…and now brain.worm.sh is live
ORLANDO of veins and petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, com- ing along the path, and every button on his gaiters; she saw Betty and Prince, the cart horses, and never had she marked so clearly the white star on Betty’s forehead, and the three long hairs that fell down below the rest on Prince’s tail. Out in the quadrangle the old grey walls of the house looked like a scraped new photograph; she heard the loud speaker condensing on the terrace a dance tune that people were listening to in the red velvet opera house at Vienna. Braced and strung up by the present moment'she was also strangely afraid, as if every time the gulf of time gaped and let a second through some un- known danger might come with it. The tension was too relentless and too rigorous to be endured Jong without discomfort. She walked more briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her, through the garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself by a great ef- fort, to stop by the carpenter’s shop, and to stand stock- still watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with her eye fixed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled through her like a meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. She saw with disgusting vividness that the thumb on Joe’s right hand was without a finger nail and there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that moment’s darkness, 321
when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the pres- sure of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by looking now at the sky), is always absent from the present—whence its terror, its nondescript character—something one trem- bles to pin through the body with aname and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow and without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change what- ever it adds itself to. This shadow now while she flick- ered her eye in her faintness in the carpenter’s shop stole out, and attaching itself to the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something tol- erable, comprehensible. Yes, she thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter’s shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by the Ser- pentine, she thought, the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a thousand deaths. I am about to understand. . . .”
Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot conceal the fact that she was now a very indiffer- ent witness to the truth of what was before her and might easily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an old man called Smith for one who was called Jones and was no relation of his whatever. For the shadow of faintness which the thumb without a nail had cast had deepened
now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest from sight) into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected—and, indeed, some say that all our most vio- lent passions, and art and religion are the reflections which we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and imme- diately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the Ser- pentine; the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; every- thing was partly something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something not itself so that with this mixture of truth and falsehood her mind became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows changed, and one thing became an- other. Except when Canute, the elk hound, chased a rabbit and so reminded her that it must be about half past four—it was indeed twenty-three minutes to six—she forgot the time.
The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted
ORLANDO since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to some- thing hard. As she flung herself down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of her leather jacket—her poem The Oak Tree. “I should have brought a trowel,” she reflected. The earth was so shal- low over the roots that it seemed doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book here. Besides the dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations, she thought. Perhaps it would be as well then to do without them. She had a little speech on the tip of her tongue which she meant to speak over the book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author and artist.) “I bury this as a tribute,”’ she was going to have said, “a return to the land of what the land has given me,” but Lord! once one began mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene getting upon a platform the other day, comparing her with Milton (save for his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had thought then of the oak tree here on its hill, and what
has that got to do with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the gardens blowing irises and fritillaries ?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a church tower among elm trees; a grey-domed manor house in a park, a spark of light burning on some glass- house, a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In the far distance Snow-
don’s crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea, No—only the wind blew, There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. “And that,” she thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances, drop once more to the land beneath her, “‘was my land once: that Castle between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was mine.”” Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light) shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses, castles, and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were before her. Itwas blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side. Goats cropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above her. The raucous voice of old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, “What is your antiquity and your race, and your possessions com- pared with this? What do you need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all the dishes, and house- maids dusting?”
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, call- ing into view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only
if you don’t know, i’m rachel, i used to be one of the developers of the website formerly known as brainworm.surgery. i was very sad how that chapter of things ended, so i’ve spent a bit over the last year of my life learning how to program in practice, and i’ve spent the past month or so coding by hand a new site from the ground up. brain.worm.sh is, of course, that website
misty fields, lamps in cottage windows, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing the dark- ness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, she could not say. Night had come —night that she loved of all times, night in which the re- flections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look deep into the darkness where things shape them- selves and to see in the pool of the mind now Shake- speare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great waves past Cape Horn. There was her husband’s brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
“Ecstasy!”’ she cried, “ecstasy!” And then the wind sank, the waters grew calm; and she saw the waves rip- pling peacefully in the moonlight.
“Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!”’ she cried, standing by the oak tree.
The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel blue feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow falling arrow that cleaves the deep
ORLANDO air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the moon was on the waters, and nothing moved between sky and sea. It was then that he came.
All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen. Gazing below her, Or- lando saw dark plumes tossing in the courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more stepped from her chariot.
“The house is at your service, Ma’am,” she cried, curtseying deeply. “Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in.”
Immediately, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer.
“Here! Shel, here!” she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now showed bright) so that her pearls
ORLANDO glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aero- plane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphor- escent flare in the darkness.
about me
i encountered 4chan through leftist video essay / podcast industrial complex in 2021. i think that when there’s an immense negativity around something, it produces an allure that paradoxically sucks you in. for that reason, i’ve come to the conclusion that the true way to fight something bad is not to antagonize it, but to create something positive as an alternative
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.
And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.
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A., Lord, 193 Abbey, Westminster, 53, 55, 223 Addison, Joseph, 167,197, 208-211,
Archduchess Harriet of Finster- Aarhorn (see Archduke Harry), 114, 177-179
Bartolus, Captain Nicholas Bene- dict, 155, 162, 164, 165, 167, 187, 197
C., Marquis of, 193, 246 Canute, The elk-hound, 246 Carlyle, Thomas, 278 Carpenter, Nurse, 69
Charles the Second, King, 118 Chesterfield, Lady, 192 Chesterfield, Lord, 213, 289 Chubb, Eusebius, 230
Dryden, John, 167, 197, 198, 315 Dupper, Mr., 69, 75, 83, 169-171,
Elizabeth, Queen, 20, 22-26, 28, 100, 194, 224, 235, 240 Euphrosyne, 31, 32
i encountered brainworm through 4chan in 2022. it was, of course, that thing i wanted, and i already knew the admin of it from elsewhere. eventually, we got back in touch and i started becoming a developer, though i didn’t know how to code, and mostly just yapped about features that i thought would be cool, and tried to overhaul the graphic design a few times, but again, i didn’t know how to code, and i didn’t really know much about graphic design either
Leicester Square, 216 Lock, Rape of the, 209 Lopokova, Madame, 315 Louise, 301
Marshall & chelerivets, 300 Mary, Queen of Scots, 172 Melbourne, Lord, 242 Moray, the Earl of, 39
writes his first play, 16; visits Queen at Whitehall, 24; made Treasurer and Steward, 25; his loves, 27; and Russian Princess, 38-64; his first trance, 66; retires into solitude, 68; love of reading, 72; his romantic dramas, literary
ambitions, 76, 81, 82, 100-1045 and Greene, 83, 88-96; his great- grandmother Moll, 86; buys elk- hounds,g6; and his poem The Oak Tree, 96, 113, 173, 236; and his house, 105—112;and the Archduch- ess Harriet, 114-118; Ambassador at Constantinople, 118-140; created a Duke, 126; second trance, 131; marriage to Rosina Pepita, a gipsy, 132; becomes a woman, 137; with the gipsies, 140-152; returns to England, 152; lawsuits, 168; and Archduke Harry, 179; in London society, 192; entertains the wits, 208; and Mr. Pope, 212; and Nell, 217; confused with her cousin, 220; returns to her country house, 233; breaks her ankle, 248; de- clared a woman, 255; engagement, 250; marriage, 264; birth of her first son, 295 Othello, 56
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Riverside, California Please return books on time. Always have books charged by the librarian when &, taken from the library.
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
The Voyage Out Night and Day Monday or Tuesday Facob’s Room Mrs. Dalloway
why brainworm? interlude
in my view, hyper-real-time / liveposting / real-time-text is the core thing that made it work
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Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronté, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am specially indebted to Mr. C. P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written. Mr. Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage—how great I alone can estimate —of Mr. Arthur Waley’s knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs. F. M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr. Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art | of painting I may possess. I have, I hope, profited in an- other department by the singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr. Fulian Bell. Miss M. K. Snowdon’ s indefatigable researches in the archives of Har- rogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various to
PREFACE specify. I must content myself with naming Mr. Angus Davidson; Mrs. Cartwright; Miss fanet Case; Lord Ber- ners (whose knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr. Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr. Adrian Stephen; Mr. F. L. Lucas; Mr. and Mrs. Desmond Mac- carthy; that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr. Clive Bell; Mr. G. H. Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr. F. M. Keynes; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr. and Mrs. St. Fobn Hutchinson; Mr. Duncan Grant; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tomlin; Mr. and Lady Ottoline Morrell; my mother-in- law, Mrs. Sidney Woolf; Mr. Osbert Sitwell; Madame Facques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr. fF. T. Sheppard; Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew, Mr. Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr. Ray- mond Mortimer; Miss Emphie Case; Lady Gerald Welles- ley; Mr. Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr. E. M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; my sister, Vanessa Bell—but the list threatens to grow too long and is already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service Vill
which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would thank, bad I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the en- tomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
Orlando as a Boy frontispiece The Russian Princess as a Child 54 The Archduchess Harriet 114 Orlando as Ambassador 126 Orlando on her return to England 158 Orlando about the year 1840 246 Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire 262
E—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old foot- ball, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him. ) Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the raft- ers. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Some-
ORLANDO times he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter or summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window- sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Or- lando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, hap- pier still the biographer who records the life of such a
ORLANDO one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe follow- ing after, till they reach what ever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for di- rectly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and fore- head, thus do we rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother,a very beau- tiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with
Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him— the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death —the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain—which was a roomy one—all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests. But to continue — Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what he does every day of his life at this hour, took out a writing book labelled “Ethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,” and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.
Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a fluency and sweetness which, considering his age—he was not yet seventeen —and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run, were remarkable enough. At last, how- ever, he came to a halt. He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here
first, the lack of mass adoption of hyper-real-time produces a sense of relative acceleration in a very fast world, which allows you to stomach the relative deceleration that the imageboard format provides
he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think “how many more suns shall I see set,” etc., etc. (the thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one’s foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.
He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He skirted all stables, ken- nels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, wash-houses, places where they make tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse- shoes, stitch jerkins—for the house was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts—and gained the ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws
ORLANDO call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
So, after a long silence, “I am alone,” he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and haw- thorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen be- neath, and on clear days thirty, or forty perhaps, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see the Eng- lish Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon firing; and forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower; and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of Orlando’s father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls. To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and per- haps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowden herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognising. That was his father’s house; that his uncle’s. His aunt
owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger, and the butterfly.
He sighed profoundly, and flung himself—there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word— on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, be- neath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship—it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amor- ous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, grad- ually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung; the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragon-flies shot past, as if all the fer- tility and amorous activity of a summer’s evening were woven web-like about his body.
After an hour or so—the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds had turned red, the hills were violet, the
woods purple, the valleys black—a trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill sound came from the valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a spot com- pact and mapped out; a maze; a town, yet girt about with walls; it came from the heart of his own great house in the valley, which, dark before, even as he looked and the single trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itself with other shriller sounds, lost its darkness and became pierced with lights. Some were small hurrying lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to answer summonses; others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt in empty banqueting-halls made ready to receive guests who had not come; and others dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of serv- ing men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot. Coaches turned and wheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed their plumes. The Queen had come.
Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at a wicket gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his room. He tossed his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to the other. He dipped his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his finger nails. With no more than six inches of looking-glass and a pair of old candles to help him, he had thrust on crim-
ORLANDO son breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias in less than ten minutes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was flushed. He was excited. But he was terribly late.
in my view, the contemporary internet lacks smooth spaces where you can form relationships without meaning to. in order to basically privatize moderation, the rest of the internet is highly striated according to identity graphs. this makes it hard to stumble upon new people and cultures. imageboards allow for this, but their open nature means the cost of moderation is much higher. for this reason, brain.worm.sh will semi-privatize moderation initially by having an invite system. (i intend for this to eventually shift this to a one-time payment; all prior accounts will be grandfathered in.) this siginificantly lowers the rate of growth, and imageboards are already slower than algorithmic social media, so hyper-real-time is thus a “necessary evil” to encourage adoption
By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres distant on the other side of the house. But half-way there, in the back quarters where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room stood open—she was gone, doubtless, with all her keys to wait upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the servants’ dinner table with a tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, rather shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did not see Orlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? “Tell me,” he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world’’— for he had the wild- est, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and po- etry—but how speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea in-
stead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his pen in his fingers, this way and that way; and gazed and mused; and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. Whereupon Orlando, overcome with shyness, darted off and reached the banqueting-hall only just in time to sink upon his knees and, hanging his head in confusion, to offer a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself.
Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed hand in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed, sickly hand; a commanding hand; a hand that had only to raise itself for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, at- tached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was yet capari- soned in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though strung together by a thousand fears; and the Queen’s eyes were light yellow. All this he felt as the great rings flashed in the water and then something pressed his hair—which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing nothing more likely to be of use to a his- torian. And in truth, his mind was such a welter of oppo- sites—of the night and the blazing candles, of the shabby poet and the great Queen, of silent fields and the clatter of
By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a head. But if itis possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and terror, surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of state by a lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted, wide open. The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so inno- cently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loyalty and manly charm —all qualities which the old woman loved the more the more they failed her. For she was growing old and worn and bent before her time. The sound of cannon was al- ways in her ears. She saw always the glistening poison drop and the long stiletto. As she sat at table she listened; she heard the guns in the Channel; she dreaded—was that a curse, was that a whisper? Innocence, simplicity, were all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them against. And it was that same night, so tra- dition has it, when Orlando was sound asleep, that she made over formally, putting her hand and seal finally to the parchment, the gift of the great monastic house that had been the Archbishop’s and then the King’s to Orlando’s father.
Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a queen without knowing it. And perhaps, for women’s hearts are intricate, it was his ignorance, and the start he gave when her lips touched him that kept the memory of her young cousin (for they had blood in common) green in her mind. At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not passed, and Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend the Queen at Whitehall.
“Here,” she said, watching him advance down the long gallery towards her, “‘comes my innocent!” (There was a serenity about him always which had the look of innocence when, technically, the word was no longer applicable. )
“Come!”’ she said. She was sitting bolt upright be- side the fire. And she held him a foot’s pace from her and looked him up and down. Was she matching her speculations the other night with the truth now visible? Did she find her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips, hands—she ran them over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but when she saw his legs she laughed out loud. He was the very image of a noble gen- tleman. But inwardly? She flashed her yellow hawk’s eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul. The young man withstood her gaze, blushing only a damask rose
as became him. Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth—she read him like a page. Instantly she plucked a ring from her finger (the joint was swollen rather) and as she fitted it to his, named him her Treasurer and Steward; next hung about him chains of office; and bid- ding him bend his knee, tied round it at the slenderest part the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was denied him. When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent him to Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about to sail for the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she bear to think of that tender flesh torn and that curly head rolled in the dust? She kept him with her. At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people rang be- neath the windows, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him bury his face in that aston- ishing composition—she had not changed her dress for a month—which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother’s furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. “This,” she breathed, “‘is my victory !’’— even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.
For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid ambitious ca- reer. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be the son of her old age; the limb of her infirm- ity; the oak tree on which she leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it, never kept her warm.
Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost. The river ran slug- gishly. One day when the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murderers always open, a boy—could it be Orlando?’—kissing a girl— who in the Devil’s name was the brazen hussy? Snatch- ing at her golden-hilted sword she struck violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man’s treachery.
second, where in most of the internet, there’s an implicit understanding that all communication must be understandable to future audiences, hyper-real-time inherently allows for a separation between synchronous and asynchronous channels
It was Orlando’s fault perhaps; yet, after all, are we to blame him? The age was the Elizabethan; their mor-
ORTEAN DO als were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for using the artifices of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The with- ered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers’. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all. Thus, if Orlando followed the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age itself, and plucked his flower in the window-seat even with the
snow on the ground and the Queen vigilant in the corri- dor, we can scarcely bring ourselves to blame him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him. As for the girl, we know no more than Queen Eli- zabeth herself did what her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana, for he made rhymes to them all in turn; equally, she may have been a court lady, or some serving maid. For Orlando’s taste was broad; he was no lover of garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination for him.
Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait in him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain grandmother of his had worn a smock and carried milkpails. Some grains of the Kent- ish or Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, fine fluid which came to him from Normandy. He held that the mixture of brown earth and blue blood was a good one. Certain it is that he had always a liking for low com- pany, especially for that of lettered people whose wits so often keep them under, as if there were sympathy of blood between them. At this season of his life, when his head brimmed with rhymes and he never went to bed without striking off some conceit, the cheek of an inn- keeper’s daughter seemed fresher and the wit of a game- keeper’s niece seemed quicker than those of the ladies at Court. Hence, he began going frequently to Wapping
ORLANDO “Old Stairs and such places at night; wrapped in a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and the garter at his knee. There, with a mug before him, among the sanded alleys and bowling greens and all the simple architec- ture of such places, he listened to sailors’ stories of hard- ship and horror and cruelty on the Spanish main; how some had lost their toes, others their noses —for the spoken story was never so rounded or so finely coloured as the written. Especially he loved to hear them volley forth their songs of the Azores, while the parrakeets, which they had brought from those parts, pecked at the rings in their ears, tapped with their hard acquisitive beaks at the rubies on their fingers, and swore as vilely as their masters. The women were scarcely less bold in their speech and less free in their manners than the birds. They perched on his knee, flung their arms round his neck and, guessing that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak, were quite as eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself. Nor was opportunity lacking. The river was astir early and late with barges, wherries, and craft of all de- scription. Every day sailed to sea some fine ship bound for the Indies; now and again another blackened and ragged with hairy unknown men on board crept pain- fully to anchor. No one missed a boy or girl if they dallied a little on the water after sunset; or raised an
eyebrow if gossip had seen them sleeping soundly among the treasure sacks safe in each other’s arms. Such indeed was the adventure that befell Orlando, Sukey, and the Earl of Cumberland. The day was hot; their love was active; they had fallen asleep among the rubies. Late that night the Earl, whose fortunes were much bound up in the Spanish ventures, came to check the booty alone with a lantern. He flashed the light on a barrel. He started back with an oath. Twined about the cask two spirits lay sleeping. Superstitious by nature, his con- science laden with many a crime, the Earl took the couple —they were wrapped in a red cloak, and Sukey’s bosom was almost as white as the eternal snows of Orlando’s poetry —for a phantom sprung from the graves of drowned sailors to upbraid him. He crossed himself. He vowed repentance. The row of alms houses still standing in the Sheen Road is the visible fruit of that moment’s panic. Twelve poor old women of the parish to-day drink tea and to-night bless his Lordship for a roof above their heads; so that illicit love in a treasure ship— but we omit the moral.
Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of this way of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, but of the primitive manners of the people. For it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans
that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call “life” and “reality” are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed, any equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek “‘life’”’ that Orlando went among them; not in quest of “reality” that he left them. But when he had heard a score of times how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey her honour—and they told the stories admirably, it must be admitted—he began to be a little weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be cut off in one way and maidenhood lost in another—or so it seemed to him—whereas the arts and the sciences had a diversity about them which stirred his curiosity pro- foundly. So, always keeping them in happy memory, he left off frequenting the beer gardens and the skittle alleys, hung his grey cloak in his wardrobe, let his star shine at his neck and his garter twinkle at his knee, and appeared once more at the Court of King James. He was young, he was rich, he was handsome. No one could have been received with greater acclamation than he was.
It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in marriage—Clorinda, Favilla,
ORLANDO Euphrosyne—to give them the names he called them in his sonnets.
a side-effect of identity graphs being at the center of contemporary social media is that every asynchronous post is tied to your identity, and that you must adopt a sort of double consciousness, especially if you’re minoritarian. we, of course, do not consist of one coherent identity that doesn’t change over time, we contain multitudes that contradict and-through their contradictions-evolve. the medium of social media forces us to act as if the first is true. our intuitions about life demand production over consumption, and all of social media values activity over passivity, but the incongruence between the nature of the media and the nature of us causes, in my experience an anxious paralysis. i think hyper-real-time alleviates this anxiety. in other words, HRT helped cure my dysphoria… what else is new
To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-man- nered gentle lady enough ;—indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months and a half; but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood. A hare brought up roasted at her father’s table turned her faint. She was much under the influence of the Priests too, and stinted her underlinen in order to give to the poor. She took it on her to reform Orlando of his sins, which sickened him, so that he drew back from the mar- riage, and did not much regret it when she died soon after of the small pox.
Favilla, who comes next, was of a different sort alto- gether. She was the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer assiduity and the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court, where her address in horsemanship, her fine instep, and her grace in danc- ing won the admiration of all. Once, however, she was so ill-advised as to whip a spaniel that had torn one of her silk stockings (and it must be said in justice that Favilla had few stockings and those for the most part of drugget) within an inch of its life beneath Orlando’s window. Orlando, who was a passionate lover of ani- mals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked, and the two front turned inward, which, he said, is a sure sign of
ORLANDO a perverse and cruel disposition in woman, and so broke the engagement that very night for ever.
The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his flames. She was by birth one of the Irish Des- monds and had therefore a family tree of her own as old and deeply rooted as Orlando’s itself. She was fair, florid, and a trifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, had a perfect set of teeth in the upper jaw, though those on the lower were slightly discoloured. She was never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee; fed them with white bread from her own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals; and was never dressed before mid-day owing to the ex- treme care she took of her person. In short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Or- lando, and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both sides were busy with covenants, jointures, settle- ments, messuages, tenements, and whatever is needed before one great fortune can mate with another when, with the suddenness and severity that then marked the English climate, came the Great Frost.
The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most se- vere that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the
roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird- scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the raven who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him. ' The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day.
But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the
ORLANDO opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with the citizens. He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground, with ar- bours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc., at his expense. For himself and the courtiers, he reserved a certain space immediately opposite the Palace gates; which, railed off from the public only by a silken rope, became at once the centre of the most brilliant society in England. Great statesmen, in their beards and rufts, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the down- fall of the Turk in striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals strode up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon and telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hov- ered motionless in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire. But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear indeed was it that
there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay mo- tionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers. Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bum- boat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth. "Twas a sight King James specially liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him. In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But it was at night that the carnival was at its mer- riest. For the frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of flute and trumpet the courtiers danced.
Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the coranto and lavolta; he was clumsy; and a little absent-minded. He much preferred the plain dances of his own country, which he had danced as a child to
third, i encountered brainworm right as gpt-3 started to slither its way out into the world, and hyper-real-time is-for now-a sort of turing test that’s more hard for ai to beat
ORLANDO these fantastic foreign measures. He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Rus- sian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things is out of the question.) ... A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow—so he raved, so
he called her. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be— no woman could skate with such speed and vigour— swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite and shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.
The stranger’s name, he found, was the Princess Ma- rousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romano- vitch, and she had come in the train of the Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father, to attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their great beards and furred hats
ORLANDO they sat almost silent; drinking some black liquid which they spat out now and then upon the ice. None spoke English, and French with which some at least were fa- miliar was then little spoken at the English Court.
It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table spread under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. The Princess was placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis Vere and the other the young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see the predicament she soon had them in, for though both were fine lads in their way, the babe unborn had as much knowledge of the French tongue as they had. When at the beginning of dinner the Princess turned to the Earl and said, with a grace which ravished his heart, “Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gen- tilhomme qui vous était apparenté en Pologne 1’été der- nier,” or “La beauté des dames de la cour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus gracieuse que votre reine, ni une coiffure plus belle que la sienne,”’ both Lord Francis and the Earl showed the highest embarrassment. The one helped her largely to horse-radish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made him beg for a marrow bone. At this the Princess could no longer contain her laughter, and Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars’ heads and stuffed
peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had meant to him noth- ing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand—in fact he was rattling off one of his most impassioned son- nets when the Princess addressed him, “Would you have the goodness to pass the salt?”
“With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,” he replied, speaking French with a perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, he spoke the tongue as his own; his mother’s maid had taught him. Yet perhaps it would have been better for him had he never learnt that tongue;
ORLANDO never answered that voice; never followed the light of those eyes. . . .
The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins she asked him, who sat beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the nauseating mixture they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the men in England? Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her hair rigged up like a Maypole (une grande perche mal fagotée) really the Queen ? And did the King always slobber like that? And which of those popinjays was George Villiers? Though these questions rather discomposed Orlando at first, they were put with such archness and drollery that he could not help but laugh; and as he saw from the blank faces of the company that nobody understood a word, he an- swered her as freely as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of the Court.
i hate ai. what else is there to say
Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more attention than mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her side, and their conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was carried on with such ani- mation, provoked such blushes and laughter, that the dullest could guess the subject. Moreover, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary. Nobody had ever
ORLANDO seen him so animated. In one night he had thrown off his boyish clumsiness; he was changed from a sulky strip- ling, who could not enter a ladies’ room without sweep- ing half the ornaments from the table, to a nobleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. To see him hand the Muscovite (as she was called) to her sledge, or offer her his hand for the dance, or catch the spotted kerchief which she had let drop, or discharge any other of those manifold duties which the supreme lady exacts and the lover hastens to anticipate was a sight to kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make the quick pulse of youth beat faster. Yet over it all hung a cloud. The old men shrugged their shoulders. The young tittered between their fingers. All knew that Orlando was betrothed to another. The Lady Margaret O’Brien O’Dare O'Reilly Tyrconnel (for that was the proper name of Euphrosyne of the Sonnets) wore Orlando’s splendid sapphire on the second finger of her left hand. It was she who had the supreme right to his attentions. Yet she might drop all the handker- chiefs in her wardrobe (of which she had many scores) upon the ice and Orlando never stooped to pick them up. She might wait twenty minutes for him to hand her to her sledge, and in the end have to be content with the services of her Blackamoor. When she skated, which she did rather clumsily, no one was at her elbow to encour-
one raised her to her feet and dusted the snow from her petticoats. Although she was naturally phlegmatic, slow to take offence, and more reluctant than most people to believe that a mere foreigner could oust her from Orlan- do’s affections, still even the Lady Margaret herself was brought at last to suspect that something was brewing against her peace of mind.
Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando took less and less care to hide his feelings. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company as soon as they had dined, or steal away from the skaters, who were forming sets for a quadrille. Next moment it would be seen that the Muscovite was missing too. But what most outraged the Court, and stung it in its tenderest part, which is its vanity, was that the couple was often seen to slip under the silken rope, which railed off the Royal enclosure from the public part of the river and to disappear among the crowd of common people. For suddenly the Princess would stamp her foot and cry, “Take me away. I detest your English mob,” by which she meant the English Court itself. She could stand it no longer. It was full of prying old women, she said, who stared in one’s face, and of bumptious young men who trod on one’s toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles broad on which one could gallop six horses abreast all
day long without meeting a soul. Besides, she wanted to see the Tower, the Beefeaters, the Heads on Temple Bar, and the jewellers’ shops in the city. Thus, it came about that Orlando took her to the city, showed her the Beef- eaters and the rebels’ heads, and bought her whatever took her fancy in the Royal Exchange. But this was not enough. Each increasingly desired the other’s company in privacy all day long where there were none to marvel or to stare. Instead of taking the road to London, there- fore, they turned the other way about and were soon be- yond the crowd among the frozen reaches of the Thames where, save for sea birds and some old country woman hacking at the ice in a vain attempt to draw a pail full of water or gathering what sticks or dead leaves she could find for firing, nota living soul ever came their way. The poor kept closely to their cottages, and the better sort, who could afford it, crowded for warmth and merri- ment to the city.
Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy—a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed—hence they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers
lando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once more in his arms and give him, for love’s sake, one more embrace. And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man’s beard and that woman’s skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the arras that moved always in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for such converse, noth- ing was too great.
Then, suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hob- bling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the
ORLANDO other; and draws from this the conclusion that all ex- tremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the Anabap- tist) which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea.
“All ends in death,” Orlando would say, sitting up- right, his face clouded with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death stopping at nothing in between, so that the biog- rapher must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged.)
about me cont
in 2023, i’m really enthused about brainworm, and i go back to school for the sole purpose of learning computer science and graphic design to be used in the development of brainworm. for context, i went to college starting 2019, i have lots of issues just before and especially during covid, i take a year break, i try and go back, it sort of works out, but i don’t have a real purpose, and i take another break starting 2022
“All ends in death,” Orlando would say, sitting up- right on the ice. But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them — Sasha stared at him, perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said nothing. But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its flavour in translation) that he forgot the frozen waters or night
ORLANDO | coming or the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her—plunging and splashing among a thou- sand images which had gone as stale as the women who inspired them—what she was like. Snow, cream, mar- ble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun ona green hill which is yet clouded —like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ran- sack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman —here, however, remembering the Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain. 47
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she was a fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the whole history of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; how they had come from Rome with the Caesars and had the right to walk down the Corso (which is the chief street in Rome) under a tasselled palanquin, which he said is a privilege reserved only for those of imperial blood (for there was an orgulous credulity about him which was pleasant enough) he would pause and ask her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had she brothers ? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she answered readily enough, an awkwardness would come between them. He suspected at first that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of the savage ways of her people, for he had heard that the women in Muscovy wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist down; that both sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear meat with their fingers and live in huts where an English noble would scruple to keep his cattle; so that he forebore to press her. But on reflection, he concluded that her silence could not be for that reason; she herself was entirely free from hair on the chin; she dressed in velvet and pearls, and her manners were certainly not those of a woman bred in a cattle shed.
What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt un- derlying the tremendous force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which shifts suddenly and makes the whole pile shake. The agony would seize him suddenly. Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how to quiet him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her and she provoked them purposely—such is the curious obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament.
To continue the story —skating farther than their wont that day they reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen in midstream. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy flying its double-headed black eagle from the main mast, which was hung with many-coloured icicles several yards in length. Sasha had left some of her clothing on board, and supposing the ship to be empty they climbed on deck and went in search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own past, Orlando would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this refuge before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far, when a fine young man started up from some business of his own behind a coil of rope and saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he was one of the crew and would help the Princess to find what she wanted, lit a lump of candle and disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought only of the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity ; of means for making her irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there were and hard- ships to be overcome. She was determined to live in Russia, where there were frozen rivers and wild horses and men, she said, who gashed each other’s throats open. It is true that a landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and slaughter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his pleasant country ways of sport and tree plant- ing; relinquish his office; ruin his career; shoot the rein- deer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka instead of canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve—for what purpose, he knew not. Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her sake. As for his marriage with the Lady Mar- garet, fixed though it was for this day sennight, the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave it a thought. Her kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a great lady; his friends would deride him for ruining the finest career in the world for a Cossack woman and a waste of snow—it weighed not a straw in the balance compared with Sasha herself. On the first dark night they would fly north; thence to Russia. So he pondered; so he plotted as he walked up and down the deck.
He was recalled, turning westward, by the sight of the sun, slung like an orange on the cross of St. Paul’s. It
ORLANDO was blood red and sinking rapidly. It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this hour and more. Seized instantly with those dark forebodings which shadowed even his most confident thoughts of her, he plunged the way he had seen them go into the hold of the ship; and, after stumbling among chests and barrels in the dark- ness, was made aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they were seated there. For one second, he had a vision of them; saw Sasha seated on the sailor’s knee; saw her bend towards him; saw them embrace before the light was blotted out in a red cloud by his rage. He blazed into such a how] of anguish that the whole ship echoed. Sasha threw herself between them, or the sailor would have been stifled before he could draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sickness came over Orlando, and they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy to drink before he revived. And then, when he had recovered and was sat upon a heap of sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before his dizzied eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox that had bit him, now cajoling, now denouncing, so that he came to doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle guttered; had not the shadows moved? The box was heavy, she said; the man was helping her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment—for who can be sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to find? —the next was the more violent with anger at her deceit.
ORLANDO Then Sasha herself turned white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go that night, and called upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of acommon seaman. Indeed, looking at them together (which he could hardly bring himself to do) Orlando was outraged by the foulness of his imagination that could have painted so frail a creature in the paws of that hairy sea brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his stockings; wore common wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray horse upon which some wren or robin has perched in its flight. So he yielded; believed her; and asked her pardon. Yet, when they were going down the ship’s side, lovingly again, Sasha paused with her hand on the ladder and called back to this tawny wide-cheeked monster a volley of Russian greetings, jests, or endearments, not a word of which Orlando could understand. But there was something in her tone (it might be the fault of the Russian consonants) that re- minded Orlando of a scene some nights since, when he had come upon her in secret gnawing a candle end in a corner, which she had picked from the floor. True, it was pink; it was gilt; and it was from the King’s table; but it was tallow, and she gnawed it. Was there not, he thought, handing her on to the ice, something rank in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant-born?
ORLANDO was now slim as a reed, and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again as they skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast, and he felt as if he had been hooked by a great fish through the nose and rushed through the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent.
in 2024, creative & ideological differences around brainworm really start to bubble up. that fall, i’m working on a research paper for a class about brainworm, you may know me from that. election hits hard, and the day before i present my initial findings for my class, brainworm is taken offline. it hits hard, and i don’t finish that paper. sorry for interviewing y’all if i did!!! T_T
It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at Charing; there the dome of St. Paul’s; there the massy square of the Tower buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob at the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’s fancy) ; now all the west seemed a golden win- dow with troops of angels (in Orlando’s fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually. All the time they seemed to be skating on fathomless depths of air, so blue the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they sped quicker and quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about them, and cut- ting in the air with their wings the very same sweeps that they cut on the ice with their skates.
Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more delightful. Seldom would she talk about
her past life, but now she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf. Upon which he told her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket. And then she praised him; for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his legs. Ravished with her praises and shamed to think how he had maligned her by fancying her on the knees of a common sailor and grown fat and lethargic at forty, he told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet instantly bethought him how she was like the spring and green grass and rushing waters, and seizing her more tightly than ever, he swung her with him half across the river so that the gulls and the cormo- rants swung too. And halting at length, out of breath, she said, panting slightly, that he was like a million- candled Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia) hung with yellow globes; incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; (so one might translate it) for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own radiance, from a lamp lit within.
All the colour, save the red of Orlando’s cheeks, soon faded. Night came on. As the orange light of sunset vanished and was succeeded by an astonishing white
glare from the torches, bonfires, flaming cressets, and other devices by which the river was lit up the strangest transformation took place. Various churches and noble- men’s palaces, whose fronts were of white stone showed in streaks and patches as if floating on the air. Of St. Paul’s, in particular, nothing was left but a gilt cross. The Abbey appeared like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything suffered emaciation and transformation.The sounds too seemed closed and concentrated. As they ap- proached the carnival, they heard a deep note like that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed louder and louder until it became an uproar. Every now and then a great shout followed a rocket up into the air. Gradually they could discern little figures breaking off from the vast crowd and spinning hither and thither like gnats on the surface of a river. Above and around this brilliant circle like a bowl of darkness pressed the deep black of a win- ter’s night. And then into this darkness there began to rise with pauses, which kept the expectation alert and the mouth open, flowering rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown. At one moment the woods and distant hills showed green as on a summer’s day; the next all was winter and blackness again.
By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who were pressing
ORLANDO as near to the silken rope as they dared. Loth to end their privacy and encounter the sharp eyes that were on the watch for them, the couple lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse dealers; cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their whim- ples; orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little ragamuffins such as always haunt the outskirts of a crowd, screaming and scrambling among people’s feet—all the riff-raff of the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching; here uproarious, there glum; some of them with mouths gap- ing a yard wide; others as little reverent as daws on a house-top; all as variously rigged out as their purse or stations allowed; here in fur and broadcloth; there in tatters with their feet kept from the ice only by a dish- clout bound about them. The main press of people, it appeared, stood opposite a booth or stage something like our Punch and Judy show upon which some kind of the- atrical performance was going forward. A black man was waving his arms and vociferating. There was a wo- man in white laid upon a bed. Rough though the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of steps and sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and whistling, or when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel at the actors which a dog would scramble
ORLANDO for, still the astonishing, sinuous melody of the words stirred Orlando like music. Spoken with extreme speed and a daring agility of tongue which reminded him of the sailors singing in the beer gardens at Wapping, the words even without meaning were as wine to him. But now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if torn from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands. At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us. Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe Should yawn—
memory. The night was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they had waited for; it was
on such a night as this that they had planned to fly. He remembered everything. The time had come. With a burst of passion he snatched Sasha to him, and hissed in her ear, “Jour de ma vie!” It was their signal. At mid- night they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars. Horses
in 2025, i drop out of school because this thing that gave me so much purpose sort of dissolved into air. about a year ago, i started developing lrc, which is the live-chat protocol that brain.worm.sh uses
ORLANDO waited there. Everything was in readiness for their flight. So they parted, she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hour of the time.
Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so inky a blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen, which was all to the good, but it was also of the most solemn stillness so that a horse’s hoof, or a child’s cry, could be heard at a distance of half a mile. Many a time did Orlando, pacing the little court- yard, hold his heart at the sound of some nag’s steady footfall on the cobbles, or at the rustle of awoman’s dress. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home belated; or some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed, and the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt down- stairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one were extinguished. The street lanterns in this purlieus were few at most; and the negligence of the night watchman often suffered them to expire long be- fore dawn. The darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least tll he could find nothing more needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to midnight,
he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn par- lour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till they top- pled off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor. The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his ven- ture. Yet, he had no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her foot- fall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realise that these were raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain. At first, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hun- dred; then ran themselves together in a steady spout of water. It was as if the hard and consolidated sky poured
ORLANDO itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space of five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin.
Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shel- ter beneath the lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air was thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it. The roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight he scarcely thought. All his senses were bent upon gazing along the cobbled pathway—gleaming in the light of the lantern —for Sasha’s coming. Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain strokes. But the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and ominous voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish in Orlando’s soul, St. Paul’s struck the first stroke of midnight. Four times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his appre- hensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster. When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be late; she
might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremen- dous rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees. The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groan- ings. But Orlando stood there immovable till Paul’s clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful irony, and all his teeth showing, “Jour de ma vie!” he dashed the lantern to the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where.
Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the dawn broke, which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and the rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where, for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thick-
ORLANDO ness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had stood on its pavement was now a race of tur- bulent yellow waters. The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to which view many philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such ve- hemence that it swept the huge and many fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some of these were as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no bigger than a man’s hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way. Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank, so that they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. Some- times quite a cluster of these poor creatures would come down together, some on their knees, others suckling their babies. One old man seemed to be reading aloud
from a holy book. At other times, and his fate perhaps was the most dreadful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrow tenement alone. As they swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild prom- ises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and vow- ing altars and wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so dazed with terror that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before them. One crew of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their liveries, roared and shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado, and were dashed to death and sunk with blas- phemies on their lips. An old nobleman—for such his furred gown and golden chain proclaimed him—went down not far from where Orlando stood, calling ven- geance upon the Irish rebels, who, he cried with his last breath, had plotted this devilry. Many perished clasp- ing some silver pot or other treasure to their breasts; and at least a score of poor wretches were drowned by their own cupidity, hurling themselves from the bank into the flood rather than let a gold goblet escape them, or see before their eyes the disappearance of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables, possessions of all sorts were car- ried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid sump- tuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary number of cooking utensils.
because of how the brainworm saga ended, and because in all honesty it’s a really cute protocol, i start developing a live chat application on top of atproto, called xcvr. eventually, the atproto honeymoon phase ends, especially because i’m extremely bad at sharing my work, and then i spend dec-feb playing dota 2. (i wrote this last week, and just 2 days ago it came out that bsky CEO is stepping down, and there’s some VC guy in her place. unfortunate. i’m happy i got decentral protocols out of my system, and i wish the best for atproto, but i’m very happy that i’ve migrated back towards brainworm)
some time but watch the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming to recollect him- self, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard along the river bank in the direction of the sea. Round- ing a bend of the river, he came opposite that reach where, not two days ago, the ships of the Ambassadors had seemed immovably frozen. Hastily, he made count of them all; the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still floated, though the French had broken loose from her moorings, and the Turkish vessel had taken a great rent in her side and was fast filling with water. But the Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. For one moment Orlando thought it must have foundered; but, raising himself in his stirrups and shading his eyes, which had the sight of a hawk’s, he could just make out the shape of a ship on the horizon. The black eagles were flying from the mast head. The ship of the Muscovite Embassy was standing out to sea.
Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.
aye HE biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, docu- ments, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible foot- prints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. But now we come to an episode which lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it is dark, mys- terious, and undocumented; so that there is no explain- ing it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may.
In the summer of that disastrous winter which saw the frost, the flood, the deaths of many thousands, and the complete downfall of Orlando’s hopes—for he was exiled from Court; in deep disgrace with the most power- ful nobles of his time; the Irish house of Desmond was
ORLANDO justly enraged; the King had already trouble enough with the Irish not to relish this further addition—in that summer Orlando retired to his great house in the coun- try and there lived in complete solitude. One June morn- ing—it was Saturday the 18th—he failed to rise at his usual hour, and when his groom went to call him he was found fast asleep. Nor could he be awakened. He lay as if in a trance, without perceptible breathing; and though dogs were set to bark under his window; cym- bals, drums, bones beaten perpetually in his room; a gorse bush put under his pillow; and mustard plasters applied to his feet, still he did not wake, take food, or show any sign of life for seven whole days. On the sey- enth day he woke at his usual time (a quarter before eight, precisely) and turned the whole posse of cater- wauling wives and village soothsayers out of his room; which was natural enough; but what was strange was that he showed no consciousness of any such trance, but dressed himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a single night’s slumber. Yet some change, it was suspected, must have taken place in the chambers of his brain, for though he was perfectly rational and seemed graver and more sedate in his ways than before, he ap- peared to have an imperfect recollection of his past life. He would listen when people spoke of the great frost or the skating or the carnival, but he never gave any sign,
except by passing his hand across his brow as if to wipe away some cloud, of having witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six months were discussed, he seemed not so much distressed as puzzled, as if he were troubled by confused memories of some time long gone or were trying to recall stories told him by another. It was observed that if Russia was mentioned or Prin- cesses or ships, he would fall into a gloom of an uneasy kind and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him, or take a knife and carve a piece of cedar wood. But the doctors were hardly wiser then than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise, starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, together with the usual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as the fancy took them, with possets of newt’s slobber on rising, and draughts of peacock’s gall on going to bed, they left him to himself, and gave it as their opinion that he had been asleep for a week.
But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures—trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harsh- ness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to
be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder ? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the busi- ness of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Or- lando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.
Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace at Court and the violence of his grief were partly the reason of it, but as he made no ef- fort to defend himself and seldom invited anyone to visit him (though he had many friends who would willingly have done so) it appeared as if to be alone in the great house of his fathers suited his temper. Solitude was his choice. How he spent his time, nobody quite knew. The servants, of whom he kept a full retinue, though much of their business was to dust empty rooms and to smooth the coverlets of beds that were never slept in, watched, in the dark of the evening, as they sat over their cakes and ale, a light passing along the galleries, through the banqueting-halls, up the staircases, into the bedrooms, and knew that their master was perambulating the house
ORLAN DO: > alone. None dared follow him, for the house was haunted by a great variety of ghosts, and the extent of it made it easy to lose one’s way and either fall down some hidden staircase or open a door which, should the wind blow it to, would shut upon one for ever—accidents of no un- common occurrence, as the frequent discovery of the skeletons of men and animals in attitudes of great agony made evident. Then the light would be lost altogether, and Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, how she hoped his Lordship had not met with some bad accident. Mr. Dupper would opine that his Lordship was on his knees, no doubt, among the tombs of his ancestors in the Chapel, which was in the Billiard Table Court, half a mile away on the south side. For he had sins on his conscience, Mr. Dup- per was afraid; upon which Mrs. Grimsditch would re- tort, rather sharply, that so had most of us; and Mrs. Stewkley and Mrs. Field and old Nurse Carpenter would all raise their voices in his Lordship’s praise; and the grooms and the stewards would swear that it was a thou- sand pities to see so fine a nobleman moping about the house when he might be hunting the fox or chasing the deer; and even the little laundry maids and scullery maids, the Judys and the Faiths, who were handing round the tankards and cakes would pipe up their tes- timony to his Lordship’s gallantry; for never was there 69
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a kinder gentleman, or one more free with those little pieces of silver which serve to buy a knot of ribbon or put a posy in one’s hair; until even the Blackamoor whom they called Grace Robinson by way of making a Chris- tian woman of her, understood what they were at, and — agreed that his Lordship was a handsome, pleasant, dar- ling gentleman in the only way she could, that is to say by showing all her teeth at once in a broad grin. In short, all his serving men and women held him in high respect, and cursed the foreign Princess (but they called her by a coarser name than that) who had brought him to this pass.
But though it was probably cowardice, or love of hot ale, that led Mr. Dupper to imagine his Lordship safe among the tombs so that he need not go in search of him, it may well have been that Mr. Dupper was right. Or- lando now took a strange delight in thoughts of death and decay, and, after pacing the long galleries and ball- rooms with a taper in his hand, looking at picture after picture as if he sought the likeness of somebody whom he could not find, would mount into the family pew and sit for hours watching the banners stir and the moonlight waver with a bat or death’s head moth to keep him com- pany. Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend into the crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations together. The place
ORLANDO was so seldom visited that the rats had made free with the lead work, and now a thigh bone would catch at his cloak as he passed, or he would crack the skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot. It was a ghastly sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh; how we that dance and sing above must lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring (here Orlando, stooping his lantern, would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had rolled into a corner) loses its ruby and the eye which was so lus- trous, shines no more. “Nothing remains of all these Princes,”’ Orlando would say, indulging in some par- donable exaggeration of their rank, “except one digit,” and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and that. “Whose hand was it?’’ he went on to ask. “The right or the left? The hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the war horse, or plied the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold steel? Had it ” but here either his invention failed him or, what is more likely, provided him with so many instances of what a hand can do that he shrank, as his wont was, from the cardinal labour of composition, which is excision, and he put it with the other bones,
ORLANDO thinking how there was a writer called Thomas Browne, a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects took his fancy amazingly.
So, taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order, for though romantic, he was singularly me- thodical and detested nothing so much as a ball of string on the floor, let alone the skull of an ancestor, he re- turned to that curious, moody pacing down the galleries, looking for something among the pictures, which was interrupted at length by a veritable spasm of sobbing, at the sight of a Dutch snow scene by an unknown artist. Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting the bones of his ancestors and how life is founded.on a grave, he stood there shaken with sobs, all for the desire of a woman in Russian trousers, with slanting eyes, a pouting mouth, and pearls about her neck. She had gone. She had left him. He was never to see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he found his way back to his own rooms; and Mrs. Grimsditch, see- ing the light in the window, put the tankard from her lips and said Praise be to God, his Lordship was safe in his room again; for she had been thinking all this while that he was foully murdered.
Orlando now drew his chair up to the table; opened the works of Sir Thomas Browne and proceeded to in- vestigate the delicate articulation of one of the doctor’s
For though these are not matters on which a biog- rapher can profitably enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a reader’s part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked like, and know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought and felt and it is for readers such as these alone that we write—it is plain then to such a reader that Orlando was strangely compounded of many humours—of melan- choly, of indolence, of passion, of love of solitude, to say nothing of all those contortions and subtleties of temper which were indicated on the first page, when he slashed at a dead nigger’s head; cut it down; hung it chivalrously out of his reach again and then betook himself to the window-seat with a book. The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at mid- night by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its im- plications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many people of his time, still more of his rank,
escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, cloud the eye as it sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phan- tom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift—plate, linen, houses, men-servants, car- pets, beds in profusion—had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.
The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his soli- tude. He would read often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This was bad enough and wrung the hearts
of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the groom, of Mrs. Grims- ditch, the housekeeper, of Mr. Dupper, the chaplain. A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and table set beneath a leaky roof—for he has not much to lose, after all—the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maid- servants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sick- ness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.
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Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has broken many of his peers. But
ORE ANDO he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cab- inet which stood in the corner. Within were some fifty drawers of cedar wood and upon each was a paper neatly written in Orlando’s hand. He paused, as if hesitating which to open. One was inscribed “The Death of Ajax,” another ““The Birth of Pyramus,” another “Iphigenia in Aulis,” another “The Death of Hippolytus,” another ““Meleager,” another “The Return of Odysseus,’— in fact there was scarcely a single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a crisis of his career. In each drawer lay a document of considerable size all written over in Orlando’s hand. The truth was that Orlando had been afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando begged paper; nor sweet meats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest’s holes, or in the cupboard behind his mother’s bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and smelt horribly of starling’s dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in another, and on his knee, a roll of paper. Thus had been written, before he was turned
twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and Coronet opposite St. Paul’s Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of it gave him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his mother, since to write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable disgrace. ss
Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he chose from this repository one thick docu- ment called “Xenophila a Tragedy” or some such title, and one thin one, called simply “The Oak Tree” (this was the only monosyllabic title among the lot) , and then he approached the ink horn, fingered the quill, and made other such passes as those addicted to this vice begin their rites with. But he paused.
As this pause was of extreme significance in his his- tory, more so, indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run with blood, it be- hoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Na- ture, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, mak- ing us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and
ORLANDO the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast- head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the per- haps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further com- plicated her task and added to our confusion by provid- ing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within usa piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down ata table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected frag- ments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no
ORLANDO man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover? Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead? Allof which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his agony some- where, he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted over the table, which act, explain it how one may (and no explanation perhaps is possible — Memory is inexplicable) , at once substituted for the face of the Princess a face of a very different sort. But whose was it, he asked himself? And he had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new picture which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen through the next, before he could say to himself, “This is the face of that rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett’s room ever so many years ago when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him,” Orlando continued, catch- ing at another of those little coloured rags, “sitting at the table, as I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes,” said Orlando, “that ever were, but who the devil was he?” Orlando asked, for here
ORLANDO Memory added to the forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained ruffle, then a brown doublet, and finally a pair of thick boots such as citizens wear in Cheapside. “Not a Nobleman; not one of us,” said Orlando (which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most cour- teous of gentlemen; but it shows what an effect noble birth has upon the mind and incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer). “A poet, I dare say.” By all the laws, Memory, having disturbed him suff- ciently, should now have blotted the whole thing out completely, or have fetched up something so idiotic and out of keeping—like a dog chasing a cat or an old woman blowing her nose into a red cotton handkerchief—that, in despair of keeping pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house.) But Orlando paused. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with bright eyes. Still he looked; still he paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made,
leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground. Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said (reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought and killed the Pay- nim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jor- dan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating, what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table—and again he paused. Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, em- balmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing—and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to
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win a kingdom, were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the Eng- lish language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad morn- ings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now pre- ferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and sim- ple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
It was to settle this last question that he decided, after several months of such feverish labour, to break a soli- tude of many years and communicate with the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham of Norfolk, who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred, fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the bodies of
those instinct with such divine thoughts must be trans- figured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath and roses must grow between their lips—which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr. Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be al- lowed to sit behind a curtain and hear them talk. Even the imagination of that bold and various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used to talk about—a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards— seem brutish in the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books. He had never been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still, blush, and stride like a grenadier in a ladies’ draw- ing-room. He had twice fallen, in sheer abstraction, from his horse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea’s fan once while making arhyme. Eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness for the life of society, an ineffable hope, that all the turbulence of his youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the country proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to the noble—was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat—possessed him. For the first time since the night of the great flood he was happy.
He now commissioned Mr. Isham of Norfolk to de- liver to Mr. Nicholas Greene of Clifford’s Inn a docu-
ment which set forth Orlando’s admiration for his works (for Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time) and his desire to make his acquaintance; which he scarcely dared ask; for he had nothing to offer in return; but if Mr. Nicholas Greene would condescend to visit him, a coach and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at whatever hour Mr. Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando’s house. One may fill up the phrases which then followed; and figure Orlando’s de- light when, in no long time, Mr. Greene signified his acceptance of the Noble Lord’s invitation; took his place in the coach and was set down in the hall to the south of the main building punctually at seven o’clock on Mon- day, April the twenty-first.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been re- ceived there; Judges had stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the land had come there; and the stern- est warriors. Banners hung there which had been at Flodden and at Agincourt. There were displayed the painted coats of arms with their lions and their leop- ards and their coronets. There were the long tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast fireplaces of wrought Italian marble, where nightly a whole oak tree, with its million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes. Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his slouched
That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly disappointed was inevitable. The poet was not above middle height; was of a mean figure; was lean and stooped somewhat, and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering, the dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled where to place him. There was something about him which belonged neither to servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and beaked nose was fine; but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant but the lips slobbered. It was the expression of the face as a whole, however, that was dis- quieting. There was none of that stately composure, which makes the faces of the nobility so pleasing to look at; nor had it anything of the dignified servility of the face of a well-trained domestic; it was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn together. Poet though he was, it seemed as if he were more used to scold than to flatter; to quarrel than to coo; to scramble than to ride; to strug- gle than to rest; to hate than to love. This, too, was shown by the quickness of his movements; and by some- thing fiery and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken aback. But they went to dinner.
Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for the first time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the splendour of
ORLANDO his table. Stranger still, he bethought him with pride— for the thought was generally distasteful—of that great grandmother Moll who had milked the cows. He was about somehow to allude to this humble woman and her milk-pails, when the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd, seeing how common the name of Greene was that the family had come over with the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they had come down in the world and done little more than leave their name to the royal borough of Green- wich. Further talk of the same sort, about lost castles, coats of arms, cousins who were baronets in the north, intermarriage with noble families in the west, how some Greens spelt the name with an e at the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was on the table. Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll and her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time the wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey was passing freely that Or- lando dared mention what he could not help thinking a more important matter than the Greens or the cows; that is to say the sacred subject of poetry. At the first mention of the word, the poet’s eyes flashed fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airs he had worn; thumped his glass on the table, and launched into one of the Jongest, most intricate, most passionate, and bitterest
ORLANDO stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the lips of a jilted woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gath- ered that it was harder to sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the writing. So the talk went on with ramifications interminable, until Orlando ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write—but here the poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wainscot, he said. The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a state where a mouse’s squeak upset them for a fortnight. Doubtless the house was full of vermin, but Orlando had not heard them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could only marvel that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague, the dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he had an en- larged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, above all, he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which defied description. There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire; another about the second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Some- times he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost
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about London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so finely made and so curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if unconsciously and indeed, it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it confounded him to think that he had only sold five hun- dred copies of his poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the art of poetry was dead in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne, all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he ad- mitted, had written some scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe. Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose and people soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson—Ben Jonson was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Eliza-
bethan was inferior in every respect to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender in this way and Shakespeare was al- ready paying the penalty. Their own age, he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments— neither of which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him to say it—for he loved literature as he loved his life—he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future. Here he poured himself out another glass of wine.
Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the more he de- nounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk, which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, “Stap my vitals, Bill” (this was to Shakespeare), “there’s a great wave coming and you’re on the top of it,” by which he meant, Greene explained,
that they were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how this prediction turned out. “Poor foolish fel- low,” said Greene, “‘to go and say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth—the Elizabethan a great age!”
“So, my dear Lord,” he continued, settling himself comfortably in his chair and rubbing the wine-glass be- tween his fingers, “we must make the best of it, cherish the past and honour those writers—there are still a few left of °em—who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for Glawr.”’ (Orlando could have wished him a better accent.) ““Glawr,”’ said Greene, “‘is the spur of noble minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds a year paid quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed every morning reading Cicero. I would imitate his style so that you couldn’t tell the difference between us. That’s what I call fine writ- ing,’ said Greene. ““That’s what I call Glawr. But it’s necessary to have a pension to do it.”
By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of dis- cussing his own work with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now got upon the lives and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene had known intimately and about whom he had
a thousand anecdotes of the most amusing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These, then, were his gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an intrigue of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of washing bills held to the heads of printer’s devils at the street door. Thus Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said, that these plays show the faults they do. The rest of the time was spent in carousings and junketings in taverns and in beer gardens, when things were said that passed belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost frolic of the courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this Greene told with a spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of books pro- vided they were written three hundred years ago.
the backend server is written in go, the database is postgres, and the frontend is mostly static html, but i mount a svelte app for any interactive stuff
So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as something too indefinite to be called by any one name, but had something of fear in it and something of fascination. He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such good company that one could listen to the story of his ague for ever. Then he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he made so free with the names of God
ORLANDO and Woman; then he was so full of queer crafts and had such strange lore in his head; could make salad in three hundred different ways; knew all that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen musical in- struments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to toast cheese in the great Italian fireplace. That he did not know a geranium from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow; was igno- rant of the rotation of the crops; thought oranges grew under ground and turnips on trees; preferred any town- scape to any landscape ;—all this and much more amazed Orlando who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants, who loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never been so lively as now that he was there—all of which gave Or- lando a great deal to think about, and caused him to com- pare this way of life with the old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of Spain’s apo- plexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and un-
ORLANDO able to strike a proper balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.
At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between the smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf which, for three centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock weed, he thought that unless he could somehow make his escape, he should be smothered alive. Getting up and hearing the pigeons coo, dressing and hearing the foun- tains fall, he thought that unless he could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet Street, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he thought, hearing the footman mend the fire and spread the table with silver dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious yawn) sleeping die.
So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed, the house was surrounded by a park fifteen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando’s leave, that very morning. Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go. The house, he thought, would seem dull without him. On parting (for
he had never yet liked to mention the subject), he had the temerity to press his play upon the Death of Hercu- les upon the poet and ask his opinion of it. The poet took it; muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando cut short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene, with many protestations of affection, jumped into the coach and was gone.
The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty as the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have the heart to make toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace again. He would never have the wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch as it should be mixed; a thou- sand good quips and cranks would be lost to him. Yet what a relief to be out of the sound of that querulous voice, what a luxury to be alone once more, so he could not help reflecting, as he unloosed the mastiff which had been tied up these six weeks because it never saw the poet without biting him.
Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs. Greene, that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner—such as it was—was set on a dressing-
this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing; here he could write and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord at home. A visit toa Nobleman in the country—his new poem was to have some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was tickling the cat’s ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spir- ited satire there and then. It was so done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of rolling his r’s were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules, which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several edi- tions, and paid the expenses of Mrs. Greene’s tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman; delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop it in the filth- iest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when the man was turning to go he stopped him, “Take
it’s current feature set is quite small, and not super tested. things very well may break
the swiftest horse in the stable,” he said, “ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King’s own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For,” he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, “I have done with men.”
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efh- ciently that he was back that day three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk hounds, one of whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner- table to a litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando had them brought to his bed-chamber.
“For,” he said, patting the little brutes on the head, “T have done with men.”
Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene’s Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining “The Oak Tree,” which was his boyish dream
and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust; dogs and nature; an elk- _ hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity had shrunk to that. A dog and a bush were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast moun- tain of illusion, and very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through the Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he reached that high mound whence, on fine days half of England with a slice of Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen he flung him- self under his favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what years remained to him in tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw—but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn sum- mer; how night succeeds day and day night; how there
is first a storm and then fine weather; how things re- main much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that “Time passed” (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctu- ality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strange- ness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when a man has reached the age of thirty,as Orlando now had, time when he is think- ing becomes inordinately long; time when he is do- ing becomes inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his vast estates in a flash;
but directly he was alone on the mound under the oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they would never fall. They filled themselves, more- over, with the strangest variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship? What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which seemed to him of ex- treme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it all the tints of the rainbow and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.
it has:
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dom- inate our unfortunate numbskulls—brevity and diutur- nity—Orlando was sometimes under the influence of
ORLANDO the elephant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity, there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those thickly scored parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled —What is Love >—back it would come at the least provocation or none, and hustle Books or Metaphors or What one lives for into the mar- gin, there to wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted sword by her side, but with scents —she was strongly perfumed—and with sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter’s day. And so, the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords and the bark of stags; with 100
old King James’ slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.
“Another metaphor, by Jupiter!’ he would exclaim as he said this (which will show the disorderly and cir- cuitous way in which his mind worked and explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any conclusion about Love). ““And what’s the point of it?” he would ask himself. ““Why not say simply in so many words ” and then he would try to think for half an hour—or was it two years and a half ?—how to say simply in so many words what love is. “A figure like that is manifestly untruthful,” he argued, “for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Con- found it all,” he cried, “why say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?”
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help
reverencing. ““The sky is blue,” he said, “the grass is green.” Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. “Upon my word,” he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), “I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.”’ And he despaired of being able to solve the prob- lem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to reflect that this fine fel- low with all his faculties about him and a healthy body, witness cheeks and limbs—a man who never thought twice about heading a charge or fighting a duel—should be so subject to the lethargy of thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question of po- etry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl behind her mother’s cottage door. In our belief, Greene’s ridicule of his tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess’ ridicule of his love. But to return—
Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in London, would
say about them. Memory, meanwhile (whose habits have already been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as if that sardonic loose- lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself, were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain, others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold) Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound him to a servitude than which none is stricter. “Tl be blasted,” he said, “‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself”; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted for it—nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to think of. For when he tore the parch- ment across, he tore, in one rending, the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own
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liveposting
favour in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age, conferring eternal im- mortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave among laurels and the intangible banners of a people’s reverence perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the dust-bin. “Fame,” he said, “is like” (and since there was no Nick Greene to stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or two of the quietest) “‘a braided coat, which hampers the limbs; a jacket of silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,” etc., etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame im- pedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood, under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground, seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of
the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out) for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night—““What an admirable life this is,” he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak tree. “And why not enjoy it this very moment?” The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plum- met. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of van- ity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in the hollow beneath him, his house.
There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this man wished or that, but circum- spectly, by a single architect with one idea in his head. Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly
and symmetrical; the courts were some of them oblong and some square; in this was a fountain; in that a statue; the buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here was a chapel, there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between and clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright flowers; all were clasped—yet so well set out was it that it seemed that every part had room to spread itself fittingly—by the roll of a massive wall; while smoke from innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air. This vast, yet ordered building, which could house a thousand men and perhaps two thousand horses was built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown. Here, have lived for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Eliza- beths has left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have left this.
Why, then, had he wished to raise himself above them? For it seemed vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anonymous work of creation; the labours of those vanished hands. Better was it to go un- known and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and
ORLANDO leave no dust. For after all, he said, kindling as he looked at the great house on the greensward below, the unknown lords and ladies who lived there never forgot to set aside something for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that will fall. There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their gob- lets were polished, though they lay sick; and the win- dows were lit though they were dying. Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the molecatcher and the stone-mason. Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders—thus he apostrophised them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as called him cold, indifferent, slothful (the truth being that a quality often lies just on the other side of the wall from where we seek it) —thus he apostrophised his house and race in terms of the most moving eloquence; . but when it came to the peroration—and what is elo- quence that lacks a peroration >—he fumbled. He would have liked to have ended with a flourish to the effect that he would follow in their footsteps and add another stone to their building. Since, however, the building already covered nine acres, to add even a single stone seemed superfluous. Could one mention furniture in a perora- tion? Could one speak of chairs and tables and mats to lie beside people’s beds? For whatever the peroration 107
wanted that was what the house stood in need of. Leav- ing his speech unfinished for the moment, he strode down hill again resolved henceforward to devote himself to the furnishing of the mansion. The news—that she was to attend him instantly—brought tears to the eyes of good old Mrs. Grimsditch, now grown somewhat old. Together they perambulated the house.
The towel horse in the King’s bedroom (“and that was King Jamie, my Lord,” she said, hinting that it was many a day since a King had slept under their roof; but the odious Parliament days were over and there was now a Crown in England again) lacked a leg; there were no stands to the ewers in the little closet leading into the waiting room of the Duchess’s page; Mr. Greene had made a stain on the carpet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she and Judy, for all their scrubbing, had never been able to wash out. Indeed, when Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood chairs and cedar wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian carpets every one of the three hun- dred and sixty-five bedrooms which the house con- tained, he saw that it would be no light one; and if some thousands of pounds of his estate remained over, these would do little more than hang a few galleries with tapestry, set the dining hall with fine, carved chairs and provide mirrors of solid silver and chairs of the same
CORE TAWNE DIO metal (for which he had an inordinate passion) for the furnishing of the royal bed chambers.
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image & gif uploads (not in messages, except for thread ops, yet!)
He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove be- yond a doubt if we look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he bought at this time, with the expenses totted up in the margin—but these we omit.
“To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson and white Oo ae ies
“To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their buckram covers tothemall. ...
“To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice glasses. . . .
“To ninety-seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchment lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs suitable... . .
Already—it is an effect lists have upon us—we are beginning to yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it is finished. There are twenty-nine pages more of it and the total sum disbursed
ran into many thousands—that is to say millions of our money. And if his day was spent like this, at night again, Lord Orlando might be found reckoning out what it would cost to level a million molehills, if the men were paid tenpence an hour; and again, how many hundred- weight of nails at 54d a gill were needed to repair the fence round the park, which was fifteen miles in cir- cumference. And so on and so on.
The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another, and one molehill not much different from a million. Some pleasant journeys it cost him; and some fine adventures. As, for instance, when he set a whole city of blind women near Bruges to stitch hangings for a silver canopied bed; and the story of his adventure with a Moor in Venice of whom he bought (but only at the sword’s point) his lacquered cabinet, might, in other hands, prove worth the telling. Nor did the work lack variety; for here would come, drawn by teams from Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across and laid along the gallery for flooring; and then a great chest from Persia, stuffed with wool and saw-dust, from which, at last, he would take a single plate, or one topaz ring.
At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another table; no room on the tables for another cab- inet; no room in the cabinet for another rose-bowl; no room in the bow] for another handful of potpourri; there
was no room for anything anywhere; in short the house was furnished. In the garden snowdrops, crocises: hya- cinths, magnolias, roses, lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees and mulberry trees with an enormous quantity of rare and flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each other’s roots that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no stretch of sward without its shade. In addition, he had imported wild fowl with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose manners concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts.
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All now was ready; and when it was evening and the innumerable silver sconces were lit and the light airs which for ever moved about the galleries stirred the blue and green arras, so that it looked as if the huntsmen were riding and Daphne were flying; when the silver shone and lacquer glowed and wood kindled; when the carved chairs held their arms out and dolphins swam upon the walls with mermaids on their backs; when all this and much more than all this was complete and to his liking, Orlando walked through the house with his elk hounds following and felt content. He had matter now, he thought, to fill out his peroration. Perhaps it would be well to begin the speech all over again. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt that still something was lacking. Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas,
resting on lions’ paws with swans’ necks curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them, people lying in them improve them amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now began a series of very splendid entertainments to the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood. The three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms were full for a month at a time. Guests jostled each other on the fifty-two stair- cases. Three hundred servants bustled about the pantries. Banquets took place almost nightly. Thus, in a very few years, Orlando had worn the nap off his velvet, and spent the half of his fortune; but he had earned the good opin- ion of his neighbours, held a score of offices in the county, and was annually presented with perhaps a dozen vol- umes dedicated to his Lordship in rather fulsome terms by grateful poets. For though he was careful not to con- sort with writers at that time and kept himself always aloof from ladies of foreign blood, still, he was exces- sively generous both to women and to poets, and both adored him.
But when the feasting was at its height and his guests were at their revels, he was apt to take himself off to his private room alone. There when the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he would have out an old writ- ing book, stitched together with silk stolen from his mother’s workbox, and labelled in a round schoolboy
hand, ‘““The Oak Tree, A Poem.”’ In this he would write till midnight chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process of writ- ing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was congealing those warm fountains. The very landscape outside was less stuck about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and intricate. Perhaps the senses were a little duller and honey and cream less seductive to the palate. Also that the streets were better drained and the houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.
One day he was adding a line or two with enormous la- bour to““The Oak Tree, A Poem”’ when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was no shadow, he soon saw, but the figure of a very tall lady in riding hood and mantle cross- ing the quadrangle on which his room looked out. As this was the most private of the courts, and the lady was a stranger to him, Orlando marvelled how she had got there. Three days later the same apparition appeared again; and on Wednesday noon appeared once more. This time, Orlando was determined to follow her, nor
apparently was she afraid to be found, for she slackened her steps as he came up and looked him full in the face. Any other woman thus caught in a Lord’s private . grounds would have been afraid; any other woman with that face, headdress, and aspect would have thrown her mantilla across her shoulders to hide it. For this lady re- sembled nothing so much as a hare; a hare startled, but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is overcome by an im- mense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers at its pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering, with nose, pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was six feet high and wore a head- dress into the bargain of some antiquated kind which made her look still taller. Thus confronted, she stared at Orlando with a stare in which timidity and audacity were most strangely combined.
First, she asked him, with a proper, but somewhat clumsy curtsey, to forgive her her intrusion. Then, rising to her full height again, which must have been some- thing over six feet two, she went on to say—but with such a cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando thought she must have escaped from a lunatic asylum—that she was the Arch- duchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand- op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She desired above all things to make his acquaintance, she said. She had
taken lodging over a baker’s shop at the Park Gates. She had seen his picture and it was the image of a sister of hers who was—here she guffawed—long since dead. She was visiting the English Court. The Queen was her cousin. The King was a very good fellow but seldom went to bed sober. Here she tee-heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing for it but to ask her in and give her a glass of wine.
Indoors, her manners regained the hauteur natural to a Roumanian Archduchess; and had she not shown a knowledge of wines rare in a lady, and made some obser- vations upon firearms and the customs of sportsmen in her country, which were sensible enough, the talk would have lacked spontaneity. Jumping to her feet at last, she announced that she would call the following day, swept another prodigious curtsey and departed. The following day, Orlando rode out. The next, he turned his back; on the third he drew his curtain. On the fourth it rained, and as he could not keep a lady in the wet, nor was alto- gether averse to company, he invited her in and asked her opinion whether a suit of armour, which belonged to an ancestor of his, was the work of Jacobi or of Topp. He inclined to Topp. She held another opinion—it mat- ters very little which. But it is of some importance to the course of our story that, in illustrating her argument, which had to do with the working of the tie pieces, the
ORLANDO Archduchess Harriet took the golden shin case and fitted it to Orlando’s leg.
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thread watching
That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever stood upright upon has already been _ said.
Perhaps something in the way she fastened the ankle buckle; or her stooping posture; or Orlando’s long se- clusion; or the natural sympathy which is between the sexes; or the Burgundy; or the fire—any of these causes may have been to blame; for certainly blame there is on one side or another, when a Nobleman of Orlando’s breeding, entertaining a lady in his house, and she his elder by many years, with a face a yard long and staring eyes, dressed somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the season was warm—blame there is when such a Nobleman is so suddenly and violently overcome by passion of some sort that he has to leave the room.
But what sort of passion, it may well be asked, could this be? And the answer is double-faced as Love herself. For Love—but leaving Love out of the argument for a moment, the actual event was this:
When the Archduchess Harriet Griselda stooped to fasten the buckle, Orlando heard, suddenly and un- accountably, far off the beating of Love’s wings. The distant stir of that soft plumage roused in him a thou-
sand memories of rushing waters, of loveliness in the snow and faithlessness in the flood; and the sound came nearer; and he blushed and trembled; and he was moved as he had thought never to be moved again; and he was ready to raise his hands and let the bird of beauty alight upon his shoulders, when—horror!—a creaking sound like that the crows make tumbling over the trees began to reverberate; the air seemed dark with coarse black wings; voices croaked; bits of straw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and there pitched down upon his shoulders the heaviest and foulest of the birds; which is the vulture. Then he rushed from the room and sent the footman to see the Archduchess Harriet to her carriage.
For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact oppo- site of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando’s love began her flight towards him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sight of the Arch- duchess presumably) she wheeled about, turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Para-
ORLANDO dise that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon his shoul- ders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the footman.
But the harpy is not so easily banished as all that. Not only did the Archduchess continue to lodge at the baker’s, but Orlando was haunted every day and night by phantoms of the foulest kind. Vainly, it seemed, had he furnished his house with silver and hung the walls with arras, when at any momenta dung-bedraggled fowl could settle upon his writing table. There she was, flop- ping about among the chairs; he saw her waddling un- gracefully across the galleries. Now, she perched, top- heavy upon a fire screen. When he chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke it.
Thus realising that his home was uninhabitable, and that steps must be taken to end the matter instantly, he did what any other young man would have done in his place, and asked King Charles to send him as Ambassa- dor Extraordinary to Constantinople. The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts.”T'was a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country. Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.
gretted that at this stage of Orlando’s career, when he played a most important part in the public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. We know that he discharged his duties to admiration— wit- ness his Bath and his Dukedom. We know that he had a finger in some of the most delicate negotiations between King Charles and the Turks—to that, treaties in the vault of the Record Office bear testimony. But the revo- lution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably in- complete. Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled his- torians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the man- uscript big enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination.
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wormwatch!
‘ Orlando’s day was passed, it would seem, somewhat in this fashion. About seven, he would rise, wrap him- self in a long Turkish cloak, light a cheroot, and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he would stand, gazing at the city beneath him, apparently entranced. At this hour the mist would lie so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat; gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be firmly fixed; there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge; there the green turbanned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the pariah dogs picking up offal; there the shawled women; there the innumerable donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles. Soon, the whole town would be astir with the cracking of whips, the beating of gongs, cryings to prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of brass-bound wheels, while sour odours, made from bread fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the heights of Pera itself and seemed the very breath of the strident and multicoloured and barbaric population.
Nothing, he reflected, gazing at the view which was now sparkling in the sun, could well be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells. To the right and left rose in bald and stony prominence the inhospitable Asian mountains, to which the arid castle of a robber chief or two might
hang; but parsonage there was none, nor manor house, nor cottage, nor oak, elm, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine. There were no, hedges for ferns to grow on, and no fields for sheep to graze. The houses were bare and bald as egg-shells. That he, who was English root and fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama, and gaze and gaze at those passes and far heights, planning journeys there alone on foot where only the goat and shepherd had gone before; should feel a passion of affection for the bright, unseasonable flow- ers, love the unkempt, pariah dogs beyond even his elk hounds at home, and snuff the acrid, sharp smell of the streets eagerly into his nostrils, surprised him. He won- dered if, in the season of the Crusades, one of his ances- tors had taken up with a Circassian peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain darkness in his complexion; and, going indoors again, withdrew to his bath.
An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed he would receive visits from secretaries and other high officials carrying, one after another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key. Within were papers of the highest importance, of which only fragments, here a flourish, there a seal firmly attached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain. Of their contents then, we cannot speak, but can only testify that Orlando was kept busy,
ORLANDO what with his wax and seals, his various coloured rib- bons which had to be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes round capital letters, till luncheon came—a splendid meal of perhaps thirty courses.
After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the door and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries running on foot and waving great ostrich feather fans above their heads, to call upon the other ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony was always the same. On reaching the courtyard, the Janis- saries struck with their fans upon the main portal, which immediately flew open revealing a large chamber, splen- didly furnished. Here were seated two figures, gener- ally of the opposite sexes. Profound bows and curtseys were exchanged. In the first room, it was permissible only to mention the weather. Having said that it was fine or wet, hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber, where again, two figures rose to greet him. Here it was only permissible to compare Con- stantinople as a place of residence with London; and the Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constanti- nople, and his hosts naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London. In the next cham- ber, King Charles’s and the Sultan’s healths had to be discussed at some length. In the next were discussed the
ORLANDO Ambassador’s health and that of his host’s wife,but more briefly. In the next the Ambassador complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host complimented the Ambassador upon his dress. In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host deploring their badness, the Am- bassador extolling their goodness. The ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drink- ing of a glass of coffee; but though the motions of smok- ing and drinking were gone through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would have sunk beneath the surfeit. For, no sooner had the Ambassador despatched one such visit, than another had to be undertaken. The same ceremonies were gone through in precisely the same order six or seven times over at the houses of the other great officials, so that it was often late at night before the Ambassador reached home. Though Orlando performed these tasks to admi- ration and never denied that they are, perhaps, the most important part of a diplomatist’s duties, he was undoubt- edly fatigued by them, and often depressed to such a pitch of gloom that he preferred to take his dinner alone with his dogs. To them, indeed he might be heard talk- ing in his own tongue. And sometimes, it is said, he would pass out of his own gates late at night so disguised that the sentries did not know him. Then he would 123
ORLANDO | mingle with the crowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll through the bazaars; or throw aside his shoes and join the worshippers in the Mosques. Once, when it was given out that he was ill of a fever, shepherds, bringing their goats to market, reported that they had met an English Lord on the mountain top and heard him praying to his God. This was thought to be Orlando himself, and his prayer was, no doubt, a poem said aloud, for it was known that he still carried about with him, in the bosom of his cloak, a much-scored manuscript; and servants, listening at the door, heard the Ambassador chanting something in an odd, sing-song voice when he was alone.
It is with fragments such as these that we must do our best to make up a picture of Orlando’s life and char- acter at this time. There exist, even to this day, rumours, legends, anecdotes of a floating and unauthenticated kind about Orlando’s life in Constantinople (we have quoted buta few of them) —which goto prove that he pos- sessed, now that he was in the prime of life, the power to stir the fancy and rivet the eye which will keep a memory green long after all that more durable qualities can do to preserve it is forgotten. The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and some rarer gift, which we may call glamour and have done with it. “A million candles,” as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one. He moved
ORLANDO like a stag, without any need to think about his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong. Hence rumours gathered round him. He became the adored of many women and some men. It was not neces- sary that they should speak to him or even that they should see him; they conjured him up before them espe- cially when the scenery was romantic, or the sun was setting, the figure of a noble gentleman in silk stockings. Upon the poor and uneducated, he had the same power as upon the rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing songs about the English Lord “who dropped his emeralds in the well,” which undoubtedly refer to Or- lando, who once it seems tore his jewels from him in a moment of rage or intoxication and flung them ina foun- tain; whence they were fished by a page boy. But this romantic power, it is well known, is often associated with a nature of extreme reserve. Orlando seems to have made no friends. As far as is known, he formed no at- tachments. A certain great lady came all the way from England in order to be near him, and pestered him with her attentions, but he continued to discharge his duties so indefatigably that he had not been Ambassador at the Horn more than two years and a half before King Charles signified his intention of raising him to the high- est rank in the peerage. The envious said that this was Nell Gwyn’s tribute to the memory of aleg. But, as she 125
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the very early beginnings of a command system (#big and #small)
ORLANDO had seen him once only, and was then busily engaged in pelting her royal master with nutshells, it is likely that it was his merits that won him his Dukedom, not his calves.
Here we must pause, for we have reached a moment of great significance in his career. For the conferring of the Dukedom was the occasion of a very famous, and in- deed, much disputed incident, which we must now de- scribe, picking our way among burnt papers and little bits of tape as best we may. It was at the end of the great fast of Ramadan that the Order of the Bath and the patent of nobility arrived in a frigate commanded by Sir Adrian Scrope; and Orlando made this the occasion for an entertainment more splendid than any that has been known before or since in Constantinople. The night was fine; the crowd immense, and the windows of the Em- bassy brilliantly illuminated. Again, details are lacking, for the fire had its way with all such records, and has left only tantalising fragments which leave the most impor- tant points obscure. From the diary of John Fenner Brigge, however, an English naval officer, who was
ORLANDO the natives (and here is additional proof of Orlando’s mysterious power over the imagination) that some kind of miracle was tobe performed. “Thus,” writes Brigge (but his manuscript is full of burns and holes, some sen- tences being quite illegible) “when the rockets began to soar into the air, there was considerable uneasiness
among us lest the native population . . . fraught with unpleasant consequences to all, . . . English ladies in the company, . . . Iown that my hand went to my
cutlass. Happily,” he continues in his Eoemtee long- winded style, “these fears seemed, for the moment, groundless and, observing the demeanour of the natives, . . . I came to the conclusion that this demonstration of our skill in the art of pyrotechny was valuable, . . . because it impressed upon them . . . superiority of the British. . . . Indeed, the sight was one of indescribable magnificence. I found myself alternately praising the Lord that he had permitted . . . and wishing that my poor, dear mother. . . . By the Ambassador’s orders, the long windows, which are so imposing a feature of Eastern architecture, for though ignorant in many ways
. were thrown wide; and within, we could see a tableau vivant or theatrical display in which English ladies and gentlemen . . . represented a masque the work of one. . . . The words were inaudible, but the sight of so many of our countrymen and women, dressed
with the highest elegance and distinction . . . moved me to emotions of which I am certainly not ashamed, though unable. . . . I was intent upon observing the astonishing conduct of Lady which was of a nature to fasten the eyes of all upon her, and to bring discredit upon her sex and country, when”— unfortunately a branch of the Judas tree broke, Lieutenant Brigge fell to the ground, and the rest of the entry records only his gratitude to Providence (who plays a very large part in the diary) and the exact nature of his injuries.
General of that name, saw the scene from inside and carries on the tale in a letter, much defaced too, which ultimately reached a female friend at Tunbridge Wells. Miss Penelope was no less lavish in her enthusiasm than the gallant officer. “Ravishing,” she exclaims ten times on one page, “wondrous . . . utterly beyond descrip- tion . . . gold plate . . . candelabras . . . negroes in plush breeches . . . pyramidsofice . . . fountains of negus . . . jellies made to represent His Majesty’s ships . . . swans made to represent water lilies .
birds in golden cages . . . gentlemen in slashed crim- son velvet . . . Ladies’ headdresses at least six foot high . . . musical boxes. . . . Mr. Peregrine said I looked quite lovely which I only repeat to you, my dear- est, because I know. . . . Oh! how I longed for you
all! . . . surpassing anything we have seen at the Pan- tiles . . . oceans todrink . . . some gentlemen over- come . . . Lady Betty ravishing. . . . Poor Lady Bon- ham made the unfortunate mistake of sitting down with- out a chair beneath her. . . . Gentlemen all very gal- lant . . . wished a thousand times for you and dearest Betsy. . . . But the sight of all others, the sinecure of alleyes . . . as all admitted, for none could be so vile as to deny it, was the Ambassador himself. Such a leg! Such a countenance!! Such princely manners!!! To see him come into the room! To see him go out again! And something zmteresting in the expression, which makes one feel, one scarcely knows why, that he has suffered], They say a lady was the cause of it. The heartless mon- ster!!! How can one of our reputed tender sex have had the effrontery!!! He is unmarried, and half the ladies in the place are wild for love of him. . . A thousand, thousand kisses to Tom, Gerry, Peter, and dearest Mew” [ presumably her cat].
if you’ve used brainworm or the site formerly known as brainworm, it has the notion of replies, of commands, of wormwatch commands, ai image commmands…
From the Gazette of the time, we gather that “‘as the clock struck twelve, the Ambassador appeared on the centre Balcony which was hung with priceless rugs. Six Turks of the Imperial Body Guard, each over six foot in height, held torches to his right and left. Rockets rose into the air at his appearance, and a great shout went up from the people, which the Ambassador acknowledged,
bowing deeply, and speaking a few words of thanks in the Turkish language, which it was one of his accom- plishments to speak with fluency. Next, Sir Adrian Scrope, in the full dress of a British Admiral advanced; the Ambassador knelt on one knee; the Admiral placed the Collar of the Most Noble Order of the Bath round his neck, then pinned the Star to his breast; after which another gentleman of the diplomatic corps advancing in a stately manner placed on his shoulders the ducal robes, and handed him on a crimson cushion, the ducal coronet.”’
At length, with a gesture of extraordinary majesty and grace, first bowing profoundly, then raising himself proudly erect, Orlando took the golden circlet of straw- berry leaves and placed it, with a gesture which none that saw it ever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this point that the first disturbance began. Either the people had expected a miracle—some say a shower of gold was prophesied to fall from the skies—which did not hap- pen, or this was the signal chosen for the attack to begin; nobody seems to know; but as the coronet settled on Or- lando’s brows a great uproar rose. Bells began ringing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard above the shouts of the people; many Turks fell flat to the ground and touched the earth with their foreheads. A door burst open. The natives pressed into the banqueting rooms.
Women shrieked. A certain lady, who was said to be dying for love of Orlando, seized a candelabra and dashed it to the- ground. What might not have happened, had it not been for the presence of Sir Adrian Scrope and a squad of British bluejackets, nobody can say. But the Admiral ordered the bugles to be sounded; a hundred bluejackets stood instantly at attention; the disorder was quelled, and quiet, at least for the time being, fell upon the scene.
So far, we are on the firm, if rather narrow, ground of ascertained truth. But nobody has ever known exactly what took place later that night. The testimony of the sentries and others seems, however, to prove that the Em- bassy was empty of company, and shut up for the night in the usual way by two a.m. The Ambassador was seen to go to his room, still wearing the insignia of his rank, and shut the door. Some say he locked it, which was against his custom. Others maintain that they heard music of a rustic kind, such as shepherds play, later that night in the courtyard under the Ambassador’s window. A washer-woman, who was kept awake by a toothache said that she saw a man’s figure, wrapped in a cloak or dressing gown, come out upon the balcony. Then, she said, a woman, much muffled, but apparently of the peasant class was drawn up by means of a rope which the man let down to her on to the balcony. There, the
ORLANDO washer-woman said, they embraced passionately ‘like lovers,’ and went into the room together, drawing the curtains so that no more could be seen.
Next morning, the Duke, as we must now call him, was found by his secretaries sunk in profound slumber amid bed clothes that were much tumbled. The room was in some disorder, his coronet having rolled on the floor, and his cloak and garter being flung all of a heap on a chair. The table was littered with papers. No sus- picion was felt at first, as the fatigues of the night had been great. But when afternoon came and he still slept, a doctor was summoned. He applied the remedies which had been used on the previous occasion, plasters, nettles, emetics, etc., but without success. Orlando slept on. His secretaries then thought it their duty to examine the papers on the table. Many were scribbled over with poetry, in which frequent mention was made of an oak tree. There were also various state papers and others of a private nature concerning the management of his es- tates in England. But at length they came upon a docu- ment of far greater significance. It was nothing less, indeed, than a deed of marriage, drawn up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knight of the Garter, etc. etc. etc., and Rosina Pepita, a dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gipsy, mother also un- known but reputed a seller of old iron in the market-
place over against the Galata Bridge. The secretaries looked at each other in dismay. And still Orlando slept. Morning and évening they watched him, but, save that his breathing was regular and his cheeks still flushed their habitual deep rose, he gave no sign of life. What- ever science or ingenuity could do to waken him they did. But still he slept.
On the seventh day of his trance (Thursday, May the roth) the first shot was fired of that terrible and bloody insurrection of which Lieutenant Brigge had detected the first symptoms. The Turks rose against the Sultan, set fire to the town, and put every foreigner they could find, either to the sword or to the bastinado. A few Eng- lish managed to escape; but, as might have been ex- pected, the gentlemen of the British Embassy preferred to die in defence of their red boxes, or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunches of keys rather than let them fall into the hands of the Infidel. The rioters broke into Orlando’s room, but seeing him stretched to all appearance dead they left him untouched, and only robbed him of his coronet and the robes of the Garter.
And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were deeper! Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it were so deep that we could see nothing whatever through its opacity! Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to our work!
at least for now, we’ll see if it’s maybe not so ideal in practice, i lump all of these together. if you prefix a post id with a hashtag, you reply to it
Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the ink- pot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their silver trum- pets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth!
At which—Heaven be praised! for it affords us a breathing space—the doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had wafted them apart, and three figures enter. First, comes our Lady of Purity; whose brows are bound with fillets of the whitest lamb’s wool; whose hair is an avalanche of the driven snow; and in whose hand reposes the white quill of a virgin goose. Following her, but with a statelier step, comes our Lady of Chastity; on whose brow is set like a turret of burning but unwasting fire a diadem of icicles; her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone. Close behind her, sheltering in- deed in the shadow of her more stately sisters, comes our Lady of Modesty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose face 1s only shown as the young moon shows when it is thin and sickle shaped and half hidden among clouds. Each advances towards the centre of the room where
ORLANDO Orlando still lies sleeping; and with gestures at once ap- pealing and commanding, Our Lady of Purity speaks first: f
“T am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; the snow is dear to me; and the moon rising; and the silver sea. With my robes I cover the speckled hen’s eggs and the brin- dled sea shell; I cover vice and poverty. On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare!”
“Tam she whose touch freezes and whose glance turns to stone. I have stayed the star in its dancing, and the wave as it falls. The highest Alps are my dwelling place; and when I walk, the lightnings flash in my hair; where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze him to the bone. Spare, O spare!”
Then Our Lady of Modesty speaks, so low that one can hardly hear:
“TI am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am and ever shall be. Not for me the fruitful fields and the fer- tile vineyard. Increase is odious to me; and when the apples burgeon or the flocks breed, I run, I run; I let
ORLANDO my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes. I do not see. Spare, O Spare!”
With gestures of grief and lamentation the three sisters now join hands and dance slowly, tossing their veils and singing as they go:
“Truth, come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and un- done; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear. Hide! Hide! Hide!”
as you might be able to tell, post ids are not numbers, at least not base 10 numbers. they are in base 36!
Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth:
At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over the mouths of the trumpets so as to muffle them, but in vain, for now all trumpets blare forth together.
The Sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and flinging their veils up and down.
“It has not always been so! But men want us no longer; the women detest us. We go; we go. I (Purity says this ) to the hen roost. I (Chastity says this ) to the still unravished heights of Surrey. I (Modesty says this ) to any cosy nook where there are curtains in plenty.
“For there, not here (all speak together joining hands and making gestures of farewell and despair towards the bed where Orlando lies sleeping) dwell still in nest and boudoir, office and lawcourt those who love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers and doc- tors; those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those who praise with- out understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. To them we go, you we leave. Come, Sisters come! This is no place for us here.”
They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if to shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the door behind them.
Weare, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast:—
He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but
The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world beyan, has ever looked more ravishing. His form com- bined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Mod- esty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Or- lando looked himself up and down in a long looking- glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a wom- an—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing what- ever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for “he’-— her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encounter- ing any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed;
this means that if someone has the post id #big, all posts that people wanted to make big automatically reply to it…
ORLANDO but that was all. The change seemed to have been accom- plished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself*showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since. But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit — such odious subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex; and was forced to consider her position. That it was pre- carious and embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung the bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of pertur- bation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and might indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation. First, she carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as seemed to be written in poetry,
and secreted them in her bosom; next she called her Se- leuchi hound, which had never left her bed all these days, though half famished with hunger, fed and combed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in her belt; finally wound about her person several strings of emeralds and pearls of the finest orient which had formed part of her Ambas- sadorial wardrobe. This done, she leant out of the win- dow, gave one low whistle, and descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the litter of waste paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax, etc., and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant fig|tree waited an old Gipsy on a don- key. He led another by the bridle. Orlando swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the Sultan left Constan- tinople.
They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature, in all of which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a week they reached the high ground outside Broussa which was then the chief camping ground of the gipsy tribe to which Orlando had ~ allied herself. Often she had looked at those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be
always, to a reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of having no documents to seal, or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay was enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they moved again. She washed in streams if she washed at all; no boxes, red, blue, or green were presented to her; there was nota key, let alone a golden key in the whole camp; as for ‘visiting,’ the word was unknown. She milked the goats; she col- lected brushwood; she stole a hen’s egg now and then, but always put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle; she stripped vines; she trod the grape; she filled the goat-skin and drank from it; and when she remem- bered how, at about this time of day, she should have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over an empty coffee cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed aloud, cut herself another hunch of bread, and begged for a puff from old Rustum’s pipe, filled though it was with cow dung.
The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret communication before the revolu- tion, seem to have looked upon her as one of themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay) and her dark hair and dark complexion bore out the belief that she was, by birth, one of them and had
been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree when she was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in houses because they are too feeble and dis- eased to stand the open air. Thus, though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing to help her to become more like them; taught her their arts of cheese-making and basket-weaving, their science of stealing and bird- snaring, and were even prepared to consider letting her marry among them.
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases (whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled. One eve- ning, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:
(The gipsies have no word for ‘beautiful.’ This is the nearest. )
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to sus-
ORLANDO pect that she had other beliefs than their own and the elder men and women thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruelest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh,save very briefly. There were mountains;there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. She likened the hills to ramparts, and the plains to the flanks of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin. Trees were withered hags,and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was some- thing else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when, from the mountain-top, she beheld, far off, across the Sea of Marmara the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the maj- esty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc., etc., as all such believers do. Then, looking down, the red TAs oe
wormwatch just supports youtube at the moment. commands are #play https://youtubeurl…, along with #skip, #pause, and #unpause
ORLANDO hyacinth, the purple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung herself upon her mat in the gipsies’ tent, she could not help bursting out again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say ‘good to eat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies laughed. But Rus- tum el Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando out of Constantinople on his donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed as if from the age-long descent of iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed, and as he sat tugging at his hookah he ob- served Orlando narrowly. He had the deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day, he found her in tears. Interpreting this to mean that her God had pun- ished her, he told her that he was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen. This, he said, was what her God did to men.
ORLANDO , When she said, “But so beautiful,” using the English word, he shook his head; and when she repeated it he was angry. He.saw that she did not believe what he be- lieved, and that was enough, wise and ancient as he was, to enrage him.
This difference of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been perfectly happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things them- selves, or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her to truth, which in its turn, led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days on the high mound at home) which meditations, since she could im- part no word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and ink.
“Oh! if only I could write!” she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of “The Oak Tree,” managed, by writing a kind of shorthand to de- scribe the scenery in a long, blank verse poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But the gipsies became suspicious, First, they noticed that she was less adept than before at
ORLANDO milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling her eyes upon him. Some- times this constraint would be felt by the whole tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking’s sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the old woman. They broke their withys; they cut their fingers. A great rage filled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent and never come near them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned; and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa. 146
Slowly, she began to feel that there was some differ- ence between her and the gipsies which made her hesi- tate sometimes:to marry and settle down among them for ever. At first she tried to account for it by saying that she came of an ancient and civilised race, whereas these gipsies were an ignorant people, not much better than savages. One night when they were questioning her about England she could not help with some pride de- scribing the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the possession of her family for four or five hundred years. Her ancestors were earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the gipsies were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised the beauty of nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as people of fine breeding are when a stranger has been made to reveal his low birth or poverty. Rustum followed her out of the tent alone and said that she need not mind if her father were a Duke, and possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she described. They would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she was seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years only the meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or three thousand years. To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before
ORLANDO Christ was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plan- tagenets was no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both were negligible. More- over, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such an- tiquity, there was nothing specially memorable or de- sirable in ancient birth; vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then, though he was too courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hun- dred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she understood) that any man who did now what her an- cestors had done three or four hundred years ago would be denounced—and by her own family most loudly
She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique method of finding the Gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a short time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such differences of opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happi- ness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party—for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue—But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.
“Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean noth- ing to them,” sighed Orlando.
leave the gipsies and become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writ- ing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots, nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount Athos, when mind- ing her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either played her a trick or worked a miracle—again, opinions differ too much for it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must compare the landscape to anything it would have been to a dry bone; toa sheep’s skeleton; to a gigan- tic skull picked white by a thousand vultures. The heat was intense and the little fig-tree under which Orlando lay only served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.
liveposting and wormwatch were the two main things i’ve really missed since brainworm has been gone, so they’ve been my priority. if you have any feature requests, let me know! otherwise, my next plans are working on a better identity system that will allow for a forest of invite codes so we can grow alongside moderation
Suddenly, a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping among the branches. She could see the deer
stepping delicately from shade to shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle sighs and shivers of a summer’s day in England. After she had gazed en- tranced for some time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she knew, to be sawn for fire- wood; and then there appeared the roofs and belfries and towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was only the blazing hill- side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and strid- ing back to the gipsies’ camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day.
It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had plotted her death. Honour, they said, de- manded it, for she did not think as they did. Yet they
ORLANDO would have been sorry to cut her throat; and welcomed the news of her departure. An English merchant ship, as luck would have it, was already under sail in the har- bour about to return to England; and Orlando, by break- ing off another pearl from her necklace not only paid her passage but had some banknotes left over in her wallet. These she would have liked to present to the gipsies. But they despised wealth she knew; and she had to content herself with embraces, which on her part were sincere.
ITH some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl of her string, Orlando had 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. Per- haps 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 particu- lars, 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 realised, with a start the penalties and the privileges of her posi- tion. 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
edifice of female government is based on that founda- tion stone; chastity is their jewel, their centre piece, 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 com- plicated kind, and not to be summed up in a trice. No- body, 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 moralise 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 awn- ing, ‘‘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, how- ever, 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 won-
ORLANDO dered, 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 Bar- tolus, 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’am ?”’ he asked. ‘“‘Let me cut you just the tiniest little slice the size of your finger nail.” 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 pur- sued, 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 (thank- ing 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, 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 that nothing else can. So that I’m not sure,” she continued, “that I won’t throw myself over- board, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue- jacket after all.”
medium term plan
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(It must be remembered that she was like a child, entering into possession of a pleasaunce or toycupboard; her arguments would not commend themselves to ma- ture 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- een ” she said. ““We had a word for them. Ah! I have it. . . .” (But we must omit that word; it was disre- ene 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 opin- ion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can 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 re- flected, the flowered paduasoy—the pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket—if these were only to be ob- tained 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 experi-
ence 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 hair- dressing,” she thought, “that alone will take an hour of my morning; there’s looking in the looking-glass, an- other hour; there’s staying and lacing; there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; and there’s being chaste year in WEIL OUL eo Aaers ” 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 him- self 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, realising for the first time, what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsi- bilities 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
ORLANDO 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 coro- net, 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 censur- ing 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 igno- rance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather 158
blown on the gale. Thus it is no great wonder if, as she pitted one sex against the other, and found each alter- nately 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 long boat.
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 aman, 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 in- terposition 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 war-horse, not even sentencing a man to death. “Better is it,” she thought, “‘to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark gar- ments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and dis- cipline of the world to others; better to be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly de- sires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted rap- tures known to the human spirit, which are,” she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, “‘contem- plation, solitude, love.”
“Praise God that I’m a woman!” she cried, and was about to run into the 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
ALPHA is when i only share this with people who i fully trust to only share it with people they full trust, because the moderation and account tools have been an afterthought until now. if it becomes a pain, my main course of action will just be to take the website down, so keep that in the back of your head
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 lag- gardry 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 re- vealed, 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
ORLANDO the salute. Orlando now gave a second start, even more violent than the first.
Happily, the sight of her native land after long ab- sence 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 de- lightful; to pursue and to conquer, how august; to per- ceive and to reason, how sublime.’’ Not one of these words so coupled together seemed to her wrong; never- theless, as the chalky cliffs loomed nearer, she felt cul- pable; dishonoured; unchaste; which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange. Closer and closer they drew, till the samphire gatherers, hang- ing 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, mop- ping 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 Or- lando’s sad heart, and she felt that however much land- ing there meant comfort, meant opulence, meant conse- quence 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, purs- ing 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, some- thing 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 dragon-flies 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 Cap- tain’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. “‘Green-
ORLANDO wich Hospital, erected in memory of Queen Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William the Third. West- minster 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 interest- ing, spectacle presented itself to the gaze of a returned traveller. Orlando hung over the prow, absorbed in won- der. 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 would 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 165
BETA is when i am happy to share this with people who maybe i fully trust, but i don’t fully trust them to only share it with people they fully trust. ultimately, a side goal of this project is to beautify the sphere of the internet that we live in, and to cultivate subcultural momentum and cross pollination, whatever that means. i write in the blurb on the webbed site that i want to imagine brain.worm.sh a “digital coffee house,” some sort of social space of yesteryear embedded in the city where paths cross and precipitate into aesthetic, cultural, and political revolutions, small and big. probably that’s too big a goal but i will not not kill the part of me that is cringe, i will kill the part of me that cringes
ORLANDO crew of terror-stricken wretches on top, floated a covey of swans, 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 win- dows, whose plate glass, whose polished knockers, testi- fied 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 swing- ing 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 Bar- tolus, 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.
“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 tem- pestuous 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
*The Captain must have been mistaken, as a reference to any textbook of [iterature will show; but the mistake was a kindly one, and so we let it
more severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was made aware of 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 ab- sence, 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 mar- ried 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 judg- ment, 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
ORLANDO Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a house, brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimfeys 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 mead- ows. 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 court- yard 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 be- fore 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 emo- tion 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 169
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, bayjmg 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 Nere was in the human mind the action of the deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dum 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.
FULL RELEASE is when i am happy to share this with anyone and everyone. i don’t think i will live to see FULL RELEASE. it’s a horizon that recedes as i approach it. and that’s ok to me :)
ORLANDO 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 moon- light 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 pot pourri, which was made as the Con- queror 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
ORLANDO 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 pas- sions 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 prayer book, 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 to- bacco, 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 contempla- tion as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circum- stances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the
ORLANDO 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 re- flected upon her sins and the imperfections thathad 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 pres- ent 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 con- cluded, 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 in 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 phi- lanthropists in the world. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our mes- sage less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine. Thus it is obvious that she was back in the confines of her own religion which time had only
ORLANDO strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief.
“T 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 sanc- tity 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 mod- ern upstart, and that they had made it by acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other up- start 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 pov- erty, 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. “Iam losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,” and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, anda 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 to 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 doc- tor 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 age-long in coming, a spirit capable of re- sistance. ‘“‘I will write,” she had said, “what I enjoy writ- ing”; 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,
nevertheless, as the eternal BETA drags on, I think it’s nice to share the community more and more broadly with interesting people. I hate the “may you live in interesting times” cliche, at least applied to this moment, because we don’t live in interesting times. when marx remarked somewhere that all world-historical facts occured the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, he forgot to add: the third time as farce, the fourth time as farce, the fifth time… i think we live in extremely boring times masquerading as interesting
ORLANDO 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 unlatch- ing 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 com- pounded,” she said (thinking of Queen Mary’s prayer book). ““What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meet- ing-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 be- wildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for explanation and imprint their message without leav- ing any hint as to their meaning upon the mind, she 176
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 writ- ing 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 indignantat it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused it) over- come with merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadow of no lessa 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 re-
sembled, 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 ex- changing 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 aman.
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, Or-
“La!” she cried, putting her hand to her side, “chow you frighten me!”
ORLANDO one knee and at the same time pressing a cordial to Or- lando’s lips, “forgive me for the deceit I have practised on you!”
Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.
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 por- trait 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 in- tolerably). 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 persua- sive 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.”
i desperately believe in something new, and i want to pour what i can into 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 prom- ise 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 apologised. 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
ORLANDO 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 had shot in Norway; and Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would say he had shot an albatross, and Or- Jando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an alba- tross 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 Or- lando 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 sup- posed; 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 181
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 blue bottle 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 it 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 morn- ings 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 cf 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 toa 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
assorted afterthoughts
you might see the domain is brain.worm.sh
ORLANDO Archduke, with all his knowledge of sport and horse- racing 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 asa living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and he paid her over £17,250 (which is about £40,885 :6:8 of our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he could be deceived no longer. When he realised 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 de- ceived him was something—it hurt him to think her capable of it; but that she had cheated at Loo was every- thing. To love a woman who cheated at play was, he said, impossible. Here he broke down completely. Hap- pily, 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 183
ORLANDO 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 in- finitely 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.
“T 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 Arch- duke’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
ORLANDO going from her, anda lover. “Life anda lover,” she mur- mured; 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. Read- ing 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 slip- pers, 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 foun- tain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass —this smile she smiled and then she listened for a mo- ment and heard only the leaves blowing and the spar- rows twittering, and then she sighed, “Life, a lover,” and then she turned on her heei with extraordinary ra- pidity; whipped her pearls from her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect in her 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 sum- moned by urgent affairs to London. Within an hour of the Archduke’s departure, off she drove.
what is sh? and what is worm.sh?
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 par- ticularly than we could at the moment to one or two re- marks which have slipped in here and there in the course
ORLANDO 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 start- ing 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 seem 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 phi- | losophers 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 an- other 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 flat-
tered 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 Or- lando, which is to be found even in her face. If we com- pare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Or- lando as a woman we shall see that though both are un- doubtedly 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 too.
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 toa dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they inter- mix. 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 every one has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the par- ticular 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 how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and some- times 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 down hill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. For her coach was now rattling over 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 Blackfriar’s 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 dif- ficulty 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 Or- lando!”” 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 law suit. 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 dis- tress 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 imagin- able. Was it impossible then to go for a walk without
sh is just a common file extension for shell script, simple computer programs. however, i like the interpretation of sh as shushing your brainworms. we all have various brainworms, and they’re ok, and it’s ok to vent at times, but please be chill, ok… under no circumstances is brain.worm.sh to turn into brain worm self-harm. i absolutely detest writing up rules, the only rule i’ve ever encountered which i liked, which i intend to steal for brain.worm.sh, is rule 1) “if you make me add rules i’m deleting the website.” while at some point in BETA i’m ok with trying to rot some of the tttt x r/4tran fandom into normal cool individuals, even if they’re not right-wing, i think active users of those spaces who are like into that whole shtick are not exactly good first users. keep in mind every user colors the first impression of every future user… thus the initial community deeply affects the culture
being half suffocated, presented with a toad set in emer- alds, and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She took a kinder view of the case next day when she found on her breakfast table half a dozen billets from some of the greatest ladies in the land — Lady Suffolk, Lady Salis- bury, Lady Chesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her in the politest manner of old alliances be- tween 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 truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma—a mirage. To make our mean- ing plain—Orlando would 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,
ORLANDO stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could per- suade 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 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. Noth- ing 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 house- keepers 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 in- sipid. 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 intoxi- cation, 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 con- coction in the world and society has no existence what- soever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone ‘tan 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 enter- ing 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 absent mindedness about her which some- times made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk
ORLANDO 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 counter- balance the splendour of her bearing, or whether she in- herited 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 any- body 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, burst- ing into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is after all of some importance in its way, escaped her. “Ts this,’ she asked—but there was none to answer, “‘is this what people call life?’ The spaniel raised her fore-_ paw 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 de- nied 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 arti- fices 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 intoxi- cation to disgust we will only seek to explain by sup- posing 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 over night 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 poison of three honeyed words dropped into her ear on the deck of the Enamoured Lady by Captain Nicholas Benedict Barto- lus as they sailed down the Thames. Addison, Dryden, ~ Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa Tree, and Ad- dison, 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, sol- diers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of
also, i should say quickly about the brain.worm side of the domain: it’s totally cool for non-trans or even non LGBTQ people to use the site! everyone has brainworms
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 the poets 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 dis- believed 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 him- self 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 en- tered 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
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 isa curious characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that the world has known. Old Ma- dame 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. Itis 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 pro- fundity 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 con- versation 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 desola- tion followed. Not a word was uttered. “Spare us an- other such, for Heaven’s sake, Madame!”’ her friends cried with one accord. And she obeyed. For almost sey- enteen 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 de- lightful than one of Lady R.’s assemblies; everyone envied those who were admitted; those who were ad- mitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and so there seemed no end to it—except that which we have now to relate.
ORLANDO tain 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. inter- rupted when any proper name was mentioned, “R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dear- est friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in York- shire’ —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 disagree- able 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. 201
ORLANDO rapped with hers upon the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.
Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity. The company was thrown into com- plete 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
worm.sh is a project by a friend of mine. i haven’t worked on it, and she hasn’t worked on cerebrovore, so far. we plan on eventually sharing a backend identity system. the idea of worm.sh is to have more of a discord-like experience, i believe, with possibly some e2ee liveposting. encryption… exciting…. (since there’s like a client - server irc style model for lrc, what cerebrovore runs on, it’s not totally trivial to do e2ee, unless you want to either leak metadata or allow editing other user’s posts)
*These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all to be found in his published works.
strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon the luck- less Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that in- flicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It isa moment fraught with the high- est 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 will- ingly, 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 itis 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 improve- ment upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the be- nighted 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 rootled 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 be- tween lay a considerable stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes Orlando and Mr. Pope would be in black- ness; 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
ORLANDO 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 con- cern 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 ona 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 apostrophising the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realised her mistake. Mr. Pope had a forehead no bigger than another man’s. Wretched man,” she thought, “chow you have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you plain, how ignoble, 205
ORLANDO 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 pro- tect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten the savage, make me clothes of the silk worm’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, there- fore? 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
ORLANDO light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.”
my code for this site is mostly at cerebrovore repository, but i use some other code that i’ve written in the past year in a few other libraries. you can get most of the story from my github, i also have a tangled (atproto github) for my handle there, @moth11.net
All this time, of course, they went on talking agree- ably, 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 Hay- market, 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 every- thing 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 per- haps 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
ORLANDO 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 disappoint- ing, that this should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of genius, yet after all they were not much different from other people. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored grottoes. 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
ORLANDO Rape of the Lock, to the S pectator, 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 suf- fered. In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every ex- perience 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 line 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.
mobile site is an immense afterthought. honestly at the time of writing this, i’ve not looked at it, except making firefox skinnyyyy. forgive me. for my liveposting atproto application xcvr, i was developing a mobile (ios only…) app this fall. you can’t find the code for that online, but it’ll probably be under a month to adapt to cerebrovore. if there’s demand, i’ll totally work on that after coming up with an invite code system
ORLANDO In came Mr. Addison. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the following passage from the Spectator.
“T 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 embel- lishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the pet- ticoat 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 Gulli- ver’s Travels? Here itis! Let us read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
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 pro- cure 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, House-breakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buf- foons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Aakers:
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 some- times 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 din- ner, 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 com- modity.) 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 atten- tion. And yet—let us finish her thought for her-—when
ORLANDO anybody says ““How future ages will envy me,” it is safe to say that they are extremely uneasy at the present mo- ment. 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 whis- pered 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 al- 213
i also have a TUI client for contemporary LRC called TTY!xcvr (talk to you! transceiver). it is not yet adapted for use in cerebrovore, but i’ll add to it this weekend, maybe. i might extend it into a full client for cerebrovore, but the main issue here is: i love the name of it apropos xcvr, and talk to you! cerebrovore just doesn’t have the same punch T_T
ORLANDO ways 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 re- spects 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 wil- low 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 fash- ion, 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 pet- ticoats 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 archi- tecture of Mr. Wren. Everything appeared in its ten- derest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of disso- lution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (in- dulging 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 inter-
ORLANDO course 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 obser- vations. 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 desola- tion. 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 girl 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 com- mon 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 be- come 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 nota 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 else- where. When all was ready, out she came, prepared— but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the strang- est 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 remark- able 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 Or- lando’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 some- thing 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 gener- ously, and many were the fine tales they told and many the amusing observations they made for it cannot be de- nied 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 de- sires, 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
ORLANDO 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 ?
i think that’s all
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 Or- lando’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. What makes the task of identification still more difficult is that she found it convenient at this time to change frequently from one set of clothes to another. Thus she often occurs in con- temporary 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. From the probity of breeches she turned to 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 Rich- mond and a proposal of marriage from some great noble- man; and so back again to town, where she would don a snuft-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 consum- mation 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 cap-
tain, was seen to dance naked ona balcony, and fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady’s hus- band 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 hear- ing 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 pout- ing 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 arm-chair—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 occa- sion 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 rolling shadow, who now rose to its full height and rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent phrases that have 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 look- ing 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
ORLANDO extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every rool, the cowl of every chimney was perceptible. Even the cobbles in the streets showed distinct one from an- other; 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 conglom- eration 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 ruftians, men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels Hashing 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 tor- 224
rotPolitics now!
ORS Ae NEDO tuous 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 ona frosty morn- _ ing.” 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 stroke 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, 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 cov- 225
ORLANDO ered the city. All was dark; all was doubt; all was con- fusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.
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 dis- coloured 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 can- opy 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 and trousers fastened tight under the instep. The chill which-he felt in his legs he soon transferred to his house; furniture was mufHled; walls and tables were cov- ered too. Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee sup- planted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a draw- ing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and ar- tificial 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 antimacassars, the home—which had become extremely important—was completely altered.
Outside the house—it was another effect of the damp —1vy grew in unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. No gar- den, however formal its original design, lacked a shrub- bery, 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 fur- ther apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Eva- sions 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 suc- cession 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—sen- tences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics,
ORLANDO and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Euse- bius 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 mem- oirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one morning ‘all about nothing’ he screwed the lid on his inkpot and went for a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery. In- numerable 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 vege- table 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 spe- cial tint. Then, remembering with a sigh his own fe- cundity 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 230
or summer, year in year out, the clouds turned and tum- bled, 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 buta 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’ Park in her old pan- elled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occa- sionally, though not often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was sufh- ciently 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
ORLANDO was insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dol- phins 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 con- glomeration 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, mil- itary helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, ex- tinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants and mathemat- ical-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 wear- ing a frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers. The incongru- ity 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 232
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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 demol- ish 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 wear- ing 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
ORLANDO mew (who had succeeded good old Grimsditch as house- keeper) 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 pro- fusely that many windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely tell a kettle from acullender. 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, hug- ging 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 (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 mod- est woman did her best to deny until denial was impos-
ORLANDO sible; the fact that she was about to bear a child? to bear fifteen or twenty children indeed, so that most of a mod- est woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, on one day at least 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 mufhns is keepin’ ’ot in the liberry”— Orlando minced out the horrid Cockney phrase in Mrs. Bartholo- mew’s refined Cockney accents as she drank—but not, 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. To-morrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a
buy acrinoline, and then (here she blushed) a bassinette, and then another crinoline,andsoon. . . . The blushes came and went with the most exquisite iteration of mod- esty 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 am- biguous 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 sta- bility and it seemed as if the spirit of the age—if such in- deed 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 car- ried 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 con- scientiously 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 on three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. And so she began 236
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 the 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, with, I dare say, the same carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth, but what differ- a ty ohare
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 house- keeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflec- tion 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 say- ing; no words came. Next she tried 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 “‘Im- possible” 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:
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— 238
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
but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over 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
bility 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 deal- ing with some of the darkest manifestations of the hu- man soul) to say No, that is not enough; and, further, to : assume a note of interrogation, as though they were ask- ing, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange over- sight? till poor Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand without in the least know- ing 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 second finger where her own was bare.