Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent. There
was the ink pot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her poem,
broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about to
say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing
changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything
had changed--she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married
Shelmerdine.

There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that
she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had
proved worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with
superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint
of her finger.

'The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand',
she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, 'for it to be of
any use at all.'

She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as if
she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her.
Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able to collect her
thoughts, the effect that her behaviour would have had upon the spirit of
the age. She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she
had taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying
him met with its approval. She was certainly feeling more herself. Her
finger had not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the
moor. Yet, she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married,
true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it
marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people,
was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in
the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at
the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could
not. What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt
better in her life.

'Hang it all!' she cried, with a touch of her old spirit. 'Here goes!'

And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise,
there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not
dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come
they did. Ah! but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over
her lest the pen might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again.
She read,

And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls:--

As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with the most
obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder,
and when she had written 'Egyptian girls', the power told her to stop.
Grass, the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as
governesses use to the beginning, is all right; the hanging cups of
fritillaries--admirable; the snaky flower--a thought, strong from a
lady's pen, perhaps, but Wordsworth no doubt, sanctions it; but--girls?
Are girls necessary? You have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well,
that'll do.
And so the spirit passed on.

Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a
deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as--to compare great things
with small--a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the
corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obligingly
made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful
whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully,
it would not have found something highly contraband for which she would
have had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her
teeth. She had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of
the age, by putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving
nature and being no satirist, cynic, or psychologist--any one of which
goods would have been discovered at once--to pass its examination
successfully. And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she
might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is
one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the
whole fortune of his works depends. Orlando had so ordered it that she
was in an extremely happy position; she need neither fight her age, nor
submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she
could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote.

It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January,
February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August
follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back
at November again, with a whole year accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little
bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may complain that he
could recite the calendar for himself and so save his pocket whatever sum
the Hogarth Press may think proper to charge for this book. But what can
the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into
which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose
opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or
biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever
to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as
the poles asunder. Therefore--since sitting in a chair and thinking is
precisely what Orlando is doing now--there is nothing for it but to
recite the calendar, tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire,
look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you
could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That
would have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through
the window and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or
suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out
with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood
of a wasp. Where there is blood there is life. And if killing a wasp is
the merest trifle compared with killing a man, still it is a fitter
subject for novelist or biographer than this mere wool-gathering; this
thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a
sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects, we might
complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration for
their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on
whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's
grasp altogether and indulging--witness her sighs and gasps, her
flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as
dawns--what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion
and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes
it--thought and imagination--are of no importance whatsoever?

But Orlando was a woman--Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we
are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand
for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is
woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing
at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for
that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a
woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of
writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as
long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And
then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little
notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation
for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will
whistle under the window--all of which is, of course, the very stuff of
life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have
done one of these things? Alas,--a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none
of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters
of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends,
generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry.
But love--as the male novelists define it--and who, after all, speak with
greater authority?--has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity,
generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and--But we
all know what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no,
she did not. If then, the subject of one's biography will neither love
nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she
is no better than a corpse and so leave her.

The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were
sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or
two rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a
snail. One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf.
Then a servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron.
Presumably he is engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the
pantry, but as no visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can
but hope for the best and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some
disturbance of the colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers
the hour in its usual cryptic way. One's mind begins tossing up a
question or two, idly, vainly, about this same life. Life, it sings, or
croons rather, like a kettle on a hob. Life, life, what art thou? Light
or darkness, the baize apron of the under-footman or the shadow of the
starling on the grass?

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the
plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the
starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on
the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of
scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what
we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions
indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of
writers when they don't know what to say next. Then they come here, says
the bird, and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life!

We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue
purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see
there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And
he says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender)
Life's labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet.
And the ant agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask
the moths, when they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather
bells, they will breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from
telegraph wires in snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the
moths say.

Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell
us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak,
never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is--having asked them all
and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once
in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear
it was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the
reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is--alas, we don't know.

At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction,
Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came
to the window, and exclaimed, 'Done!'

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now
met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on
as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

'And if I were dead, it would be just the same!' she exclaimed.

Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that
she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually
attacked her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent
spectacle with staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way.
The manuscript which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating
as if it were a living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how
fine a sympathy was between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could
make out what it was that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be
read. It would die in her bosom if it were not read. For the first time
in her life she turned with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose
bushes were about her in profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can
none of them read. It is a lamentable oversight on the part of Providence
which had never struck her before. Human beings alone are thus gifted.
Human beings had become necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the
carriage to take her to London at once.

'There's just time to catch the eleven forty five, M'Lady,' said Basket.
Orlando had not yet realized the invention of the steam engine, but such
was her absorption in the sufferings of a being, who, though not herself,
yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for the first
time, took her seat in a railway carriage, and had the rug arranged about
her knees without giving a thought to 'that stupendous invention, which
had (the historians say) completely changed the face of Europe in the
past twenty years' (as, indeed, happens much more frequently than
historians suppose). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty;
rattled horribly; and the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled
up to London in something less than an hour and stood on the platform at
Charing Cross, not knowing where to go.

The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days
in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part
to an umbrella factory. She had bought another in Mayfair which was
sanitary, convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was
it in Mayfair that her poem would be relieved of its desire? Pray God,
she thought, remembering the brightness of their ladyships' eyes and the
symmetry of their lordship's legs, they haven't taken to reading there.
For that would be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.'s. The same
sort of talk would be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout
might have shifted from the General's left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr
L. might have stayed ten days with R. instead of T. Then Mr Pope would
come in. Oh! but Mr Pope was dead. Who were the wits now, she
wondered--but that was not a question one could put to a porter, and so
she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by the jingling of innumerable
bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets of the strangest little
boxes on wheels were drawn up by the pavement. She walked out into the
Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all sizes, drawn by
blood horses and by dray horses, conveying one solitary dowager or
crowded to the top by whiskered men in silk hats, were inextricably
mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so long used
to the look of a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at loggerheads; and
to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the street
sounded violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the pavement
was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their own
bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility,
poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood
men, holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside
great baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of
the horses' noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too,
Disaster! Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at
some moment of national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she
could not tell. She looked anxiously at people's faces. But that confused
her still more. Here would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to
himself as if he knew some terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat,
jolly-faced fellow, shouldering his way along as if it were a festival
for all the world. Indeed, she came to the conclusion that there was
neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each man and each woman was bent
on his own affairs. And where was she to go?

She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast
windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing gowns, and
flowers, and fishing rods, and luncheon baskets; while stuff of every hue
and pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and festooned and
ballooned across and across. Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate
mansions, soberly numbered 'one', 'two', 'three', and so on right up to
two or three hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and
six steps and a pair of curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid
on tables, and a parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out
of another, until her mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came
to great open squares with black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat
men in the middle, and war horses prancing, and columns rising and
fountains falling and pigeons fluttering. So she walked and walked along
pavements between houses until she felt very hungry, and something
fluttering above her heart rebuked her with having forgotten all about
it. It was her manuscript. 'The Oak Tree'.

She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where she stood.
No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and handsome, was
singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was approaching. There was
something vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she
felt certain that she had met him at some time or other. But where? Could
it be that this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane
in his hand and a flower in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and
combed white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was!--her old, her
very old friend, Nick Greene!

At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognized her. 'The
Lady Orlando!' he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.

'Sir Nicholas!' she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively by
something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who had
lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now
risen in the world and become certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen
other fine things into the bargain.

With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was correct; he was
a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was the author of a
score of volumes. He was, in short, the most influential critic of the
Victorian age.

A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who had
caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy, restless
fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the
Italian fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest
that they had seen the sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now
sprucely dressed in a grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his
button-hole, and grey suede gloves to match. But even as she marvelled,
he made another bow, and asked her whether she would honour him by
lunching with him? The bow was a thought overdone perhaps, but the
imitation of fine breeding was creditable. She followed him, wondering,
into a superb restaurant, all red plush, white table-cloths, and silver
cruets, as unlike as could be the old tavern or coffee house with its
sanded floor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch and chocolate, and
its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly on the table
beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same man. His
nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin was
shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links;
where his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was not, indeed,
until he had ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her
of his taste in Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same
man. 'Ah!' he said, heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable
enough, 'ah! my dear lady, the great days of literature are over.
Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson--those were the giants. Dryden, Pope,
Addison--those were the heroes. All, all are dead now. And whom have they
left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!'--he threw an immense amount of
scorn into his voice. 'The truth of it is,' he said, pouring himself a
glass of wine, 'that all our young writers are in the pay of the
booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their tailor's
bills. It is an age', he said, helping himself to hors-d'oeuvres, 'marked
by precious conceits and wild experiments--none of which the Elizabethans
would have tolerated for an instant.'

'No, my dear lady,' he continued, passing with approval the turbot au
gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, 'the great days are
over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the past; honour those
writers--there are still a few left of 'em--who take antiquity for their
model and write, not for pay but--' Here Orlando almost shouted 'Glawr!'
Indeed she could have sworn that she had heard him say the very same
things three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but
the spirit was the same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his
knighthood. And yet, some change there was. For while he ran on about
taking Addison as one's model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and
lying in bed of a morning (which she was proud to think her pension paid
quarterly enabled him to do) rolling the best works of the best authors
round and round on one's tongue for an hour, at least, before setting pen
to paper, so that the vulgarity of the present time and the deplorable
condition of our native tongue (he had lived long in America, she
believed) might be purified--while he ran on in much the same way that
Greene had run on three hundred years ago, she had time to ask herself,
how was it then that he had changed? He had grown plump; but he was a man
verging on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature had been a prosperous
pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless, uneasy vivacity had
gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no longer quite so free
and easy. He mentioned, it is true, 'my dear friend Pope' or 'my
illustrious friend Addison' every other second, but he had an air of
respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it
seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own blood
relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the
poets.

Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all
these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as
something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something
errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly
gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her
disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper
part of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell 'The Oak Tree',
a poem.

'A manuscript!' said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez. 'How
interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it.' And
once more, after an interval of some three hundred years, Nicholas Greene
took Orlando's poem and, laying it down among the coffee cups and the
liqueur glasses, began to read it. But now his verdict was very different
from what it had been then. It reminded him, he said as he turned over
the pages, of Addison's "Cato". It compared favourably with Thomson's
"Seasons". There was no trace in it, he was thankful to say, of the
modern spirit. It was composed with a regard to truth, to nature, to the
dictates of the human heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of
unscrupulous eccentricity. It must, of course, be published instantly.

Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her
manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress. The idea tickled
Sir Nicholas considerably.

'But what about royalties?' he asked.

Orlando's mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who
happened to be staying there.

Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to
the fact that Messrs -- (here he mentioned a well-known firm of
publishers) would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book
on their list. He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten per cent on
all copies up to two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the
reviewers, he would himself write a line to Mr --, who was the most
influential; then a compliment--say a little puff of her own
poems--addressed to the wife of the editor of the -- never did any harm.
He would call --. So he ran on. Orlando understood nothing of all this,
and from old experience did not altogether trust his good nature, but
there was nothing for it but to submit to what was evidently his wish and
the fervent desire of the poem itself. So Sir Nicholas made the
blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it into his breast
pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with many
compliments on both sides, they parted.

Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone,--and she felt a
bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it--she had
nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked--the extraordinary
chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St James's Street;
a married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee
house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in
the afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel
terrier dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life?
The thought popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old
Greene were somehow the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment,
adverse or favourable, as the reader chooses to consider it upon her
relations with her husband (who was at the Horn), that whenever anything
popped violently into her head, she went straight to the nearest
telegraph office and wired to him. There was one, as it happened, close
at hand. 'My God Shel', she wired; 'life literature Greene toady--' here
she dropped into a cypher language which they had invented between them
so that a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity might be
conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph clerk being any wiser,
and added the words 'Rattigan Glumphoboo', which summed it up precisely.
For not only had the events of the morning made a deep impression on her,
but it cannot have escaped the reader's attention that Orlando was
growing up--which is not necessarily growing better--and 'Rattigan
Glumphoboo' described a very complicated spiritual state--which if the
reader puts all his intelligence at our service he may discover for
himself.

There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was
probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper clouds raced
swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that her husband
would be at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cutting away some
tattered spar, or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving
the post office, she turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which
was a shop so common in our day that it needs no description, yet, to her
eyes, strange in the extreme; a shop where they sold books. All her life
long Orlando had known manuscripts; she had held in her hands the rough
brown sheets on which Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she
had seen Shakespeare's script and Milton's. She owned, indeed, a fair
number of quartos and folios, often with a sonnet in her praise in them
and sometimes a lock of hair. But these innumerable little volumes,
bright, identical, ephemeral, for they seemed bound in cardboard and
printed on tissue paper, surprised her infinitely. The whole works of
Shakespeare cost half a crown, and could be put in your pocket. One could
hardly read them, indeed, the print was so small, but it was a marvel,
none the less. 'Works'--the works of every writer she had known or heard
of and many more stretched from end to end of the long shelves. On tables
and chairs, more 'works' were piled and tumbled, and these she saw,
turning a page or two, were often works about other works by Sir Nicholas
and a score of others whom, in her ignorance, she supposed, since they
were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave an
astounding order to the bookseller to send her everything of any
importance in the shop and left.

She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath that cleft
tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through the body by
Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often to blame in the matter, began
framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life
literature Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers
looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable
opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She
had carried off a sheaf of papers and critical journals from the book
shop, and at length, flinging herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she
spread these pages round her and did her best to fathom the noble art of
prose composition as these masters practised it. For still the old
credulity was alive in her; even the blurred type of a weekly newspaper
had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying on her elbow, an
article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she had once
known--John Donne. But she had pitched herself, without knowing it, not
far from the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in her
ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed
overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet
trousers crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic
rubber ball bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues
broke through the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald
on her finger. She read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked
up at the sky and looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to
be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult! For--here came by
a pair of tight scarlet trousers--how would Addison have put that? Here
came two dogs dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described
that? For reading Sir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in the
intervals of looking about her), she somehow got the impression--here she
rose and walked--they made one feel--it was an extremely uncomfortable
feeling--one must never, never say what one thought. (She stood on the
banks of the Serpentine. It was a bronze colour; spider-thin boats were
skimming from side to side.) They made one feel, she continued, that one
must always, always write like somebody else. (The tears formed
themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought, pushing a little boat
off with her toe, I don't think I could (here the whole of Sir Nicholas'
article came before her as articles do, ten minutes after they are read,
with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his writing-table, and the
time of the day thrown in), I don't think I could, she continued,
considering the article from this point of view, sit in a study, no, it's
not a study, it's a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day long, and talk
to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which they mustn't
repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she continued,
weeping bitterly, they're all so manly; and then, I do detest Duchesses;
and I don't like cake; and though I'm spiteful enough, I could never
learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and write
the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed, launching
a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost sank in
the bronze-coloured waves.

Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses
call it)--and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes--the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and
much more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the
Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as
the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from
ocean liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and
the wave she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn;
and as she watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw
Bonthrop's ship climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a
white crest with a thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the
thousand deaths it went and disappeared--'It's sunk!' she cried out in an
agony--and then, behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound
among the ducks on the other side of the Atlantic.

'Ecstasy!' she cried. 'Ecstasy! Where's the post office?' she wondered.
'For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him...' And repeating 'A toy
boat on the Serpentine', and 'Ecstasy', alternately, for the thoughts
were interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing, she hurried
towards Park Lane.

'A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat,' she repeated, thus enforcing upon
herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor
eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's
something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red,
blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a
fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or
care for one's kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth,
husband I mean, Bonthrop: that's what it is--a toy boat on the
Serpentine, ecstasy--it's ecstasy that matters. Thus she spoke aloud,
waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope Gate, for the consequence
of not living with one's husband, except when the wind is sunk, is that
one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would no doubt have been
different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen Victoria
recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in a flash.
She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did not
care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it
might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene's article had plunged her in
the depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy.
So she repeated: 'Ecstasy, ecstasy', as she stood waiting to cross.

But the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her standing
there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine,
while the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and
cloak, in four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a
golden river had coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across
Park Lane. The ladies held card-cases between their fingers; the
gentlemen balanced gold-mounted canes between their knees. She stood
there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One thought only disturbed her, a
thought familiar to all who behold great elephants, or whales of an
incredible magnitude, and that is: how do these leviathans to whom
obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant, propagate their
kind? Perhaps, Orlando thought, looking at the stately, still faces,
their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is the
consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and
splendid there they sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the
stream became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects
moved, dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.

So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street, where,
when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember curlew calling and
one very old man with a gun.

She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of her
house, how Lord Chesterfield had said--but her memory was checked. Her
discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see Lord Chesterfield
putting his hat down here and his coat down there with an elegance of
deportment which it was a pleasure to watch, was now completely littered
with parcels. While she had been sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had
delivered her order, and the house was crammed--there were parcels
slipping down the staircase--with the whole of Victorian literature done
up in grey paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of
these packets as she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the
others, and, rapidly cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by
innumerable volumes.

Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her
order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature
meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great
names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks,
Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons--all vocal,
clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else.
Orlando's reverence for print had a tough job set before it but drawing
her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter
between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion.

And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a
conclusion upon Victorian literature--one is to write it out in sixty
volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length
of this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us
to choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the
conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there
was not a single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over
a vast pile of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees
half as high as her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme
to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina
Rossetti came to tea; next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to
celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it ate all these
dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score
of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival;
the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that
literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very
dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that
literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very
respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at
Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing
very delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was
of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed
our limit of six lines, we must omit.

Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the window
for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes to a conclusion
it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and must wait for the
unseen antagonist to return it to them. What would be sent her next from
the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her
hands clasped, she stood for a considerable space of time wondering.
Suddenly she started--and here we could only wish that, as on a former
occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and
provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap
up what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no!
Having thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen it fall
short by several inches, these ladies had given up all intercourse with
her these many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then,
going to happen this pale March morning to mitigate, to veil, to cover,
to conceal, to shroud this undeniable event whatever it may be? For after
giving that sudden, violent start, Orlando--but Heaven be praised, at
this very moment there struck up outside one of these frail, reedy,
fluty, jerky, old-fashioned barrel-organs which are still sometimes
played by Italian organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the
intervention, humble though it is, as if it were the music of the
spheres, and allow it, with all its gasps and groans, to fill this page
with sound until the moment comes when it is impossible to deny its
coming; which the footman has seen coming and the maid-servant; and the
reader will have to see too; for Orlando herself is clearly unable to
ignore it any longer--let the barrel-organ sound and transport us on
thought, which is no more than a little boat, when music sounds, tossing
on the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers, the most clumsy, the
most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens where washing is
hanging to--what is this place? Do you recognize the Green and in the
middle the steeple, and the gate with a lion couchant on either side? Oh
yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here we are at Kew, and I will show
you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth,
and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there
is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in
October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be
said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be
flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit,
waiting the kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the
evening from bank to bank.

Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.

Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys and their smoke; behold the city
clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her dog
for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time
not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though Heaven has mercifully
decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on
for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist; still
through our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid
fulfilment of natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a
ditch; as once one saw blazing--such silly hops and skips the mind takes
when it slops like this all over the saucer and the barrel-organ
plays--saw blazing a fire in a field against minarets near
Constantinople.

Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of
all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates;
and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark
chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and
confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of
links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red
bows on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in
red ink and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher
flashing from bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether
it is what the male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in
whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For
dark flows the stream--would it were true, as the rhyme hints 'like a
dream'--but duller and worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams,
but alive, smug, fluent, habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive
green drowns the blue of the wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of
a sudden from bank to bank.

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which
bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn
parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us
and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so
deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of
dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a
moth, prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.

But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind land.
Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he
flies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now
floods back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again;
bubbling, dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is
to pass us safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall
on--(here the barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).

'It's a very fine boy, M'Lady,' said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting
her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In other words Orlando was
safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock
in the morning.

Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage;
nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by any
means, the same day. No--for if we look out of the window, as Orlando was
doing at the moment, we shall see that Park Lane itself has considerably
changed. Indeed one might stand there ten minutes or more, as Orlando
stood now, without seeing a single barouche landau. 'Look at that!' she
exclaimed, some days later when an absurd truncated carriage without any
horses began to glide about of its own accord. A carriage without any
horses indeed! She was called away just as she said that, but came back
again after a time and had another look out of the window. It was odd
sort of weather nowadays. The sky itself, she could not help thinking,
had changed. It was no longer so thick, so watery, so prismatic now that
King Edward--see, there he was, stepping out of his neat brougham to go
and visit a certain lady opposite--had succeeded Queen Victoria. The
clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky seemed made of metal, which in
hot weather tarnished verdigris, copper colour or orange as metal does in
a fog. It was a little alarming--this shrinkage. Everything seemed to
have shrunk. Driving past Buckingham Palace last night, there was not a
trace of that vast erection which she had thought everlasting; top hats,
widows' weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths, all had vanished and left
not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement. But it was now--after
another interval she had come back again to her favourite station in the
window--now, in the evening, that the change was most remarkable. Look at
the lights in the houses! At a touch, a whole room was lit; hundreds of
rooms were lit; and one was precisely the same as the other. One could
see everything in the little square-shaped boxes; there was no privacy;
none of those lingering shadows and odd corners that there used to be;
none of those women in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put down
carefully on this table and on that. At a touch, the whole room was
bright. And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavements were
bright; everything was bright. She came back again at mid-day. How narrow
women have grown lately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight,
shining, identical. And men's faces were as bare as the palm of one's
hand. The dryness of the atmosphere brought out the colour in everything
and seemed to stiffen the muscles of the cheeks. It was harder to cry
now. Water was hot in two seconds. Ivy had perished or been scraped off
houses. Vegetables were less fertile; families were much smaller.
Curtains and covers had been frizzled up and the walls were bare so that
new brilliantly coloured pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas,
apples, were hung in frames, or painted upon the wood. There was
something definite and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the
eighteenth century, except that there was a distraction, a
desperation--as she was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which
she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the
light poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up
as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves
very taut; at the same time her hearing quickened; she could hear every
whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking on the
mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the light went on
becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more
clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific
explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently
struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o'clock
in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the
present moment.

No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart,
and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than
that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only
possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on
another. But we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly
late already. She ran downstairs, she jumped into her motorcar, she
pressed the self-starter and was off. Vast blue blocks of building rose
into the air; the red cowls of chimneys were spotted irregularly across
the sky; the road shone like silver-headed nails; omnibuses bore down
upon her with sculptured white-faced drivers; she noticed sponges,
bird-cages, boxes of green American cloth. But she did not allow these
sights to sink into her mind even the fraction of an inch as she crossed
the narrow plank of the present, lest she should fall into the raging
torrent beneath. 'Why don't you look where you're going to?...Put your
hand out, can't you?'--that was all she said sharply, as if the words
were jerked out of her. For the streets were immensely crowded; people
crossed without looking where they were going. People buzzed and hummed
round the plate-glass windows within which one could see a glow of red, a
blaze of yellow, as if they were bees, Orlando thought--but her thought
that they were bees was violently snipped off and she saw, regaining
perspective with one flick of her eye, that they were bodies. 'Why don't
you look where you're going?' she snapped out.

At last, however, she drew up at Marshall & Snelgrove's and went into the
shop. Shade and scent enveloped her. The present fell from her like drops
of scalding water. Light swayed up and down like thin stuffs puffed out
by a summer breeze. She took a list from her bag and began reading in a
curious stiff voice at first, as if she were holding the words--boy's
boots, bath salts, sardines--under a tap of many-coloured water. She
watched them change as the light fell on them. Bath and boots became
blunt, obtuse; sardines serrated itself like a saw. So she stood in the
ground-floor department of Messrs Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way
and that; snuffed this smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then
she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and
was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as
she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century we knew how everything was
done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I
see men flying--but how its done I can't even begin to wonder. So my
belief in magic returns. Now the lift gave a little jerk as it stopped at
the first floor; and she had a vision of innumerable coloured stuffs
flaunting in a breeze from which came distinct, strange smells; and each
time the lift stopped and flung its doors open, there was another slice
of the world displayed with all the smells of that world clinging to it.
She was reminded of the river off Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where
the treasure ships and the merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and
curiously they had smelt! How well she remembered the feel of rough
rubies running through her fingers when she dabbled them in a treasure
sack! And then lying with Sukey--or whatever her name was--and having
Cumberland's lantern flashed on them! The Cumberlands had a house in
Portland Place now and she had lunched with them the other day and
ventured a little joke with the old man about almshouses in the Sheen
Road. He had winked. But here as the lift could go no higher, she must
get out--Heaven knows into what 'department' as they called it. She stood
still to consult her shopping list, but was blessed if she could see, as
the list bade her, bath salts, or boy's boots anywhere about. And indeed,
she was about to descend again, without buying anything, but was saved
from that outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her
list; which happened to be 'sheets for a double bed'.

'Sheets for a double bed,' she said to a man at a counter and, by a
dispensation of Providence, it was sheets that the man at that particular
counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch, no, Grimsditch was dead;
Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was dead; Louise then--Louise had come to
her in a great taking the other day, for she had found a hole in the
bottom of the sheet in the royal bed. Many kings and queens had slept
there--Elizabeth; James; Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the
sheet had a hole in it. But Louise was positive she knew who had done it.
It was the Prince Consort.

'Sale bosch!' she said (for there had been another war; this time against
the Germans).

'Sheets for a double bed,' Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double bed
with a silver counterpane in a room fitted in a taste which she now
thought perhaps a little vulgar--all in silver; but she had furnished it
when she had a passion for that metal. While the man went to get sheets
for a double bed, she took out a little looking-glass and a powder puff.
Women were not nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering
herself with the greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself
first turned woman and lay on the deck of the "Enamoured Lady". She gave
her nose the right tint deliberately. She never touched her cheeks.
Honestly, though she was now thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older.
She looked just as pouting, as sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a
million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha had said) as she had done that day
on the ice, when the Thames was frozen and they had gone skating--

'The best Irish linen, Ma'am,' said the shopman, spreading the sheets on
the counter,--and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here, as
she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between
the departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-goods
department, a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles, and
the scent curved like a shell round a figure--was it a boy's or was it a
girl's--young, slender, seductive--a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in
Russian trousers; but faithless, faithless!

'Faithless!' cried Orlando (the man had gone) and all the shop seemed to
pitch and toss with yellow water and far off she saw the masts of the
Russian ship standing out to sea, and then, miraculously (perhaps the
door opened again) the conch which the scent had made became a platform,
a dais, off which stepped a fat, furred woman, marvellously well
preserved, seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke's mistress; she who, leaning
over the banks of the Volga, eating sandwiches, had watched men drown;
and began walking down the shop towards her.

'Oh Sasha!' Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should have
come to this; she had grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowed her head
over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in fur, and a girl
in Russian trousers, with all these smells of wax candles, white flowers,
and old ships that it brought with it might pass behind her back unseen.

'Any napkins, towels, dusters today, Ma'am?' the shopman persisted. And
it is enormously to the credit of the shopping list, which Orlando now
consulted, that she was able to reply with every appearance of composure,
that there was only one thing in the world she wanted and that was bath
salts; which was in another department.

But descending in the lift again--so insidious is the repetition of any
scene--she was again sunk far beneath the present moment; and thought
when the lift bumped on the ground, that she heard a pot broken against a
river bank. As for finding the right department, whatever it might be,
she stood engrossed among the handbags, deaf to the suggestions of all
the polite, black, combed, sprightly shop assistants, who descending as
they did equally and some of them, perhaps, as proudly, even from such
depths of the past as she did, chose to let down the impervious screen of
the present so that today they appeared shop assistants in Marshall &
Snelgrove's merely. Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great
glass doors she could see the traffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to
pile itself upon omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice blocks
had pitched and tossed that day on the Thames. An old nobleman--in furred
slippers had sat astride one of them. There he went--she could see him
now--calling down maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there,
where her car stood.

'Time has passed over me,' she thought, trying to collect herself; 'this
is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one
thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in
the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian
trousers. When I step out of doors--as I do now,' here she stepped on to
the pavement of Oxford Street, 'what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I
hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?' Her eyes filled
with tears.

That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will,
perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her
motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains.
And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of
the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to
synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat
simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes,
all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent
disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly
say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years
allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead
though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through
the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call
themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's life, whatever the
"Dictionary of National Biography" may say, is always a matter of
dispute. For it is a difficult business--this time-keeping; nothing more
quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it may have
been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose her
shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or the
boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the
present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently
assaulted.

'Confound it all!' she cried, for it is a great shock to the nervous
system, hearing a clock strike--so much so that for some time now there
is nothing to be said of her save that she frowned slightly, changed her
gears admirably, and cried out, as before, 'Look where you're going!'
'Don't you know your own mind?' 'Why didn't you say so then?' while the
motor-car shot, swung, squeezed, and slid, for she was an expert driver,
down Regent Street, down Haymarket, down Northumberland Avenue, over
Westminster Bridge, to the left, straight on, to the right, straight on
again...

The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October
1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags.
Children ran out. There were sales at drapers' shops. Streets widened and
narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a
funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written 'Ra--Un',
but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women
almost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin-- that was over a porch. A
woman looked out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very
still. Applejohn and Applebed, Undert--. Nothing could be seen whole or
read from start to finish. What was seen begun--like two friends starting
to meet each other across the street--was never seen ended. After twenty
minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a
sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much
resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes
unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in
what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment.
Indeed we should have given her over for a person entirely disassembled
were it not that here, at last, one green screen was held out on the
right, against which the little bits of paper fell more slowly; and then
another was held out on the left so that one could see the separate
scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and then green screens
were held continuously on either side, so that her mind regained the
illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage, a
farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.

When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and
puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as
if the person she wanted might not be there, 'Orlando? For if there are
(at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at
once, how many different people are there not--Heaven help us--all having
lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two
thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world
for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one's
name) meaning by that, Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular
self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our
friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one
may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another
self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these
selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are
piled on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little
constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for
many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it
is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones
is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine--and so on;
for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms
which his different selves have made with him--and some are too wildly
ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.

So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called 'Orlando?' with a note of
interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.

'All right then,' Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on
these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves
to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a
biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven
selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing then,
only those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on
the boy who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it up again;
the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed
the Queen the bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young
man who fell in love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the
Ambassador; or upon the Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have
wanted the woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit;
the girl in love with life; the Patroness of Letters; the woman who
called Mar (meaning hot baths and evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning
crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop (meaning the death we die daily) or
all three together--which meant more things than we have space to write
out--all were different and she may have called upon any one of them.

Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are now in the region of
'perhaps' and 'appears') was that the one she needed most kept aloof, for
she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she
drove--there was a new one at every corner--as happens when, for some
unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has
the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some
people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves
we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the
Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly
seeking this self as the reader can judge from overhearing her talk as
she drove (and if it is rambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, and
sometimes unintelligible, it is the reader's fault for listening to a
lady talking to herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding
in brackets which self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may
well be wrong).

'What then? Who then?' she said. 'Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman.
Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? The garter in the
hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious,
vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don't care a damn if I am.
Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don't count (here a new self
came in). Lying in bed of a morning listening to the pigeons on fine
linen; silver dishes; wine; maids; footmen. Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many
things for nothing. Hence my books (here she mentioned fifty classical
titles; which represented, so we think, the early romantic works that she
tore up). Facile, glib, romantic. But (here another self came in) a
duffer, a fumbler. More clumsy I couldn't be. And--and--(here she
hesitated for a word and if we suggest 'Love' we may be wrong, but
certainly she laughed and blushed and then cried out--) A toad set in
emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles on the ceiling! (here another
self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was sunk in gloom: tears
actually shaped themselves and she had long given over crying). Trees,
she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was passing a
clump) growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a tumbledown
barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came trotting
across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night. But people
(here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.) I
don't know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here she turned
into the High Street of her native town, which was crowded, for it was
market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and old women with hens in
baskets.) I like peasants. I understand crops. But (here another self
came skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a lighthouse).
Fame! (She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the
evening papers (here she alluded to the 'Oak Tree' and 'The Burdett
Coutts' Memorial Prize which she had won; and we must snatch space to
remark how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination to
which the whole book moved, this peroration with which the book was to
end, should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the
truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of
place--culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does
with a man). Fame! she repeated. A poet--a charlatan; both every morning
as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to meet; to meet, to dine;
fame--fame! (She had here to slow down to pass through the crowd of
market people. But no one noticed her. A porpoise in a fishmonger's shop
attracted far more attention than a lady who had won a prize and might,
had she chosen, have worn three coronets one on top of another on her
brow.) Driving very slowly she now hummed as if it were part of an old
song, 'With my guineas I'll buy flowering trees, flowering trees,
flowering trees and walk among my flowering trees and tell my sons what
fame is'. So she hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and
there like a barbaric necklace of heavy beads. 'And walk among my
flowering trees,' she sang, accenting the words strongly, 'and see the
moon rise slow, the waggons go...' Here she stopped short and looked
ahead of her intently at the bonnet of the car in profound meditation.

'He sat at Twitchett's table,' she mused, 'with a dirty ruff on...Was it
old Mr Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh-p--re? (for when we
speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole.)
She gazed for ten minutes ahead of her, letting the car come almost to a
standstill.

'Haunted!' she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. 'Haunted! ever
since I was a child. There flies the wild goose. It flies past the window
out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the steering-wheel tighter) and
stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. I've seen it,
here--there--there--England, Persia, Italy. Always it flies fast out to
sea and always I fling after it words like nets (here she flung her hand
out) which shrivel as I've seen nets shrivel drawn on deck with only
sea-weed in them; and sometimes there's an inch of silver--six words--in
the bottom of the net. But never the great fish who lives in the coral
groves.' Here she bent her head, pondering deeply.

And it was at this moment, when she had ceased to call 'Orlando' and was
deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom she had called
came of its own accord; as was proved by the change that now came over
her (she had passed through the lodge gates and was entering the park).

The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition
makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow
becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is
contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and
become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or
wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is
probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be
more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to
communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent.

Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curving drive between the elms and
oaks through the falling turf of the park whose fall was so gentle that
had it been water it would have spread the beach with a smooth green
tide. Planted here and in solemn groups were beech trees and oak trees.
The deer stepped among them, one white as snow, another with its head on
one side, for some wire netting had caught in its horns. All this, the
trees, deer, and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if
her mind had become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them
completely. Next minute she drew up in the courtyard where, for so many
hundred years she had come, on horseback or in coach and six, with men
riding before or coming after; where plumes had tossed, torches flashed,
and the same flowering trees that let their leaves drop now had shaken
their blossoms. Now she was alone. The autumn leaves were falling. The
porter opened the great gates. 'Morning, James,' she said, 'there're some
things in the car. Will you bring 'em in?' words of no beauty, interest,
or significance themselves, it will be conceded, but now so plumped out
with meaning that they fell like ripe nuts from a tree, and proved that
when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it
satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true indeed of every movement
and action now, usual though they were; so that to see Orlando change her
skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather jacket, which she did
in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with the beauty of
movement as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art. Then she
strode into the dining-room where her old friends Dryden, Pope, Swift,
Addison regarded her demurely at first as who should say Here's the prize
winner! but when they reflected that two hundred guineas was in question,
they nodded their heads approvingly. Two hundred guineas, they seemed to
say; two hundred guineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herself a
slice of bread and ham, clapped the two together and began to eat,
striding up and down the room, thus shedding her company habits in a
second, without thinking. After five or six such turns, she tossed off a
glass of red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her
hand, strode down the long corridor and through a dozen drawing-rooms and
so began a perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and
spaniels as chose to follow her.

This, too, was all in the day's routine. As soon would she come home and
leave her own grandmother without a kiss as come back and leave the house
unvisited. She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in; stirred,
opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence. She fancied,
too, that, hundreds and thousands of times as she had seen them, they
never looked the same twice, as if so long a life as theirs had stored in
them a myriad moods which changed with winter and summer, bright weather
and dark, and her own fortunes and the people's characters who visited
them. Polite, they always were to strangers, but a little weary: with
her, they were entirely open and at their ease. Why not indeed? They had
known each other for close on four centuries now. They had nothing to
conceal. She knew their sorrows and joys. She knew what age each part of
them was and its little secrets--a hidden drawer, a concealed cupboard,
or some deficiency perhaps, such as a part made up, or added later. They,
too, knew her in all her moods and changes. She had hidden nothing from
them; had come to them as boy and woman, crying and dancing, brooding and
gay. In this window-seat, she had written her first verses; in that
chapel, she had been married. And she would be buried here, she
reflected, kneeling on the window-sill in the long gallery and sipping
her Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it, the body of the
heraldic leopard would be making yellow pools on the floor the day they
lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in no
immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go
forever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the
room--she had strolled into the Ambassador's bedroom--shone like a shell
that has lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted
over and painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow,
green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as
empty. No Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where
the heart of the house still beat. Gently opening a door, she stood on
the threshold so that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and
watched the tapestry rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which
never failed to move it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. The
heart still beat, she thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn;
the frail indomitable heart of the immense building.

Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery whose
floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of chairs with all
their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out
for Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who
never came. The sight made her gloomy. She unhooked the rope that fenced
them off. She sat on the Queen's chair; she opened a manuscript book
lying on Lady Betty's table; she stirred her fingers in the aged rose
leaves; she brushed her short hair with King James' silver brushes: she
bounced up and down upon his bed (but no King would ever sleep there
again, for all Louise's new sheets) and pressed her cheek against the
worn silver counterpane that lay upon it. But everywhere were little
lavender bags to keep the moth out and printed notices, 'Please do not
touch', which, though she had put them there herself, seemed to rebuke
her. The house was no longer hers entirely, she sighed. It belonged to
time now; to history; was past the touch and control of the living. Never
would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was in the bedroom
that had been old Nick Greene's), or holes burnt in the carpet. Never two
hundred servants come running and brawling down the corridors with
warming pans and great branches for the great fireplaces. Never would ale
be brewed and candles made and saddles fashioned and stone shaped in the
workshops outside the house. Hammers and mallets were silent now. Chairs
and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in glass
cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.

So she sat at the end of the gallery with her dogs couched round her, in
Queen Elizabeth's hard armchair. The gallery stretched far away to a
point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into
the past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and
talking; the great men she had known; Dryden, Swift, and Pope; and
statesmen in colloquy; and lovers dallying in the window-seats; and
people eating and drinking at the long tables; and the wood smoke curling
round their heads and making them sneeze and cough. Still further down,
she saw sets of splendid dancers formed for the quadrille. A fluty,
frail, but nevertheless stately music began to play. An organ boomed. A
coffin was borne into the chapel. A marriage procession came out of it.
Armed men with helmets left for the wars. They brought banners back from
Flodden and Poitiers and stuck them on the wall. The long gallery filled
itself thus, and still peering further, she thought she could make out at
the very end, beyond the Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older,
further, darker, a cowled figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with
his hands clasped, and a book in them, murmuring--

Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so
demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder.
Her own face, that had been dark and sombre as she gazed, was lit as by
an explosion of gunpowder. In this same light everything near her showed
with extreme distinctness. She saw two flies circling round and noticed
the blue sheen on their bodies; she saw a knot in the wood where her foot
was, and her dog's ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a bough
creaking in the garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift screaming
past the window. Her own body quivered and tingled as if suddenly stood
naked in a hard frost. Yet, she kept, as she had not done when the clock
struck ten in London, complete composure (for she was now one and entire,
and presented, it may be, a larger surface to the shock of time). She
rose, but without precipitation, called her dogs, and went firmly but
with great alertness of movement down the staircase and out into the
garden. Here the shadows of the plants were miraculously distinct. She
noticed the separate grains of earth in the flower beds as if she had a
microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the intricacy of the twigs of every
tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and the marking of veins and
petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path, and every
button on his gaiters was visible; 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 whenever the gulf of time
gaped and let a second through some unknown danger might come with it.
The tension was too relentless and too rigorous to be endured long
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 effort, 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, when her eyelids flickered,
she was relieved of the pressure 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 trembles to pin through the body with a name and
call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow without substance or
quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself
to. This shadow now, while she flickered 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 tolerable,
comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. 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 Serpentine, 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 indifferent 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 violent 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 immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she
was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the
hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases
and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses;
everything was partly something else, as if her mind had become a forest
with glades branching here and there; things came nearer, and further,
and mingled and separated and made the strangest alliances and
combinations in an incessant chequer of light and shade. 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 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
something 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
shallow 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 garden 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 Snowdon'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 there', 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. It was
blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side. Goats cropped
the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above. The raucous voice of
old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, 'What is your antiquity and
your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do you need with
four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and housemaids
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,
calling into view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields,
cottages with lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a
fan-shaped light pushing the darkness 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 reflections
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 themselves and to see in the pool of the mind now
Shakespeare, 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. She looked into the darkness. 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 rippling 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 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 in between sky
and sea. Then 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, Orlando 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.'

As she spoke, 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 glowed--like the eggs of some vast
moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her
head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare
in the darkness.

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.

'It is the goose!' Orlando cried. 'The wild goose...'

And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of
midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty
Eight.



THE END