is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was
drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner -
such as it was - was set on a dressing-table where the children had been
making mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing, here
he could write, and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord
at home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country - his new poem was to have
some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was
tickling the cat's ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for
inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then. It was so
done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted
was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and
follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of
rolling his r's, were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt
about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any
disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules,
which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid the
expenses of Mrs Greene's tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take
care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did
with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman;
delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop
it in the filthiest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when
the man was turning to go he stopped him, "Take the swiftest horse in the
stable," he said, "ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship
which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King's own kennels
the finest elk-hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back
without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to
his books, "I have done with men."
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and
disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efficiently that he was back that day
three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk-hounds, one of
whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner-table to a
litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando had them brought to his bedchamber.
"For," he said, "I have done with men."
Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.
Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not
only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the
worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all
equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit
to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven
poetical works, only retaining "The Oak Tree", which was his boyish dream
and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any
trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its
variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush
were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and
very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through
the Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half
forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he
reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of
Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his
favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or
woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of
speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what
years remained to him in tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns
unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw - but probably the
reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and
plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons
rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night
succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine
weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years
or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can
sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might
have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed"
(here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever
happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom
and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind
of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the
body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human
spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on
the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of
the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the
clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves
fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have
said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when
a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is
thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes
inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his
vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the
oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they
would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest
variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems
which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship?
What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which
seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second,
swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and
filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent
months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he
would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man
of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no
more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the
length of human life (of the animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our
capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it
is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces
which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment,
dominate our unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was
sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the
gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it
went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments
swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity,
there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those scored
parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his
heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree
had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the
process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by
Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled -
What is Love? - back it would come at the least provocation or none, and
hustle Books or Metaphors of What one lives for into the margin, there to
wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the
process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with
pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in
rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted
sword by her side, but with scents - she was strongly perfumed - and with
sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter's day. And so,
the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log
fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with
old King James' slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds
of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge
it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like
the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown
about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned
women.
"Another metaphor by Jupiter!" he would exclaim as he said this (which
will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and
explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any
conclusion about Love). "And what's the point of it?" he would ask himself.
"Why not say simply in so many words?" and then he would try to think for
half an hour, - or was it two years and a half? - how to say simply in so
many words what love is. "A figure like that is manifestly untruthful," he
argued, "for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances,
could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and
Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all," he cried, "why say
Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means
and leave it?"
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so
to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great
distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the
grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like
the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the
grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of
hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had
fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more
true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able
to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a
deep dejection.
And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd
it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to
reflect that this fine fellow with all his faculties about him and a healthy
body, witness cheeks and limbs - a man who never thought twice about heading
a charge or fighting a duel - should be so subject to the lethargy of
thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question
of poetry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl
behind her mother's cottage door. In our belief, Greene's ridicule of his
tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess' ridicule of his love. But to
return:
Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky
and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in
London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile (whose habits have already
been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as
if that sardonic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself,
were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So
Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain,
others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and
muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our
time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold)
Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound
him to a servitude than which none is stricter. "I'll be blasted," he said,
"if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick
Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day
forward, to please myself"; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole
budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering
loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at
him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted
for it - nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to
think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one rending,
the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own favour
in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints
Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age,
conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave
among laurels and the intangible banners of a people's reverence
perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the
dustbin. "Fame," he said. "is like" (and since there was no Nick Greene to
stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or
two of the quietest) "a braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of
silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,"
etc. etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and
constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark,
ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the
obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where
he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he
alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood,
under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground,
seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity,
and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to
the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of
envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of
generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks
offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he
supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out),
for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church
builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but
only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night? "What an
admirable life this is," he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak
tree. "And why not enjoy it this very moment?" The thought struck him like a
bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected
love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the
nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no
longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had
been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in
the hollow beneath him, his house.
There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather
than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this man wished
or that, but circumspectly, by a single architect with one idea in his head.
Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical;
the courts were some of them oblong and some square; in this was a fountain;
in that a statue; the buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here
was a chapel, there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between
and clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright flowers; all were clasped - yet
so well set out was it that it seemed that every part had room to spread
itself fittingly - by the roll of a massive wall; while smoke from
innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air. This vast, yet ordered
building, which could house a thousand men and perhaps two thousand horses,
was built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown. Here have
lived, for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my
own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths has
left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their
spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have
left this.
Never had the house looked more noble and humane.
Why, then, had he wished to raise himself above them? For it seemed
vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anonymous work of
creation; the labours of those vanished hands. Better was it to go unknown
and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen,
than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust. For after all, he said,
kindling as he looked at the great house on the greensward below, the
unknown lords and ladies who lived there never forgot to set aside something
for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that
will fall. There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the
kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their goblets were polished,
though they lay sick, and their windows were lit though they lay dying.
Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the
molecatcher and the stone-mason. Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders - thus
he apostrophized them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as
called him cold, indifferent, slothful (the truth being that a quality often
lies just on the other side of the wall from where we seek it) - thus he
apostrophized his house and race in terms of the most moving eloquence; but
when it came to the peroration - and what is eloquence that lacks a
peroration? - he fumbled. He would have liked to have ended with a flourish
to the effect that he would follow in their footsteps and add another stone
to their building. Since, however, the building already covered nine acres,
to add even a single stone seemed superfluous. Could one mention furniture
in a peroration? Could one speak of chairs and tables and mats to lie beside
people's beds? For whatever the peroration wanted, that was what the house
stood in need of. Leaving his speech unfinished for the moment, he strode
down hill again resolved henceforward to devote himself to the furnishing of
the mansion. The news - that she was to attend him instantly - brought tears
to the eyes of good old Mrs Grimsditch, now grown somewhat old. Together
they perambulated the house.
The towel horse in the King's bedroom ("and that was King Jamie, my
Lord," she said, hinting that it was many a day since a King had slept under
their roof; but the odious Parliament days were over and there was now a
Crown in England again) lacked a leg; there were no stands to the ewers in
the little closet leading into the waiting room of the Duchess's page; Mr
Greene had made a stain on the carpet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she
and Judy, for all their scrubbing, had never been able to wash out. Indeed,
when Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood chairs
and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian
carpets, every one of the three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms which the
house contained, he saw that it would be no light one; and if some thousands
of pounds of his estate remained over, these would do little more than hang
a few galleries with tapestry, set the dining hall with fine, carved chairs
and provide mirrors of solid silver and chairs of the same metal (for which
he had an inordinate passion) for the furnishing of the royal bedchambers.
He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove beyond a doubt if we
look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he bought at this
time, with the expenses totted up in the margin - but these we omit.
"To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and
white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson
and white silk...
"To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their
buckram covers to them all...
"To sixty seven walnut tree tables...
"To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice
glasses...
"To one hundred and two mats, each thirty yards long...
"To ninety seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchment
lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs suitable...
"To fifty branches for a dozen lights apiece..."
Already - it is an effect lists have upon us - we are beginning to
yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it
is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it and the total sum
disbursed ran into many thousands - that is to say millions of our money.
And if his day was spent like this, at night again, Lord Orlando might be
found reckoning out what it would cost to level a million molehills, if the
men were paid tenpence an hour; and again, how many hundredweight of nails
at fivepence halfpenny a gill were needed to repair the fence round the
park, which was fifteen miles in circumference. And so on and so on.
The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another,
and one molehill not much different from a million. Some pleasant journeys
it cost him; and some fine adventures. As, for instance, when he set a whole
city of blind women near Bruges to stitch hangings for a silver canopied
bed; and the story of his adventure with a Moor in Venice of whom he bought
(but only at the sword's point) his lacquered cabinet, might, in other
hands, prove worth the telling. Nor did the work lack variety; for here
would come, drawn by teams from Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across and
laid along the gallery for flooring; and then a chest from Persia, stuffed
with wool and sawdust. from which, at last, he would take a single plate, or
one topaz ring.
At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another
table; no room on te tables for another cabinet; no room in the cabinet for
another rose-bowl; no room in the bowl for another handful of potpourri;
there was no room for anything anywhere; in short the house was furnished.
In the garden snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses, lilies,
asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, pear trees and apple trees and
cherry trees and mulberry trees, with an enormous quantity of rare and
flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each
other's roots that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no
stretch of sward without its shade. In addition, he had imported wild fowl
with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose manners
concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts.
All now was ready; and when it was evening and the innumerable silver
sconces were lit and the light airs which for ever moved about the galleries
stirred the blue and green arras, so that it looked as if the huntsmen were
riding and Daphne flying; when the silver shone and lacquer glowed and wood
kindled; when the carved chairs held their arms out and dolphins swam upon
the walls with mermaids on their backs; when all this and much more than all
this was complete and to his liking, Orlando walked through the house with
his elk-hounds following and felt content. He had matter now, he thought, to
fill out his peroration. Perhaps it would be well to begin the speech all
over again. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt that still something
was lacking. Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas,
resting on lions' paws with swans' necks curving under them, beds even of
the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them,
people lying in them improve them amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now began a
series of very splendid entertainments to the nobility and gentry of the
neighbourhood. The three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms were full for a
month at a time. Guests jostled each other on the fifty-two staircases.
Three hundred servants bustled about the pantries. Banquets took place
almost nightly. Thus, in a very few years, Orlando had worn the nap off his
velvet, and spent the half of his fortune; but he had earned the good
opinion of his neighbours, held a score of offices in the county, and was
annually presented with perhaps a dozen volumes dedicated to his Lordship in
rather fulsome terms by grateful poets. For though he was careful not to
consort with writers at that time and kept himself always aloof from ladies
of foreign blood, still, he was excessively generous both to women and to
poets, and both adored him.
But when the feasting was at its height and his guests were at their
revels, he was apt to take himself off to his private room alone. There when
the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he would have out an old
writing book, stitched together with silk stolen from his mother's workbox,
and labelled in a round schoolboy hand, "The Oak Tree, A Poem". In this he
would write till midnight chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as
many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the
year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process
of writing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the
historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His
floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was
congealing those warm fountains. The very landscape outside was less stuck
about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and
intricate. Perhaps the senses were a little duller and honey and cream less
seductive to the palate. Also that the streets were better drained and the
houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.
One day he was adding a line or two with enormous labour to "The Oak
Tree, A Poem", when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was no shadow,
he soon saw, but the figure of a very tall lady in riding hood and mantle
crossing the quadrangle on which his room looked out. As this was the most
private of the courts, and the lady was a stranger to him, Orlando marvelled
how she had got there. Three days later the same apparition appeared again;
and on Wednesday noon appeared once more. This time, Orlando was determined
to follow her, nor apparently was she afraid to be found, for she slackened
her steps as he came up and looked him full in the face. Any other woman
thus caught in a Lord's private grounds would have been afraid; any other
woman with that face, head-dress, and aspect would have thrown her mantilla
across her shoulders to hide it. For this lady resembled nothing so much as
a hare; a hare startled, but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is overcome by
an immense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers at its
pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering, with nose
pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was six feet high and wore a
head-dress into the bargain of some antiquated kind which made her look
still taller. Thus confronted, she stared at Orlando with a stare in which
timidity and audacity were most strangely combined.
First, she asked him, with a proper, but somewhat clumsy curtsey, to
forgive her her intrusion. Then, rising to her full height again, which must
have been something over six feet two, she went on to say - but with such a
cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando
thought she must have escaped from a lunatic asylum - that she was the
Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the
Roumanian territory. She desired above all things to make his acquaintance,
she said. She had taken lodging over a baker's shop at the Park Gates. She
had seen his picture and it was the image of a sister of hers who was - here
she guffawed - long since dead. She was visiting the English court. The
Queen was her Cousin. The King was a very good fellow but seldom went to bed
sober. Here she tee-heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing
for it but to ask her in and give her a glass of wine.
Indoors, her manners regained the hauteur natural to a Roumanian
Archduchess; and had she not shown a knowledge of wines rare in a lady, and
made some observations upon firearms and the customs of sportsmen in her
country, which were sensible enough, the talk would have lacked spontaneity.
Jumping to her feet at last, she announced that she would call the following
day, swept another prodigious curtsey and departed. The following day,
Orlando rode out. The next, he turned his back; on the third he drew his
curtain. On the fourth it rained, and as he could not keep a lady in the
wet, nor was altogether averse to company, he invited her in and asked her
opinion whether a suit of armour, which belonged to an ancestor of his, was
the work of Jacobi or of Topp. He inclined to Topp. She held another opinion
- it matters very little which. But it is of some importance to the course
of our story that, in illustrating her argument, which had to do with the
working of the tie pieces, the Archduchess Harriet took the golden shin case
and fitted it to Orlando's leg.
That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever
stood upright upon has already been said.
Perhaps something in the way she fastened the ankle buckle; or her
stooping posture; or Orlando's long seclusion; or the natural sympathy which
is between the sexes; or the Burgundy; or the fire - any of these causes may
have been to blame; for certainly blame there is on one side or another,
when a Nobleman of Orlando's breeding, entertaining a lady in his house, and
she his elder by many years, with a face a yard long and staring eyes,
dressed somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the
season was warm - blame there is when such a Nobleman is so suddenly and
violently overcome by passion of some sort that he has to leave the room.
But what sort of passion, it may well be asked, could this be? And the
answer is double faced as Love herself. For Love - but leaving Love out of
the argument for a moment, the actual event was this:
When the Archduchess Harriet Griselda stooped to fasten the buckle,
Orlando heard, suddenly and unaccountably, far off the beating of Love's
wings. The distant stir of that soft plumage roused in him a thousand
memories of rushing waters, of loveliness in the snow and faithlessness in
the flood; and the sound came nearer; and he blushed and trembled; and he
was moved as he had thought never to be moved again; and he was ready to
raise his hands and let the bird of beauty alight upon his shoulders, when -
horror! - a creaking sound like that the crows make tumbling over the trees
began to reverberate; the air seemed dark with coarse black wings; voices
croaked; bits of straw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and there pitched down
upon his shoulders the heaviest and foulest of the birds; which is the
vulture. Thus he rushed from the room and sent the footman to see the
Archduchess Harriet to her carriage.
For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the
other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two
feet, two nails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact
opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you
cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando's love began her flight towards
him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards.
Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a
sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about,
turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was
Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise, that flopped, foully and
disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the
footman.
But the harpy is not so easily banished as all that. Not only did the
Archduchess continue to lodge at the Baker's, but Orlando was haunted every
day and night by phantoms of the foulest kind. Vainly, it seemed, had he
furnished his house with silver and hung the walls with arras, when at any
moment a dung-bedraggled fowl could settle upon his writing table. There she
was, flopping about among the chairs; he saw her waddling ungracefully
across the galleries. Now, she perched, top heavy upon a fire screen. When
he chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke it.
Thus realizing that his home was uninhabitable, and that steps must be
taken to end the matter instantly, he did what any other young man would
have done in his place, and asked King Charles to send him as Ambassador
Extraordinary to Constantinople. The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell
Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. 'Twas a thousand
pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the
country.
Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss
over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.
CHAPTER 3.
It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at
this stage of Orlando's career, when he played a most important part in the
public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. We know
that he discharged his duties to admiration - witness his Bath and his
Dukedom. We know that he had a finger in some of the most delicate
negotiations between King Charles and the Turks - to that, treaties in the
vault of the Record Office bear testimony. But the revolution which broke
out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so
damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record
could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the
paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important
sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled
historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big
enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a
meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been
necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination.
Orlando's day was passed, it would seem, somewhat in this fashion.
About seven, he would rise, wrap himself in a long Turkish cloak, light a
cheroot, and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he would stand, gazing at
the city beneath him, apparently entranced. At this hour the mist would lie
so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat;
gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be
firmly fixed; there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge; there the
green-turbaned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the
pariah dogs picking up offal; there the shawled women; there the innumerable
donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles. Soon, the whole town would
be astir with the cracking of whips, the beating of gongs, cryings to
prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of brass-bound wheels, while sour
odours, made from bread fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the
heights of Pera itself and seemed the very breath of the strident
multi-coloured and barbaric population.
Nothing, he reflected, gazing at the view which was now sparkling in
the sun, could well be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the
towns of London and Tunbridge Wells. To the right and left rose in bald and
stony prominence the inhospitable Asian mountains, to which the arid castle
of a robber chief or two might hang; but parsonage there was none, nor manor
house, nor cottage, nor oak, elm, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine. There were
no hedges for ferns to grow on, and no fields for sheep to graze. The houses
were white as egg-shells and as bald. That he, who was English root and
fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama,
and gaze and gaze at those passes and far heights planning journeys there
alone on foot where only the goat and shepherd had gone before; should feel
a passion of affection for the bright, unseasonable flowers, love the
unkempt pariah dogs beyond even his elk hounds at home, and snuff the acrid,
sharp smell of the streets eagerly into his nostrils, surprised him. He
wondered if, in the season of the Crusades, one of his ancestors had taken
up with a Circassian peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain
darkness in his complexion; and, going indoors again, withdrew to his bath.
An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed, he would receive
visits from secretaries and other high officials carrying, one after
another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key. Within were
papers of the highest importance, of which only fragments, here a flourish,
there a seal firmly attached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain. Of their
contents then, we cannot speak, but can only testify that Orlando was kept
busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to
be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes
round capital letters, till luncheon came - a splendid meal of perhaps
thirty courses.
After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the
door, and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries running on foot and waving
great ostrich feather fans above their heads, to call upon the other
ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony was always the same. On
reaching the courtyard, the Janissaries struck with their fans upon the main
portal, which immediately flew open revealing a large chamber, splendidly
furnished. Here were seated two figures, generally of the opposite sexes.
Profound bows and curtseys were exchanged. In the first room, it was
permissible only to mention the weather. Having said that it was fine or
wet, hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber, where
again, two figures rose to greet him. Here it was only permissible to
compare Constantinople as a place of residence with London; and the
Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constantinople, and his hosts
naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London. In
the next chamber, King Charles's and the Sultan's healths had to be
discussed at some length. In the next were discussed the Ambassador's health
and that of his host's wife, but more briefly. In the next the Ambassador
complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host complimented the
Ambassador upon his dress. In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host
deploring their badness, the Ambassador extolling their goodness. The
ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drinking of a
glass of coffee; but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone
through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in
the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would
have sunk beneath the