Orlando (Chapter 5)

The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of
the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or
rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering
gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who
lived beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate
of England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no
sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was
so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that
its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort
took the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century.
Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less
intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp
now began to make its way into every house--damp, which is the most
insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds,
and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp
is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the
kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So gradual is the process, that
it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and
the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that
the disease is at work.

Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of
the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.
Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had
sat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by
the brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared;
beards were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The
chill which he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to
his house; furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing
was left bare. Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was
invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and,
as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room
to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial
flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes
to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or
two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the
home--which had become extremely important--was completely altered.

Outside the house--it was another effect of the damp--ivy grew in
unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered
in greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a
shrubbery, a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms
where children were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light
penetrated to the drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came
through curtains of brown and purple plush. But the change did not stop
at outward things. The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their
hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their
feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another.
Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases.
The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was
tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both
sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth
outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the
average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen
and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for
twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and
thus--for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets
into the woodwork--sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics
became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were
now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be
our witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man
who could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of
his memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages
one morning 'all about nothing' he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went
for a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the
shrubbery. Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He
seemed to himself 'to crush the mould of a million more under his feet'.
Thick smoke exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He
reflected that no fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast
vegetable encumbrance. Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant.
Cucumbers 'came scrolloping across the grass to his feet'. Giant
cauliflowers towered deck above deck till they rivalled, to his
disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves. Hens laid incessantly
eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh his own fecundity
and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth confinement
indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He looked
upwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great frontispiece
of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the instigation
of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in year out,
the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or elephants
rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed upon
him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide
above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the
undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was
copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his
head in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.

While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well for
Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the
climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear
knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even she, at length, was
forced to acknowledge that times were changed. One afternoon in the early
part of the century she was driving through St James's Park in her old
panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not
often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds
with strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was
sufficiently strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth
century to cause her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and
flamingo clouds made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves
that she was insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins
dying in Ionian seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck the
earth, the sunbeam seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid,
hecatomb, or trophy (for it had something of a banquet-table air)--a
conglomeration at any rate of the most heterogeneous and ill-assorted
objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a vast mound where the statue of
Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a vast cross of fretted and
floriated gold were widow's weeds and bridal veils; hooked on to other
excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets,
memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas
trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and
mathematical instruments--the whole supported like a gigantic coat of
arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in flowing white; on
the left by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and sponge-bag
trousers. The incongruity of the objects, the association of the fully
clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours
and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with the most
profound dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so
indecent, so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it must be,
the effect of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the
first breeze that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past,
as if it were destined to endure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking
back into the corner of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could
ever demolish that garish erection. Only the noses would mottle and the
trumpets would rust; but there they would remain, pointing east, west,
south, and north, eternally. She looked back as her coach swept up
Constitution Hill. Yes, there it was, still beaming placidly in a light
which--she pulled her watch out of her fob--was, of course, the light of
twelve o'clock mid-day. None other could be so prosaic, so
matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of dawn or sunset, so seemingly
calculated to last for ever. She was determined not to look again.
Already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly. But what was more
peculiar a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her cheeks as she passed
Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a superior power down
upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she was wearing black
breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached her country
house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot thirty
miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.

Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of
her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt
which she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew
(who had succeeded good old Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt
chilly.

'So do we all, m'lady,' said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. 'The
walls is sweating,' she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and
sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the
finger-prints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that
many windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could
scarcely tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been
mistaken for coals and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were
already wearing three or four red-flannel petticoats, though the month
was August.

'But is it true, m'lady,' the good woman asked, hugging herself, while
the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, 'that the Queen, bless her, is
wearing a what d'you call it, a--,' the good woman hesitated and
blushed.

'A crinoline,' Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached
Blackfriars). Mrs Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down
her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were
they not all of them weak women? wearing crinolines the better to conceal
the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the
deplorable fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until
denial was impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child? to
bear fifteen or twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman's
life was spent, after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every
year, was made obvious.

'The muffins is keepin' 'ot,' said Mrs Bartholomew, mopping up her tears,
'in the liberry.'

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

'The muffins is keepin' 'ot in the liberry'--Orlando minced out the
horrid cockney phrase in Mrs Bartholomew's refined cockney accents as she
drank--but no, she detested the mild fluid--her tea. It was in this very
room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the
fireplace with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on
the table when Lord Burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of
the subjunctive. 'Little man, little man,'--Orlando could hear her
say--'is "must" a word to be addressed to princes?' And down came the
flagon on the table: there was the mark of it still.

But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great
Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her
arm-chair with a curse. Tomorrow she would have to buy twenty yards or
more of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. And then (here
she blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she
blushed) a bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on...The
blushes came and went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and
shame imaginable. One might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot,
now cold, upon her cheeks. And if the spirit of the age blew a little
unequally, the crinoline being blushed for before the husband, her
ambiguous position must excuse her (even her sex was still in dispute)
and the irregular life she had lived before.

At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed as
if the spirit of the age--if such indeed it were--lay dormant for a time.
Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or
relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper,
sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained--the manuscript of her poem,
'The Oak Tree'. She had carried this about with her for so many years
now, and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were
stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing
paper when with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and
cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most
conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read
the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at
it for close three hundred years now. It was time to make an end.
Meanwhile she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and
thinking as she read, how very little she had changed all these years.
She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she
had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and
satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried
drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected,
fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the
same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the
seasons.

'After all,' she thought, getting up and going to the window, 'nothing
has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a
chair has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the
same lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the
same carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen
Elizabeth, but what difference...'

No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the door
was flung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed by
Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just
dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon
the eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot,
which spread and meandered round her pen. It was some infirmity of the
quill, she supposed; it was split or dirty. She dipped it again. The blot
increased. She tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came.
Next she began to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it
became a round-headed monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But
as for writing poetry with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was
impossible. No sooner had she said 'Impossible' than, to her astonishment
and alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest
possible fluency. Her page was written in the neatest sloping Italian
hand with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life:

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

Will the young maiden, when her tears,
Alone in moonlight shine,
Tears for the absent and the loved,
Murmur--

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

Again she dipped her pen and off it went:--

She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve
Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
Had faded into paleness, broken by
Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,

but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink ever the page and
blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver,
all of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the
ink flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. What had
happened to her? Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what
was it? she demanded. But the room was empty. No one answered her, unless
the dripping of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.

Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an
extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of
a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing
scales. Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest
sensations about the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves.
Her arms sang and twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and
twanging in twenty years or so. But all this agitation seemed at length
to concentrate in her hands; and then in one hand, and then in one finger
of that hand, and then finally to contract itself so that it made a ring
of quivering sensibility about the second finger of the left hand. And
when she raised it to see what caused this agitation, she saw
nothing--nothing but the vast solitary emerald which Queen Elizabeth had
given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It was of the finest
water. It was worth ten thousand pounds at least. The vibration seemed,
in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some of the darkest
manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not enough; and,
further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were asking,
what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight? till poor Orlando
felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand without in
the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask which
dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were much
quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly
perceived what she had never noticed before--a thick ring of rather
jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.

'Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew,' she said, stretching her hand to
take it.

At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a
rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it
away from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. 'No,' she
said, with resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but
as for taking off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor
Queen Victoria on her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had
put it on her finger twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she
had slept in it; worked in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed
to be buried in it. In fact, Orlando understood her to say, but her voice
was much broken with emotion; that it was by the gleam on her wedding
ring that she would be assigned her station among the angels and its
lustre would be tarnished for ever if she let it out of her keeping for a
second.

'Heaven help us,' said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the
pigeons at their pranks, 'what a world we live in! What a world to be
sure!' Its complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole
world was ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings
abounded. She went to church. Wedding rings were everywhere. She drove
out. Gold, or pinchbeck, thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on
every hand. Rings filled the jewellers' shops, not the flashing pastes
and diamonds of Orlando's recollection, but simple bands without a stone
in them. At the same time, she began to notice a new habit among the town
people. In the old days, one would meet a boy trifling with a girl under
a hawthorn hedge frequently enough. Orlando had flicked many a couple
with the tip of her whip and laughed and passed on. Now, all that was
changed. Couples trudged and plodded in the middle of the road
indissolubly linked together. The woman's right hand was invariably
passed through the man's left and her fingers were firmly gripped by his.
Often it was not till the horses' noses were on them that they budged,
and then, though they moved it was all in one piece, heavily, to the side
of the road. Orlando could only suppose that some new discovery had been
made about the race; that they were somehow stuck together, couple after
couple, but who had made it and when, she could not guess. It did not
seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits and the
elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or
mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no
indissoluble alliance among the brutes that she could see. Could it be
Queen Victoria then, or Lord Melbourne? Was it from them that the great
discovery of marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered, was said to
be fond of dogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond
of women. It was strange--it was distasteful; indeed, there was something
in this indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of
decency and sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were accompanied by
such a tingling and twanging of the afflicted finger that she could
scarcely keep her ideas in order. They were languishing and ogling like a
housemaid's fancies. They made her blush. There was nothing for it but to
buy one of those ugly bands and wear it like the rest. This she did,
slipping it, overcome with shame, upon her finger in the shadow of a
curtain; but without avail. The tingling persisted more violently, more
indignantly than ever. She did not sleep a wink that night. Next morning
when she took up the pen to write, either she could think of nothing, and
the pen made one large lachrymose blot after another, or it ambled off,
more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies about early death and
corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all. For it would
seem--her case proved it--that we write, not with the fingers, but with
the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about
every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. Though
the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel
herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to
consider the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely
and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.

That this was much against her natural temperament has been sufficiently
made plain. When the sound of the Archduke's chariot wheels died away,
the cry that rose to her lips was 'Life! A Lover!' not 'Life! A Husband!'
and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and run about
the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. Such is the
indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters
down anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than
those who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the
Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the
eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the
change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth
century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and
broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never
been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in
time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now
that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the
lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was
intolerable.

So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so
christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which
she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress
she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could
she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high
mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp
leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes
were quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy.
She became nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and
afraid, for the first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All
these things inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery,
whether Queen Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has
another allotted to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is
supported, till death them do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to
lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again.
Thus did the spirit work upon her, for all her past pride, and as she
came sloping down the scale of emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed
lodging-place, those twangings and tinglings which had been so captious
and so interrogative modulated into the sweetest melodies, till it seemed
as if angels were plucking harp-strings with white fingers and her whole
being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.

But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the wild autumn
winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he had
married a very great lady and had hunted hares in Roumania these many
years now; nor Mr M.; he was become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he
made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for
fishes. One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the
Nells and the Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely
did to lean upon.

'Whom', she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping
her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of
appealing womanhood as she did so, 'can I lean upon?' Her words formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen
had written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the
spirit of the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it. The rooks
were tumbling pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had
stopped at last and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her
to put on her plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out
before dinner.

'Everyone is mated except myself,' she mused, as she trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and
Pippin even--transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening
seemed to have a partner. 'Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all,'
Orlando thought, glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned
windows of the hall, 'am single, am mateless, am alone.'

Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down
unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved
hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One must lean on someone, she
thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and
help him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid
to ask it. So she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and
apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even
errand-boys to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.

At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be hiding
behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss her.
But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume
from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers.
She had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in
her hat. The air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. As the
rooks went whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather
fell gleaming through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak
floating behind her, over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so
far for years. Six feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn
between her fingers and pressed to her lips to feel their smooth,
glinting plumage, when she saw, gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool,
mysterious as the lake into which Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur.
A single feather quivered in the air and fell into the middle of it.
Then, some strange ecstasy came over her. Some wild notion she had of
following the birds to the rim of the world and flinging herself on the
spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while the rooks' hoarse
laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she ran; she tripped;
the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle was broken.
She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the bog
myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks' hoarse
laughter was in her ears. 'I have found my mate,' she murmured. 'It is
the moor. I am nature's bride,' she whispered, giving herself in rapture
to the cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the
hollow by the pool. 'Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I
have found a greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool
always. These are wild birds' feathers--the owl's, the nightjar's. I
shall dream wild dreams. My hands shall wear no wedding ring,' she
continued, slipping it from her finger. 'The roots shall twine about
them. Ah!' she sighed, pressing her head luxuriously on its spongy
pillow, 'I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame
and missed it; love and not known it; life--and behold, death is better.
I have known many men and many women,' she continued; 'none have I
understood. It is better that I should lie at peace here with only the
sky above me--as the gipsy told me years ago. That was in Turkey.' And
she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into which the
clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it, and
camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of
red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only
mountains, very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and
she fancied she heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their
folds were fields of irises and gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes
slowly lowered themselves down and down till they came to the
rain-darkened earth and saw the great hump of the South Downs, flowing in
one wave along the coast; and where the land parted, there was the sea,
the sea with ships passing; and she fancied she heard a gun far out at
sea, and thought at first, 'That's the Armada,' and then thought 'No,
it's Nelson', and then remembered how those wars were over and the ships
were busy merchant ships; and the sails on the winding river were those
of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle sprinkled on the dark fields,
sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming here and there in
farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle as the shepherd
went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out and the
stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. Indeed, she was falling
asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the
ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a
heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the
anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened,
she thought it changed to the trot of a horse's hoofs; one, two, three,
four, she counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and
nearer, she could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in
its hoofs. The horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark
against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and
falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse
stopped.

'Madam,' the man cried, leaping to the ground, 'you're hurt!'

'I'm dead, sir!' she replied.

A few minutes later, they became engaged.

The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.

'I knew it!' she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous,
passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the
wild, dark-plumed name--a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue
gleam of rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like
twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other
things which will be described presently.

'Mine is Orlando,' she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship in
full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the
Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, 'Orlando', he
explained.

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed,
as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each
other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in
such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and
whether they were beggars or people of substance. He had a castle in the
Hebrides, but it was ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the
banqueting hall. He had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the
East. He was on his way now to join his brig at Falmouth, but the wind
had fallen and it was only when the gale blew from the South-west that he
could put out to sea. Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room
window at the gilt leopard on the weather vane. Mercifully its tail
pointed due east and was steady as a rock. 'Oh! Shel, don't leave me!'
she cried. 'I'm passionately in love with you,' she said. No sooner had
the words left her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed into both their
minds simultaneously.

'You're a woman, Shel!' she cried.

'You're a man, Orlando!' he cried.

Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then
took place since the world began. When it was over and they were seated
again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west gale? Where was
he bound for?

'For the Horn,' he said briefly, and blushed. (For a man had to blush as
a woman had, only at rather different things.) It was only by dint of
great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she
gathered that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of
adventures--which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale.
Masts had been snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the
admission from him). Sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left
the only survivor on a raft with a biscuit.

'It's about all a fellow can do nowadays,' he said sheepishly, and helped
himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision which she had
thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for
which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and
he roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard,
brought the tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than
any she had cried before: 'I am a woman,' she thought, 'a real woman, at
last.' She thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given
her this rare and unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left
foot, she would have sat upon his knee.

'Shel, my darling,' she began again, 'tell me...' and so they talked two
hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would
profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so
well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing,
or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where
to buy the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from
their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has
come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can
almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no
expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most
poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written
down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken
to indicate that the space is filled to repletion.

After some days more of this kind of talk,

'Orlando, my dearest,' Shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling
outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there
was a couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.

'Show 'em up,' said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck,
taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the
fireplace. Two officers in bottlegreen uniforms with truncheons at their
hips then entered the room and stood at attention. Formalities being
over, they gave into Orlando's own hands, as their commission was, a
legal document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs of
sealing wax, the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all
of the highest importance.

Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her
right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane
to the matter.

'The lawsuits are settled,' she read out...'some in my favour, as for
example...others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in
Constantinople, Shel,' she explained) 'Children pronounced illegitimate,
(they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don't
inherit, which is all to the good...Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex', she
read out with some solemnity, 'is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female.
The estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are
tailed and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of
marriage'--but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and
said, 'but there won't be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either,
so the rest can be taken as read.' Whereupon she appended her own
signature beneath Lord Palmerston's and entered from that moment into the
undisturbed possession of her titles, her house, and her estate--which
was now so much shrunk, for the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious,
that, though she was infinitely noble again, she was also excessively
poor.

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much
quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was
filled with rejoicings.

[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out.
Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street
incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from
the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in
glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were
founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the
dozen were burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of
peasant boys with the label 'I am a base Pretender', lolling from their
mouths. The Queen's cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the
avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that
very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under
with invitations from the Countess if R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the
Marchioness of P., Mrs W.E. Gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure
of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family
and her own, etc.]--all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets,
as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any
importance in Orlando's life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.
For when the bonfires were blazing in the marketplace, she was in the
dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine was the weather that the trees
stretched their branches motionless above them, and if a leaf fell, it
fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one could watch it for half an
hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest at last, on Orlando's
foot.

'Tell me, Mar,' she would say (and here it must be explained, that when
she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a
dreamy, amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if
spiced logs were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and
a thought wet perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a
nightingale might be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs
barking at distant farms, a cock crowing--all of which the reader should
imagine in her voice)--'Tell me, Mar,' she would say, 'about Cape Horn.'
Then Shelmerdine would make a little model on the ground of the Cape with
twigs and dead leaves and an empty snail shell or two.

'Here's the north,' he would say. 'There's the south. The wind's coming
from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we've just lowered the
top-boom mizzen: and so you see--here, where this bit of grass is, she
enters the current which you'll find marked--where's my map and
compasses, Bo'sun? Ah! thanks, that'll do, where the snail shell is. The
current catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or
we shall be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf
is,--for you must understand my dear--' and so he would go on, and she
would listen to every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that
is to say, without his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the
waves; the icicles clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the
mast in a gale; there reflected on the destiny of man; came down again;
had a whisky and soda; went on shore; was trapped by a black woman;
repented; reasoned it out; read Pascal; determined to write philosophy;
bought a monkey; debated the true end of life; decided in favour of Cape
Horn, and so on. All this and a thousand other things she understood him
to say, and so when she replied, Yes, negresses are seductive, aren't
they? he having told her that the supply of biscuits now gave out, he was
surprised and delighted to find how well she had taken his meaning.

'Are you positive you aren't a man?' he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,

'Can it be possible you're not a woman?' and then they must put it to the
proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the
other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could
be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle
as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.

And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has
become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so
scanty in comparison with ideas that 'the biscuits ran out' has to stand
for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop
Berkeley's philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that
only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one
meets a simple one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt
at all, that the poor man is lying.)

So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with
spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart
of the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there among the snail
shells, making models of Cape Horn. 'Bonthrop,' she would say, 'I'm off,'
and when she called him by his second name, 'Bonthrop', it should signify
to the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks
on a desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people
die daily, die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn
woods; and with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby
asking her out every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome
her, and so saying 'Bonthrop', she said in effect, 'I'm dead', and pushed
her way as a spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so
oared herself deep into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and
movement were over and she were free now to take her way--all of which
the reader should hear in her voice when she said 'Bonthrop,' and should
also add, the better to illumine the word, that for him too the same word
signified, mystically, separation and isolation and the disembodied
pacing the deck of his brig in unfathomable seas.

After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked 'Shelmerdine', and
stooping, she picked up one of those autumn crocuses which to some people
signify that very word, and put it with the jay's feather that came
tumbling blue through the beech woods, in her breast. Then she called
'Shelmerdine' and the word went shooting this way and that way through
the woods and struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells
in the grass. He saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and
the jay's feather in her breast, and cried 'Orlando', which meant (and it
must be remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix
themselves in our eyes, some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the
bowing and swaying of bracken as if something were breaking through;
which proved to be a ship in full sail, heaving and tossing a little
dreamily, rather as if she had a whole year of summer days to make her
voyage in; and so the ship bears down, heaving this way, heaving that
way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the crest of this wave and sinks
into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly stands over you (who are in
a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at her) with all her sails
quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap on deck--as Orlando
dropped now into the grass beside him.

Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the
26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine
recited Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which
had started to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across
Orlando's foot. A second leaf followed and then a third. Orlando shivered
and turned pale. It was the wind. Shelmerdine--but it would be more
proper now to call him Bonthrop--leapt to his feet.

'The wind!' he cried.

Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with leaves
as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts,
frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow
after till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was
lit as fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing
out that taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there
was Mr Dupper catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was
the prayer book. And they thrust Queen Mary's prayer book in his hands
and he searched, hastily fluttering the pages, and said, 'Marmaduke
Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and Lady Orlando, kneel down'; and they knelt down,
and now they were bright and now they were dark as the light and shadow
came flying helter-skelter through the painted windows; and among the
banging of innumerable doors and a sound like brass pots beating, the
organ sounded, its growl coming loud and faint alternately, and Mr
Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried now to raise his voice above
the uproar and could not be heard and then all was quiet for a moment,
and one word--it might be 'the jaws of death'--rang out clear, while all
the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes and whips still in their
hands to listen, and some sang loud and others prayed, and now a bird was
dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap of thunder, so that no
one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a golden flash, the ring
pass from hand to hand. All was movement and confusion. And up they rose
with the organ booming and the lightning playing and the rain pouring,
and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger, went out into the
court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for the horse was
bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for her husband
to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt forward and
Orlando, standing there, cried out Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and he
answered her Orlando! and the words went dashing and circling like wild
hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and
further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a
shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.