silk, that satin;
fancied the carved dolphins swam; brushed her hair with King James'
silver brush; buried her face in the potpourri, which was made as the
Conqueror had taught them many hundred years ago and from the same roses;
looked at the garden and imagined the sleeping crocuses, the dormant
dahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming white in the snow and the great
yew hedges, thick as a house, black behind them; saw the orangeries and
the giant medlars;--all this she saw, and each sight and sound, rudely as
we write it down, filled her heart with such a lust and balm of joy, that
at length, tired out, she entered the Chapel and sank into the old red
arm-chair in which her ancestors used to hear service. There she lit a
cheroot ('twas a habit she had brought back from the East) and opened the
Prayer Book.

It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had been
held by Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye of faith could
detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the Royal blood.
But what pious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what evil passions it
soothed asleep, who dare say, seeing that of all communions this with the
deity is the most inscrutable? Novelist, poet, historian all falter with
their hand on that door; nor does the believer himself enlighten us, for
is he more ready to die than other people, or more eager to share his
goods? Does he not keep as many maids and carriage horses as the rest?
and yet with it all, holds a faith he says which should make goods a
vanity and death desirable. In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the
blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now
added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking,
was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the
blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a
reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said,
no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however, can be more arrogant,
though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one,
and of religions none but the speaker's. Orlando, it seemed, had a faith
of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world, she now reflected
upon her sins and the imperfections that had crept into her spiritual
state. The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the poet's Eden. Do
what she would there were still too many of these sinful reptiles in the
first stanzas of 'The Oak Tree'. But 'S' was nothing, in her opinion,
compared with the termination 'ing'. The present participle is the Devil
himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in
Devils. To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she
concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can
adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet's,
then, is the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where
others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the
poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the
world. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the
vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they
are the thinnest integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine, etc.
Thus it is obvious that she was back in the confines of her own religion
which time had only strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly
acquiring the intolerance of belief.

'I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper at last. 'I am losing
some illusions,' she said, shutting Queen Mary's book, 'perhaps to
acquire others,' and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her
ancestors lay.

But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and the
rest, had lost something of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi had waved
his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the fact that only
three or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their
way to make in the world like any modern upstart, and that they had made
it by acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other
upstart does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding
had preferred the quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the
penalty by extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or
herded sheep in the fields, filled her with remorse. She thought of the
Egyptian pyramids and what bones lie beneath them as she stood in the
crypt; and the vast, empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmara
seemed, for the moment, a finer dwelling-place than this many-roomed
mansion in which no bed lacked its quilt and no silver dish its silver
cover.

'I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper. 'I am losing my
illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,' and she paced down the long
gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome.
But it was interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out
to her log fire (for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it
were an avenue of great edifices, the progress of her own self along her
own past.

How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of
tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then--it was
the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps--into this high
frenzy was let fall some black drop, which turned her rhapsody into
sluggishness. Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and
many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not
verse; and she remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at
Norwich, Browne, whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in
solitude after her affair with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows
these growths are agelong in coming, a spirit capable of resistance. 'I
will write,' she had said, 'what I enjoy writing'; and so had scratched
out twenty-six volumes. Yet still, for all her travels and adventures and
profound thinkings and turnings this way and that, she was only in
process of fabrication. What the future might bring, Heaven only knew.
Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High
battlements of thought, habits that had seemed durable as stone, went
down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and
fresh stars twinkling in it. Here she went to the window, and in spite of
the cold could not help unlatching it. She leant out into the damp night
air. She heard a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter of a pheasant
trailing through the branches. She heard the snow slither and flop from
the roof to the ground. 'By my life,' she exclaimed, 'this is a thousand
times better than Turkey. Rustum,' she cried, as if she were arguing with
the gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind and
continuing it with someone who was not there to contradict she showed
again the development of her soul), 'you were wrong. This is better than
Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco--of what odds and ends are we compounded,'
she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). 'What a phantasmagoria
the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore
our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are
overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the
thrushes sing.' And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things
which call for explanation and imprint their message without leaving any
hint as to their meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and
went to bed.

Next morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had out her pen and
paper. and started afresh upon 'The Oak Tree', for to have ink and paper
in plenty when one has made do with berries and margins is a delight not
to be conceived. Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of
despair, now in the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when a shadow
darkened the page. She hastily hid her manuscript.

As her window gave on to the most central of the courts, as she had given
orders that she would see no one, as she knew no one and was herself
legally unknown, she was first surprised at the shadow, then indignant at
it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused it) overcome with
merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadow
of no less a personage than the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of
Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She was
loping across the court in her old black riding-habit and mantle as
before. Not a hair of her head was changed. This then was the woman who
had chased her from England! This was the eyrie of that obscene
vulture--this the fatal fowl herself! At the thought that she had fled
all the way to Turkey to avoid her seductions (now become excessively
flat), Orlando laughed aloud. There was something inexpressibly comic in
the sight. She resembled, as Orlando had thought before, nothing so much
as a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes, the lank cheeks, the high
headdress of that animal. She stopped now, much as a hare sits erect in
the corn when thinking itself unobserved, and stared at Orlando, who
stared back at her from the window. After they had stared like this for a
certain time, there was nothing for it but to ask her in, and soon the
two ladies were exchanging compliments while the Archduchess struck the
snow from her mantle.

'A plague on women,' said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to
fetch a glass of wine, 'they never leave one a moment's peace. A more
ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying set of people don't exist. It was to
escape this Maypole that I left England, and now'--here she turned to
present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold--in her place stood a
tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was
alone with a man.

Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had
completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be
equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.

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

'Gentle creature,' cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at the
same time pressing a cordial to Orlando's lips, 'forgive me for the
deceit I have practised on you!'

Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.

In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with
great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The Archduchess (but
she must in future be known as the Archduke) told his story--that he was
a man and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and
fallen hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had
dressed as a woman and lodged at the Baker's shop; that he was desolated
when he fled to Turkey; that he had heard of her change and hastened to
offer his services (here he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said
the Archduke Harry, she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the
Perfection of her sex. The three p's would have been more persuasive if
they had not been interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the
strangest kind. 'If this is love,' said Orlando to herself, looking at
the Archduke on the other side of the fender, and now from the woman's
point of view, 'there is something highly ridiculous about it.'

Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate
declaration of his suit. He told her that he had something like twenty
million ducats in a strong box at his castle. He had more acres than any
nobleman in England. The shooting was excellent: he could promise her a
mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no English moor, or Scotch
either, could rival. True, the pheasants had suffered from the gape in
his absence, and the does had slipped their young, but that could be put
right, and would be with her help when they lived in Roumania together.

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

That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew
from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that
women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and
so, shocked she was.

The Archduke apologized. He commanded himself sufficiently to say that he
would leave her now, but would return on the following day for his
answer.

That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednesday; he came on Thursday; he came on
Friday; and he came on Saturday. It is true that each visit began,
continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there
was much room for silence. They sat on either side of the fireplace and
sometimes the Archduke knocked over the fire-irons and Orlando picked
them up again. Then the Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk
in Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke
would say that it was not as big as the reindeer which he shot in Norway;
and Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would
say he had shot an albatross, and Orlando would say (half hiding her
yawn) was an albatross as big as an elephant, and the Archduke would
say--something very sensible, no doubt, but Orlando heard it not, for she
was looking at her writing-table, out of the window, at the door. Upon
which the Archduke would say, 'I adore you', at the very same moment that
Orlando said 'Look, it's beginning to rain', at which they were both much
embarrassed, and blushed scarlet, and could neither of them think what to
say next. Indeed, Orlando was at her wit's end what to talk about and had
she not bethought her of a game called Fly Loo, at which great sums of
money can be lost with very little expense of spirit, she would have had
to marry him, she supposed; for how else to get rid of him she knew not.
By this device, however, and it was a simple one, needing only three
lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies, the embarrassment of
conversation was overcome and the necessity of marriage avoided. For now,
the Archduke would bet her five hundred pounds to a tester that a fly
would settle on this lump and not on that. Thus, they would have
occupation for a whole morning watching the flies (who were naturally
sluggish at this season and often spent an hour or so circling round the
ceiling) until at length some fine bluebottle made his choice and the
match was won. Many hundreds of pounds changed hands between them at this
game, which the Archduke, who was a born gambler, swore was every bit as
good as horse racing, and vowed he could play at for ever. But Orlando
soon began to weary.

What's the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life', she
asked, 'if I have to pass all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an
Archduke?'

She began to detest the sight of sugar; flies made her dizzy. Some way
out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still
awkward in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man
over the head or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think
of no better method than this. She caught a blue-bottle, gently pressed
the life out of it (it was half dead already; or her kindness for the
dumb creatures would not have permitted it) and secured it by a drop of
gum arabic to a lump of sugar. While the Archduke was gazing at the
ceiling, she deftly substituted this lump for the one she had laid her
money on, and crying 'Loo Loo!' declared that she had won her bet. Her
reckoning was that the Archduke, with all his knowledge of sport and
horseracing, would detect the fraud and, as to cheat at Loo is the most
heinous of crimes, and men have been banished from the society of mankind
to that of apes in the tropics for ever because of it, she calculated
that he would be manly enough to refuse to have anything further to do
with her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the amiable nobleman. He
was no nice judge of flies. A dead fly looked to him much the same as a
living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and he paid her over
17,250 pounds (which is about 40,885 pounds 6 shillings and 8 pence of
our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he could be
deceived no longer. When he realized the truth at last, a painful scene
ensued. The Archduke rose to his full height. He coloured scarlet. Tears
rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won a fortune from him
was nothing--she was welcome to it; that she had deceived him was
something--it hurt him to think her capable of it; but that she had
cheated at Loo was everything. To love a woman who cheated at play was,
he said, impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said,
recovering slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, after all, only a
woman, he said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart
to forgive her and had bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his
language, when she cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by
dropping a small toad between his skin and his shirt.

In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have
preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one's person
a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden; one must have recourse to
toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold
steel cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The
Archduke cursed. She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.

'Heaven be praised!' cried Orlando still laughing. She heard the sound of
chariot wheels driven at a furious pace down the courtyard. She heard
them rattle along the road. Fainter and fainter the sound became. Now it
faded away altogether.

'I am alone,' said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.

That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of
science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been
made love to, many women would take their oath. As the sound of the
Archduke's chariot wheels died away, Orlando felt drawing further from
her and further from her an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune
(she did not mind that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and
circumstance of married life (she did not mind that), but life she heard
going from her, and a lover. 'Life and a lover,' she murmured; and going
to her writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:

'Life and a lover'--a line which did not scan and made no sense with what
went before--something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid the
scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,

'Life and a lover.' Then laying her pen aside she went into her bedroom,
stood in front of her mirror, and arranged her pearls about her neck.
Then since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown of
sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of
peach bloom; thence to a wine-coloured brocade. Perhaps a dash of powder
was needed, and if her hair were disposed--so--about her brow, it might
become her. Then she slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and drew an
emerald ring upon her finger. 'Now,' she said when all was ready and lit
the silver sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not
have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow--for all
about the looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a
burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or
again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a
siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell
down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she,
so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was
no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright, 'Damn it,
Madam, you are loveliness incarnate,' which was the truth. Even Orlando
(who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the
involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems
not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and
confronts them all of a sudden in the glass--this smile she smiled and
then she listened for a moment and heard only the leaves blowing and the
sparrows twittering, and then she sighed, 'Life, a lover,' and then she
turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity; whipped her pearls from
her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect in the neat
black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman, and rang the bell.
When the servant came, she told him to order a coach and six to be in
readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent affairs to London. Within
an hour of the Archduke's departure, off she drove.

And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was
of a simple English kind which needs no description, to draw the reader's
attention more particularly than we could at the moment to one or two
remarks which have slipped in here and there in the course of the
narrative. For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her
manuscripts when interrupted. Next, that she looked long and intently in
the glass; and now, as she drove to London, one might notice her starting
and suppressing a cry when the horses galloped faster than she liked. Her
modesty as to her writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her
safety all seems to hint that what was said a short time ago about there
being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to
be altogether true. She was becoming a little more modest, as women are,
of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person.
Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were
diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much
to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more
important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of
the world and the world's view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus
saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately,
pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore
with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have
been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, been cut tight to her
legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it
behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she
flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat
breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin
bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that
wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their
liking. So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain
change was visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will
look at the above, even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando
as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both
are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The
man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep
the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full
in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking.
The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of
suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their
outlook might have been the same.

That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we
incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of
great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.
It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's
dress and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing
rather more openly than usual--openness indeed was the soul of her
nature--something that happens to most people without being thus plainly
expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the
sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex
to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the
male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of
what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result
everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and
note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando
herself.

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and
then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The
curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman,
how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her
clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And
then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a
man's love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not
endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted,
she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields
in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops
than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard.
She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet
again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of
another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would
burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography,
found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more
common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to
travel downhill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is
difficult to say and cannot now be decided. For her coach was now
rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in the city. The steps
were being let down; the iron gates were being opened. She was entering
her father's house at Blackfriars, which though fashion was fast
deserting that end of the town, was still a pleasant, roomy mansion, with
gardens running down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to
walk in.

Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her for
what she had come in search of--that is to say, life and a lover. About
the first there might be some doubt; the second she found without the
least difficulty two days after her arrival. It was a Tuesday that she
came to town. On Thursday she went for a walk in the Mall, as was then
the habit of persons of quality. She had not made more than a turn or two
of the avenue before she was observed by a little knot of vulgar people
who go there to spy upon their betters. As she came past them, a common
woman carrying a child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly
into Orlando's face, and cried out, 'Lawk upon us, if it ain't the Lady
Orlando!' Her companions came crowding round, and Orlando found herself
in a moment the centre of a mob of staring citizens and tradesmen's
wives, all eager to gaze upon the heroine of the celebrated lawsuit. Such
was the interest that the case excited in the minds of the common people.
She might, indeed, have found herself gravely discommoded by the pressure
of the crowd--she had forgotten that ladies are not supposed to walk in
public places alone--had not a tall gentleman at once stepped forward and
offered her the protection of his arm. It was the Archduke. She was
overcome with distress and yet with some amusement at the sight. Not only
had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her, but in order to show that he
took her levity with the toad in good part, he had procured a jewel made
in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon her with a repetition
of his suit as he handed her to her coach.

What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove
home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to go for a
walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad set in
emeralds, and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She took a kinder view of
the case next day when she found on her breakfast table half a dozen
billets from some of the greatest ladies in the land--Lady Suffolk, Lady
Salisbury, Lady Chesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her
in the politest manner of old alliances between their families and her
own, and desired the honour of her acquaintance. Next day, which was a
Saturday, many of these great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday,
about noon, their footmen brought cards of invitation to various routs,
dinners, and assemblies in the near future; so that Orlando was launched
without delay, and with some splash and foam at that, upon the waters of
London society.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any
other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only
those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it--the poets
and the novelists--can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases
where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a
miasma--a mirage. To make our meaning plain--Orlando could come home from
one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a
Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room
a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again.
Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could
persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and
tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at
last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society
said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain
language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could
never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O.
had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M.
amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry,
politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her
memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always.
Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was
intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those
brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose
flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different
ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord
O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them
all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of
flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this
seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time,
therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the
most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence
whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal
with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to
prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are
content to leave it.

Following the example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only say
that society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance.
To have the entry there was the aim of every well-bred person. The graces
were supreme. Fathers instructed their sons, mothers their daughters. No
education was complete for either sex which did not include the science
of deportment, the art of bowing and curtseying, the management of the
sword and the fan, the care of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the
flexibility of the knee, the proper methods of entering and leaving the
room, with a thousand etceteras, such as will immediately suggest
themselves to anybody who has himself been in society. Since Orlando had
won the praise of Queen Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl of rose
water as a boy, it must be supposed that she was sufficiently expert to
pass muster. Yet it is true that there was an absentmindedness about her
which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she
should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a
stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might
endanger a cup of tea on occasion.

Whether this slight disability was enough to counterbalance the splendour
of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop too much of that black
humour which ran in the veins of all her race, certain it is that she had
not been in the world more than a score of times before she might have
been heard to ask herself, had there been anybody but her spaniel Pippin
to hear her, 'What the devil is the matter with me?' The occasion was
Tuesday, the 16th of June 1712; she had just returned from a great ball
at Arlington House; the dawn was in the sky, and she was pulling off her
stockings. 'I don't care if I never meet another soul as long as I live,'
cried Orlando, bursting into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life,
which is, after all, of some importance in its way, escaped her. 'Is
this', she asked--but there was none to answer, 'is this', she finished
her sentence all the same, 'what people call life?' The spaniel raised
her forepaw in token of sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her
tongue. Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the
spaniel with her lips. In short, there was the truest sympathy between
them that can be between a dog and its mistress, and yet it cannot be
denied that the dumbness of animals is a great impediment to the
refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails; they bow the front part
of the body and elevate the hind; they roll, they jump, they paw, they
whine, they bark, they slobber, they have all sorts of ceremonies and
artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail, since speak
they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog gently on
to the floor, with the great people at Arlington House. They, too, wag
their tails, bow, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot.
'All these months that I've been out in the world', said Orlando,
pitching one stocking across the room, 'I've heard nothing but what
Pippin might have said. I'm cold. I'm happy. I'm hungry. I've caught a
mouse. I've buried a bone. Please kiss my nose.' And it was not enough.

How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we
will only seek to explain by supposing that this mysterious composition
which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself, but
has a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which either makes you drunk
when you think it, as Orlando thought it, delightful, or gives you a
headache when you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive. That the
faculty of speech has much to do with it either way, we take leave to
doubt. Often a dumb hour is the most ravishing of all; brilliant wit can
be tedious beyond description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on
with our story.

Orlando threw the second stocking after the first and went to bed
dismally enough, determined that she would forswear society for ever. But
again as it turned out, she was too hasty in coming to her conclusions.
For the very next morning she woke to find, among the usual cards of
invitation upon her table, one from a certain great Lady, the Countess of
R. Having determined overnight that she would never go into society
again, we can only explain Orlando's behaviour--she sent a messenger
hot-foot to R-- House to say that she would attend her Ladyship with all
the pleasure in the world--by the fact that she was still suffering from
the effect of three honeyed words dropped into her ear on the deck of the
"Enamoured Lady" by Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus as they sailed
down the Thames. Addison, Dryden, Pope, he had said, pointing to the
Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had chimed in her head like an
incantation ever since. Who can credit such folly? but so it was. All her
experience with Nick Greene had taught her nothing. Such names still
exercised over her the most powerful fascination. Something, perhaps, we
must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual
divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men--yet with a
distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the
very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that
she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one.
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. The
little glimpse she had of these great men from the deck of the ship was
of the nature of a vision. That the cup was china, or the gazette paper,
she doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he had dined with Dryden the
night before, she flatly disbelieved him. Now, the Lady R.'s reception
room had the reputation of being the antechamber to the presence room of
genius; it was the place where men and women met to swing censers and
chant hymns to the bust of genius in a niche in the wall. Sometimes the
God himself vouchsafed his presence for a moment. Intellect alone
admitted the suppliant, and nothing (so the report ran) was said inside
that was not witty.

It was thus with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room. She
found a company already assembled in a semicircle round the fire. Lady
R., an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace mantilla on her
head, was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre. Thus being somewhat
deaf, she could control the conversation on both sides of her. On both
sides of her sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it
was said, had been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered,
had been the mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant,
and all were famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in
silence...After three hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.

But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in between.
In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the
profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem
indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a
curious characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant
societies that the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends
talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains?
Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either
that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the
fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and
fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one
of them.

The truth would seem to be--if we dare use such a word in such a
connection--that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment. The
hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a
spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a
third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for
illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who
can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is
notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no
real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the
illusion prevails. This serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no
more than three witty things in the course of fifty years. Had she said
more, her circle would have been destroyed. The witticism, as it left her
lips, bowled over the current conversation as a cannon ball lays low the
violets and the daisies. When she made her famous 'mot de Saint Denis'
the very grass was singed. Disillusionment and desolation followed. Not a
word was uttered. 'Spare us another such, for Heaven's sake, Madame!' her
friends cried with one accord. And she obeyed. For almost seventeen years
she said nothing memorable and all went well. The beautiful counterpane
of illusion lay unbroken on her circle as it lay unbroken on the circle
of Lady R. The guests thought that they were happy, thought that they
were witty, thought that they were profound, and, as they thought this,
other people thought it still more strongly; and so it got about that
nothing was more delightful than one of Lady R.'s assemblies; everyone
envied those who were admitted; those who were admitted envied themselves
because other people envied them; and so there seemed no end to
it--except that which we have now to relate.

For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident occurred.
She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the most
brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old General
C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left leg
and gone to his right, while Mr L. interrupted when any proper name was
mentioned, 'R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My
dearest friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire'--which,
such is the force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the
most searching comment upon human life, and kept the company in a roar;
when the door opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando
did not catch. Soon a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To
judge from their faces, the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman
said there was a draught. The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be
under the sofa. It was as if their eyes were being slowly opened after a
pleasant dream and nothing met them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty
counterpane. It was as if the fumes of some delicious wine were slowly
leaving them. Still the General talked and still Mr L. remembered. But it
became more and more apparent how red the General's neck was, how bald Mr
L.'s head was. As for what they said--nothing more tedious and trivial
could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted and those who had fans yawned
behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon the arm of her great
chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.

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

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

'Mr Pope,' said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic fury,
'you are pleased to be witty.' Mr Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke a word.
They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose
and slunk from the room. That they would ever come back after such an
experience was doubtful. Link-boys could be heard calling their coaches
all down South Audley Street. Doors were slammed and carriages drove off.
Orlando found herself near Mr Pope on the staircase. His lean and
misshapen frame was shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice,
rage, triumph, wit, and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his
eyes. He looked like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its
forehead. At the same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now
upon the luckless Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that
inflicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side.
Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It is a
moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit. Women turn
nuns and men priests in such moments. In such moments, rich men sign away
their wealth; and happy men cut their throats with carving knives.
Orlando would have done all willingly, but there was a rasher thing still
for her to do, and this she did. She invited Mr Pope to come home with
her.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the
Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St
Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is
Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we
survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy
illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what
atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies,
the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we
tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life
is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs
us of our life--(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is
tedious and may well be dropped).

On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by
the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars. That she was
still flesh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due to a
fact to which we drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see
the more we believe. Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and
Blackfriars were at that time very imperfectly lit. True, the lighting
was a great improvement upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the
benighted traveller had to trust to the stars or the red flame of some
night watchman to save him from the gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak
woods where swine rooted in the Tottenham Court Road. But even so it
wanted much of our modern efficiency. Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps
occurred every two hundred yards or so, but between lay a considerable
stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes Orlando and Mr Pope would
be in blackness; and then for about half a minute again in the light. A
very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando. As the light faded,
she began to feel steal over her the most delicious balm. 'This is indeed
a very great honour for a young woman to be driving with Mr Pope,' she
began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. 'I am the most
blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me--indeed, I feel the knot of his
knee ribbons pressing against my thigh--is the greatest wit in Her
Majesty's dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy
me with fury.' Here came the lamp-post again. 'What a foolish wretch I
am!' she thought. 'There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come
will never cast a thought on me or on Mr Pope either. What's an "age",
indeed? What are "we"?' and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed
the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without
interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered.
But here again was darkness. Her illusion revived. 'How noble his brow
is,' she thought (mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr Pope's forehead in
the darkness). 'What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom,
and truth--what a wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people
are ready to barter their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for
ever. But for you the human pilgrimage would be performed in utter
darkness'; (here the coach gave a great lurch as it fell into a rut in
Park Lane) 'without genius we should be upset and undone. Most august,
most lucid of beams,'--thus she was apostrophizing the hump on the
cushion when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley
Square and she realized her mistake. Mr Pope had a forehead no bigger
than another man's. 'Wretched man,' she thought, 'how you have deceived
me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you plain, how
ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and weakly, there is nothing to
venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise.'

Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she
could see nothing but the poet's knees.

'But it is I that am a wretch,' she reflected, once they were in complete
obscurity again, 'for base as you may be, am I not still baser? It is you
who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten the
savage, make me clothes of the silkworm's wool, and carpets of the
sheep's. If I want to worship, have you not provided me with an image of
yourself and set it in the sky? Are not evidences of your care
everywhere? How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be,
therefore? Let it be all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you.'

Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now
Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides
some degraded creatures of her own sex, two wretched pigmies on a stark
desert land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The one was
powerless to help the other. Each had enough to do to look after itself.
Looking Mr Pope full in the face, 'It is equally vain', she thought; 'for
you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you.
The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth
is damnably unbecoming to us both.'

All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of
birth and education use, about the Queen's temper and the Prime
Minister's gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the
Haymarket, along the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her
house in Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had
been becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright--that is to
say, the sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of
a summer's morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen
distinctly that they alighted, Mr Pope handing Orlando from her carriage
and Orlando curtseying Mr Pope to precede her into her mansion with the
most scrupulous attention to the rites of the Graces.

From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that genius
(but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late Lord
Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is
constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps
should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the
lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a
time; save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and
may flash six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that
night) and then lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by
its beams is therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men
of genius are, it is said, much like other people.

It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this should
be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of genius.
Nor were they so different from the rest of us as one might have
supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea.
They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They
adored grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful.
They wore plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr Swift had a
fine malacca cane. Mr Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered
with his head. A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they
without their jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that
came to Orlando higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with
herself for noticing such trifles, and kept a book in which to write down
their memorable sayings, but the page remained empty. All the same, her
spirits revived, and she took to tearing up her cards of invitation to
great parties; kept her evenings free; began to look forward to Mr Pope's
visit, to Mr Addison's, to Mr Swift's--and so on and so on. If the reader
will here refer to the "Rape of the Lock", to the "Spectator", to
"Gulliver's Travels", he will understand precisely what these mysterious
words may mean. Indeed, biographers and critics might save themselves all
their labours if readers would only take this advice. For when we read:

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Pray'rs or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball.

--we know as if we heard him how Mr Pope's tongue flickered like a
lizard's, how his eyes flashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved, how
he lied, how he suffered. In short, every secret of a writer's soul,
every experience of his life; every quality of his mind is written large
in his works; yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers
to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only
explanation of the monstrous growth.

So, now that we have read a page or two of the "Rape of the Lock", we
know exactly why Orlando was so much amused and so much frightened and so
very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that afternoon.

Mrs Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr Addison waited on her
Ladyship. At this, Mr Pope got up with a wry smile, made his congee, and
limped off. In came Mr Addison. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the
following passage from the "Spectator":

'I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx
shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the peacock, parrot
and swan shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched
for shells, and the rocks for gems, and every part of nature furnish out
its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most
consummate work of it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the
petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it.'

We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all, in the hollow, of our hands.
Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrinkle in
his stocking? Does not every ripple and curve of his wit lie exposed
before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his urbanity and the
fact that he would marry a Countess and die very respectably in the end?
All is clear. And when Mr Addison has said his say, there is a terrific
rap at the door, and Mr Swift, who had these arbitrary ways with him,
walks in unannounced. One moment, where is "Gulliver's Travels"? Here it
is! Let us read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:

'I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tranquillity of Mind; I did not
find the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of a
secret or open Enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering or
pimping, to procure the Favour of any great Man or of his Minion. I
wanted no Fence against Fraud or Oppression; Here was neither Physician
to destroy my Body, nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No Informer to watch
my Words, and Actions, or forge Accusations against me for Hire: Here
were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen,
Housebreakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits,
splenetick tedious Talkers...'

But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and
yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He is so
coarse and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole world,
yet talks baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a
madhouse.

So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the weather
was fine, she carried them down to the country with her, and feasted them
royally in the Round Parlour, which she had hung with their pictures all
in a circle, so that Mr Pope could not say that Mr Addison came before
him, or the other way about. They were very witty, too (but their wit is
all in their books) and taught her the most important part of style,
which is the natural run of the voice in speaking--a quality which none
that has not heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill;
for it is born of the air, and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and
rolls and fades away, and is never to be recaptured, least of all by
those who prick up their ears, half a century later, and try. They taught
her this, merely by the cadence of their voices in speech; so that her
style changed somewhat, and she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses
and characters in prose. And so she lavished her wine on them and put
bank-notes, which they took very kindly, beneath their plates at dinner,
and accepted their dedications, and thought herself highly honoured by
the exchange.

Thus time ran on, and Orlando could often be heard saying to herself with
an emphasis which might, perhaps, make the hearer a little suspicious,
'Upon my soul, what a life this is!' (For she was still in search of that
commodity.) But circumstances soon forced her to consider the matter more
narrowly.

One day she was pouring out tea for Mr Pope while, as anyone can tell
from the verses quoted above, he sat very bright-eyed, observant, and all
crumpled up in a chair by her side.

'Lord,' she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, 'how women in ages to
come will envy me! And yet--' she paused; for Mr Pope needed her
attention. And yet--let us finish her thought for her--when anybody says
'How future ages will envy me', it is safe to say that they are extremely
uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so
flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has
done his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of
tea; for another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has
a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts
the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is
biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance,
Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. Then the
high opinion poets have of themselves; then the low one they have of
others; then the enmities, injuries, envies, and repartees in which they
are constantly engaged; then the volubility with which they impart them;
then the rapacity with which they demand sympathy for them; all this, one
may whisper, lest the wits may overhear us, makes pouring out tea a more
precarious and, indeed, arduous occupation than is generally allowed.
Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may overhear us), there
is a little secret which men share among them; Lord Chesterfield
whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to secrecy, 'Women are
but children of a larger growth...A man of sense only trifles with them,
plays with them, humours and flatters them', which, since children always
hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow up, may have
somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out tea is a
curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his
poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea,
this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her
understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run
her through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as
we can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug
suspended and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little,
look out of the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall
with a great plop--as Orlando did now--into Mr Pope's tea. Never was any
mortal so ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr
Pope. He turned to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough
draught of a certain famous line in the 'Characters of Women'. Much
polish was afterwards bestowed on it, but even in the original it was
striking enough. Orlando received it with a curtsey. Mr Pope left her
with a bow. Orlando, to cool her cheeks, for really she felt as if the
little man had struck her, strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the
garden. Soon the cool breezes did their work. To her amazement she found
that she was hugely relieved to find herself alone. She watched the merry
boatloads rowing up the river. No doubt the sight put her in mind of one
or two incidents in her past life. She sat herself down in profound
meditation beneath a fine willow tree. There she sat till the stars were
in the sky. Then she rose, turned, and went into the house, where she
sought her bedroom and locked the door. Now she opened a cupboard in
which hung still many of the clothes she had worn as a young man of
fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit richly trimmed
with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed, but it fitted
her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure of a noble
Lord. She took a turn or two before the mirror to make sure that her
petticoats had not lost her the freedom of her legs, and then let herself
secretly out of doors.

It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the
light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps,
made a light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the
architecture of Mr Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet,
just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver
sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought
Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie); that society should be, that
friendship should be, that love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as
we have lost faith in human intercourse some random collocation of barns
and trees or a haystack and a waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol
of what is unattainable that we begin the search again.

She entered Leicester Square as she made these observations. The
buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day. The canopy
of the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to fill up the outline of
roof and chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly with one arm drooping
by her side, the other reposing in her lap, on a seat beneath a plane
tree in the middle of the square seemed the very figure of grace,
simplicity, and desolation. Orlando swept her hat off to her in the
manner of a gallant paying his addresses to a lady of fashion in a public
place. The young woman raised her head. It was of the most exquisite
shapeliness. The young woman raised her eyes. Orlando saw them to be of a
lustre such as is sometimes seen on teapots but rarely in a human face.
Through this silver glaze the young woman looked up at him (for a man he
was to her) appealing, hoping, trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted
his arm. For--need we stress the point?--she was of the tribe which
nightly burnishes their wares, and sets them in order on the common
counter to wait the highest bidder. She led Orlando to the room in
Gerrard Street which was her lodging. To feel her hanging lightly yet
like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the feelings which
become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet, having been
so lately a woman herself, she suspected that the girl's timidity and her
hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in the latch and
the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put on to
gratify her masculinity. Upstairs they went, and the pains which the poor
creature had been at to decorate her room and hide the fact that she had
no other deceived Orlando not a moment. The deception roused her scorn;
the truth roused her pity. One thing showing through the other bred the
oddest assortment of feeling, so that she did not know whether to laugh
or to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girl called herself, unbuttoned her
gloves; carefully concealed the left-hand thumb, which wanted mending;
then drew behind a screen, where, perhaps, she rouged her cheeks,
arranged her clothes, fixed a new kerchief round her neck--all the time
prattling as women do, to amuse her lover, though Orlando could have
sworn, from the tone of her voice, that her thoughts were elsewhere. When
all was ready, out she came, prepared--but here Orlando could stand it no
longer. In the strangest torment of anger, merriment, and pity she flung
off all disguise and admitted herself a woman.

At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laughter as might have been heard
across the way.

'Well, my dear,' she said, when she had somewhat recovered, 'I'm by no
means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter is' (and it
was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the same sex,
her manner changed and she dropped her plaintive, appealing ways), 'the
plain Dunstable of the matter is, that I'm not in the mood for the
society of the other sex to-night. Indeed, I'm in the devil of a fix.'
Whereupon, drawing up the fire and stirring a bowl of punch, she told
Orlando the whole story of her life. Since it is Orlando's life that
engages us at present, we need not relate the adventures of the other
lady, but it is certain that Orlando had never known the hours speed
faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell had not a particle of wit
about her, and when the name of Mr Pope came up in talk asked innocently
if he were connected with the perruque maker of that name in Jermyn
Street. Yet, to Orlando, such is the charm of ease and the seduction of
beauty, this poor girl's talk, larded though it was with the commonest
expressions of the street corners, tasted like wine after the fine
phrases she had been used to, and she was forced to the conclusion that
there was something in the sneer of Mr Pope, in the condescension of Mr
Addison, and in the secret of Lord Chesterfield which took away her
relish for the society of wits, deeply though she must continue to
respect their works.

These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and Prue
Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they now
elected her a member. Each would tell the story of the adventures which
had landed her in her present way of life. Several were the natural
daughters of earls and one was a good deal nearer than she should have
been to the King's person. None was too wretched or too poor but to have
some ring or handkerchief in her pocket which stood her in lieu of
pedigree. So they would draw round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it
her business to furnish generously, and many were the fine tales they
told and many the amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied
that when women get together--but hist--they are always careful to see
that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print. All
they desire is--but hist again--is that not a man's step on the stair?
All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman took the very
words out of our mouths. Women have no desires, says this gentleman,
coming into Nell's parlour; only affectations. Without desires (she has
served him and he is gone) their conversation cannot be of the slightest
interest to anyone. 'It is well known', says Mr S. W., 'that when they
lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each
other. When they are alone, they do not talk, they scratch.' And since
they cannot talk together and scratching cannot continue without
interruption and it is well known (Mr T. R. has proved it) 'that women
are incapable of any feeling of affection for their own sex and hold each
other in the greatest aversion', what can we suppose that women do when
they seek out each other's society?

As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible
man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians
from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando
professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to
the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is
impossible.

But to give an exact and particular account of Orlando's life at this
time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and grope in
the ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about Gerrard
Street and Drury Lane at that time, we seem now to catch sight of her and
then again to lose it. The task is made still more difficult by the fact
that she found it convenient at this time to change frequently from one
set of clothes to another. Thus she often occurs in contemporary memoirs
as 'Lord' So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed
to him, and it is he who is said to have written the poems that were
really hers. She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different
parts, for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn
only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that
she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were
increased and its experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she
exchanged the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both
sexes equally.

So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of
ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or two (for she
had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a
turn in the garden and clip the nut trees--for which knee-breeches were
convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best
suited a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great
nobleman; and so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured
gown like a lawyer's and visit the courts to hear how her cases were
doing,--for her fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer
consummation than they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally,
when night came, she would more often than not become a nobleman complete
from head to toe and walk the streets in search of adventure.

Returning from some of these junketings--of which there were many stories
told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the King's
ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled with a
certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady's husband followed
them--but of the truth or otherwise of these stories, we express no
opinion--returning from whatever her occupation may have been, she made a
point sometimes of passing beneath the windows of a coffee house, where
she could see the wits without being seen, and thus could fancy from
their gestures what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying
without hearing a word of them; which was perhaps an advantage; and once
she stood half an hour watching three shadows on the blind drinking tea
together in a house in Bolt Court.

Never was any play so absorbing. She wanted to cry out, Bravo! Bravo!
For, to be sure, what a fine drama it was--what a page torn from the
thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow with the
pouting lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair, uneasy, petulant,
officious; there was the bent female shadow, crooking a finger in the cup
to feel how deep the tea was, for she was blind; and there was the
Roman-looking rolling shadow in the big armchair--he who twisted his
fingers so oddly and jerked his head from side to side and swallowed down
the tea in such vast gulps. Dr Johnson, Mr Boswell, and Mrs
Williams,--those were the shadows' names. So absorbed was she in the
sight, that she forgot to think how other ages would have envied her,
though it seems probable that on this occasion they would. She was
content to gaze and gaze. At length Mr Boswell rose. He saluted the old
woman with tart asperity. But with what humility did he not abase himself
before the great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full height and
rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent
phrases that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though she
never heard a word that any of the three shadows said as they sat there
drinking tea.

At length she came home one night after one of these saunterings and
mounted to her bedroom. She took off her laced coat and stood there in
shirt and breeches looking out of the window. There was something
stirring in the air which forbade her to go to bed. A white haze lay over
the town, for it was a frosty night in midwinter and a magnificent vista
lay all round her. She could see St Paul's, the Tower, Westminster Abbey,
with all the spires and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of
its banks, the opulent and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places.
On the north rose the smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west
the streets and squares of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon
this serene and orderly prospect the stars looked down, glittering,
positive, hard, from a cloudless sky. In the extreme clearness of the
atmosphere the line of every roof, the cowl of every chimney, was
perceptible; even the cobbles in the streets showed distinct one from
another, and Orlando could not help comparing this orderly scene with the
irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the city of London in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the city, if such one
could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and conglomeration of houses,
under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars reflected themselves in deep
pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle of the streets. A black
shadow at the corner where the wine shop used to stand was, as likely as
not, the corpse of a murdered man. She could remember the cries of many a
one wounded in such night brawlings, when she was a little boy, held to
the diamond-paned window in her nurse's arms. Troops of ruffians, men and
women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the streets, trolling out
wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and knives gleaming in
their fists. On such a night as this the impermeable tangle of the
forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined, writhing in
contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on one of the hills
which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed
to rot or parch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and
violence, poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways
and buzzed and stank--Orlando could remember even now the smell of them
on a hot night--in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city.
Now--she leant out of her window--all was light, order, and serenity.
There was the faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the
far-away cry of the night watchman--'Just twelve o'clock on a frosty
morning'. No sooner had the words left his lips than the first stroke of
midnight sounded. Orlando then for the first time noticed a small cloud
gathered behind the dome of St Paul's. As the strokes sounded, the cloud
increased, and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed. At
the same time a light breeze rose and by the time the sixth stroke of
midnight had struck the whole of the eastern sky was covered with an
irregular moving darkness, though the sky to the west and north stayed
clear as ever. Then the cloud spread north. Height upon height above the
city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, with all its lights shining. burnt
more brilliantly than ever by contrast. With the eighth stroke, some
hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled over Piccadilly. They seemed to mass
themselves and to advance with extraordinary rapidity towards the west
end. As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge blackness
sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of midnight,
the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city.
All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth
century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.