Orlando. A Biography / Орландо

© Шитова А. В., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2021

© ООО «ИД «Антология», 2021

1

He – and there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time tried to disguise it – was trying to strike the skull of a Moor which hung from the ceiling of the attic. It was the color and the shape of an old coconut, with a strand or two of dry hair. Orlando's father, or even his grandfather, had brought it from the battlefields of Africa; and now it swung gently in the breeze which was always blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had killed that Moor.

Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of wild lilies, among stones, and along strange rivers. The fathers had struck many heads off many shoulders and brought them back to hang from the ceiling. Orlando would do that too, he vowed. But now he was only sixteen – too young to ride with them in Africa or France. So he would run away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room, and there he would slice the air with his sword. Sometimes he would cut the cord and the skull would fall to the floor. Then he would put it up again. The skull was swinging freely because the house, at the top of which Orlando lived, was so vast that the wind itself seemed to live there, blowing this way and that way, winter and summer, stirring the green tapestries.

Orlando's fathers had been noble. They came out of the northern mists, wearing crowns on their heads.

Now Orlando stood in the center of the yellow body of a heraldic leopard as the sunlight poured in through the stained glass of a massive coat of arms[1] in the window. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was colored red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing. His strong legs, his handsome body and wide shoulders were decorated with different colors of that heraldic light. But Orlando's honest and serious face, as he opened the window, was lit only by the sun.

Orlando was something to look at. His red cheeks were covered with peach down, and the down on the lips was only a little thicker. His teeth were white; he had a short straight nose; the hair was dark, the ears small. But the most spectacular were his forehead and eyes. He had eyes like two large dewy violets; and a forehead like a marble dome.

Sights disturbed Orlando – like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green, walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her. Sights excited him – the birds and the trees. Sights made him in love with death – the evening sky, the ravens. When all these sights, and the garden sounds too, flowed into the brain of the young man and created the confusion of passions and emotions, Orlando sat down at the table.

As he did every day at this hour, he took out a writing book with 'Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts' written on it and dipped an old goose quill in the ink. Soon he had covered more than ten pages with poetry. He was fluent, but abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the characters of his drama; there were Kings and Queens; horrifying plots; noble sentiments. Not a word was said as he himself would have said it, but all of it was just sweetness of the sixteenth century.

At last, however, he stopped. He was describing, as all young poets do, nature, and, to describe the shade of green, he looked at a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, but green in literature is another. The green Orlando now saw spoiled his rhyme and broke his meter. Besides, one look out the window made him drop the pen, take his cloak, and, as he was walking out of the room, almost trip over a chest – because Orlando was a bit clumsy.

He was careful to avoid meeting anyone outside. There was Stubbs, the gardener, walking along the path. Orlando hid behind a tree till he had passed. He went out through a little gate in the garden wall. Unseen, he walked past the stables, the dog kennels, the breweries, the wash-houses – because the house was as big as a town filled with men at work – and took the ferny path leading uphill through the park.

Orlando loved solitude. He naturally loved to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

'I am alone,' he whispered at last after a long silence. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place where a single oak tree grew. The hill was very high – so high that nineteen English counties could be seen from there; and on clear days – thirty; or even forty, if the weather was fine. Sometimes one could see the English Channel[2]. Rivers could be seen with boats on them; and galleons, and armadas, and cannons firing, and forts, and fortresses, and castles. To the east there was London, and the smoke of the city, and Snowdon[3] herself among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood gazing, recognizing. That was his father's house; that his uncle's. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The moorland was theirs and the forest; the pheasant, the fox, the deer, and the butterfly.

He sighed and dropped down onto the earth beneath the oak tree. He loved to feel the earth beneath him. Image followed image – it was the back of a great horse he was riding, or the deck of a ship – or anything. He needed something hard to which he could attach his floating heart that seemed to be filled with spiced winds every evening at this time when he walked out. He tied it to the oak tree as he lay there, and the heart stilled itself[4]. The little leaves hung, the deer stopped, the pale summer clouds floated; his body grew heavy on the ground as he lay so still that summer's evening.

After an hour or so – the sun was setting quickly, the white clouds had turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black – a trumpet sounded. Orlando jumped to his feet. The sound came from the valley. It came from a dark spot down there. It came from the heart of his own great house in the valley, which suddenly lost its darkness and was now filling with lights. Some of them were small lights, as if servants were running along corridors; others were high and bright lights, as if they burnt in empty halls made ready to receive guests; and others fell and rose, as if the serving men were welcoming indoors a great Princess who had got out of her carriage.

The Queen[5] had come.

Orlando looked no more. He ran downhill. He rushed through the gate. He ran up the stairs. He reached his room. He threw his stockings to one side of the room, his jacket to the other. He combed his hair. He washed his hands. He cut his finger nails. He put on crimson breeches, a lace collar, a waistcoat, and shoes. He was ready in less than ten minutes. He was flushed. He was excited. But he was terribly late.

By shortcuts he knew, he walked now through the vast rooms to the banqueting-hall, five acres away, on the other side of the house. But on the way there, in the part of the house where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs. Stewkley's room was open – she was gone, obviously, with all her keys, to help her mistress. But there, sitting at the table with paper in front of him, was a rather fat, shabby-looking man. He was holding a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed to be rolling some thought in his mind. His eyes, clouded like some green stone, were fixed[6]. He did not see Orlando.

Though he was in a hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? 'Tell me', he wanted to say, 'everything in the whole world.' He had the wildest ideas about poets and poetry. But how to speak to a man who does not see you? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his pen in his fingers, this way and that way, and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. At that moment, Orlando, overcome with shyness, ran off.

He reached the banqueting-hall only just in time to drop to his knees and, hanging his head low, to offer a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself. Such was his shyness that he only saw her ringed hand in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long fingers; a nervous, sickly hand; a commanding hand; a hand that had only to be raised for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept. The body that was decorated with gems; the body that held itself very upright even in pain and in fear. The Queen's watchful eyes were light yellow. All this Orlando felt as the great rings flashed in the water and then something touched his hair. This night his mind was filled with opposites – of the darkness and the burning candles, of silent fields and the noisy serving men, of the shabby poet and the great Queen. Yet, he could only see a hand.

The Queen herself could only see a head. But if it is possible to imagine a body by looking at a hand of a great Queen, surely a head can tell as much – especially when it is looked down upon by a lady whose eyes were always wide open. The long, curly hair, the dark head bent so innocently before her, told of a pair of fine legs; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loyalty and charm – all qualities which the old woman loved, yet was losing herself. She was growing old and tired. She always saw the poison and the long knife she feared. She always heard the guns and the cannons she feared. And it was that same night, when Orlando was already asleep, that she made the gift of the great house to Orlando's father.

Orlando slept all night, ignorant. He had been kissed by a queen without knowing it. And perhaps it was his ignorance and how he started when her lips touched him that kept the memory of her young cousin – because they were related – green in her mind. And so, two years of this quiet country life later, when Orlando had already written about twenty tragedies and a dozen of sonnets, a message came that he had to see the Queen at Whitehall.

'Here,' she said, watching him walking down the long gallery towards her, 'comes my innocent!' He still looked innocent, but, technically, he was not. 'Come!' she said. She was sitting upright beside the fire, looking him up and down. Eyes, mouth, nose, chest, hands – she looked at them with her yellow eyes, and when she saw his legs she laughed out loud. He was the true image of a noble gentleman. But what about his soul? The young man stood before her, blushing. There was strength, grace, romance, poetry, youth – she read him like a book. She took a ring off her finger, put it onto his, and named him her Treasurer and Steward. Next she made him bend his knee and tied the jeweled order of the Garter[7] around it.

He could have everything after that. She kept him with her. The old woman loved him, and the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, planned for him a splendid career. Lands and houses were given to him. He was the son of her old age; her strength. At the height of her triumph, when the guns were firing at the Tower, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her because she was so weak and old and made him bury his face in her skirts – she had not changed her dress for a month – which smelt, as he remembered, like some old cupboard at home where his mother kept her furs. He got up, suffocating.

'This', she whispered, 'is my victory!' A rocket went up and colored her cheeks scarlet.

The long winter months went on and on. Every tree in the park was white with frost. The river ran slowly. One day, when the snow was on the ground, and the dark rooms were full of shadows, she saw in the mirror, which she always kept by her side for fear of spies, through the door, which she always kept open for fear of murderers, a boy – could it be Orlando? – kissing a girl. Who the Devil was this goddamn girl? She grabbed her sword and struck the mirror with it. The glass shattered; people came running; she was lifted and set in her chair again. But her days were coming to an end.

Perhaps it was Orlando; yet could he be blamed? He was young; he was boyish. The age was the Elizabethan. Their morals were different; their poets, their weather, even their vegetables – everything was different. Sunsets were redder; dawns were whiter. The flowers bloomed and died. The sun rose and sank. The lovers loved and went. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short.

Orlando loved not only the garden flowers; he also loved the wild and the weeds. He thought that the mixture of brown earth and blue blood was a good one. So he began going to Wapping[8] and the beer gardens quite frequently at night, wearing a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and the garter at his knee. There, with a mug before him, he listened to sailors' stories of horror and violence. The women there sat on his knee and put their arms round his neck, knowing that something extraordinary was hidden under his cloak. The river was busy early and late with barges. Every day some fine ship sailed to and from the sea. No one gossiped if a boy or girl played a little on the water after sunset or slept among the sacks in each other's arms.

Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of this way of life, but of the primitive manner of the people. It was not to seek 'life' or 'reality' that Orlando went among them. Yet he was bored with their stories of crime and poverty, and decided that the arts and the sciences interested him much more. So, always keeping them in a happy memory, he stopped going to the beer gardens, hung his grey cloak in his wardrobe, let his star shine at his neck and his garter twinkle at his knee, and appeared once more at the Court of King James.

He was young; he was rich; he was handsome. Many ladies were ready to show Orlando their favors. The names of three he was planning to marry were Clorinda, Favilla, and Euphrosyne – or so he called them in his sonnets.

Clorinda was a sweet-mannered, gentle lady. Indeed, Orlando was in love with her for six months and a half. But she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood. She was also influenced by the Church, and decided to clear off Orlando's sins, which made him so sick that he canceled the wedding and did not much regret it when she died of the small-pox soon after that.

Favilla was of a different sort altogether. She was the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman, but she had beautiful eyes, and could ride a horse and dance equally well. Once, however, she severely whipped a spaniel that had torn one of her silk stockings, and she happened to do that beneath Orlando's window. Orlando, who was a lover of animals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked, which, he said, was a sure sign of cruelty in women, and so he broke the engagement that very night for ever.

The third one, Euphrosyne, was by far[9] the most serious of his passions. She had a family tree just as old as Orlando's. She was fair and a bit phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well and had perfect teeth. She loved whippets and spaniels, and fed them with white bread from her own plate. She sang sweetly and was never dressed before mid-day. In short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Orlando, if it had not been for[10] the Great Frost.

The Great Frost was the most severe that has ever visited the islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road, and then was seen to turn to powder and be blown off like dust over the roofs as the icy wind struck her at the street corner. The sheep and cattle died. It was a common sight: a whole herd of pigs frozen on the road. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that the fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, horses, and little boys – all frozen in the act of the moment – one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens.

But while the country people suffered, London enjoyed a brilliant carnival. The Court was at Greenwich[11], and the new King used the opportunity of his coronation to please the citizens. He ordered the frozen river to be decorated like a park or pleasure ground, with pavilions, pagodas, mazes, alleys, and drinking booths – all at his expense[12]. For himself and the Court, he reserved a space right opposite the Palace gates, and at once the place became the centre of the most brilliant society in England. Great statesmen discussed state affairs under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda. Admirals walked up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, telling stories. Lovers sat upon divans covered with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies passed by. Colored balloons floated in the air. Here and there bonfires burnt with green, orange, and purple flames, but the heat could not melt the thick ice.

The ice was so clear that fish could be seen frozen in it. Near London Bridge[13], where the river had frozen to a greater depth, a wrecked boat overloaded with apples was clearly visible. It was lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn. The old woman, who was carrying her fruit to market, could be seen sitting there in her plaids, with her lap full of apples, as if she were going to serve a customer. It was a sight King James and the Court especially liked to look at.

In short, the carnival was the most brilliant scene by day, and the merriest at night. The frosty nights were perfectly still; the moon and stars shone like diamonds, and the people danced to the fine music of flute and trumpet.

At about six in the evening of the seventh of January, Orlando had just finished some dance when he saw, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy[14], a figure which made him curious. He could not tell whether it was a boy or a woman because of the tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion. The person was of medium height, very slender, dressed in cream-colored velvet and some greenish fur. But these details were not important because that person was extremely seductive.

Images and metaphors twisted in Orlando's mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow – all within three seconds. He did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together – so he just stared, with the Lady Euphrosyne hanging upon his arm. It must be a boy, he thought because no woman could skate so well. Orlando was ready to tear his hair because that person was of his own sex, and thus the romance was out of the question[15]. Now the skater came closer. Legs and hands were a boy's, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had such deep blue eyes.

Finally, the unknown skater stopped. She was a woman.

Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold. The stranger's name, he found, was the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she had come with the Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father, to attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent, drinking some black liquid. None spoke English, and French was then little known at the Court.

It was by accident that Orlando and the Princess became acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table under a huge awning. The Princess was placed between two young Lords – one was Lord Francis Vere, and the other the young Earl of Moray. Both were fine lads in their way, but they had no knowledge of the French language. When at the beginning of dinner the Princess complimented the Queen's hairstyle in French, both Lord Francis and the Earl showed embarrassment. One put a sauce on her plate; the other called his dog and gave it a bone. The Princess laughed, and Orlando, catching her eyes, laughed too.

He laughed, but then the laugh froze on his lips. Whom had he loved? What had he loved until now? An old woman. Red-cheeked women of the beer gardens. A nun. A cruel dancer. Too much lace and ceremony. Love had meant nothing to him. The joys of it had a bland taste. As he looked at the Princess, his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; he saw the spring coming.

Then the Princess asked him, 'Would you pass me the salt?'

He blushed deeply. 'With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,' he replied, speaking French perfectly because his mother's maid had taught him.

The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat beside her? What was the strange food on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the men in England? Was that funny figure at the end of the table with her hair put up really the Queen? And did the King always drool like that? Though these questions embarrassed Orlando at first, they made him laugh; and he saw from the blank faces of the company that nobody understood a word. So he answered her as freely as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.

Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of the Court.

Soon it was obvious that Orlando paid the Muscovite much more attention than it was necessary. He was always by her side, and their conversation was all blushes and laughter. Then, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary. In one night he had been freed of his boyish clumsiness. Nobody had ever seen him so happy before; but a cloud hung over it all. The old men shrugged their shoulders. The young laughed. All knew that Orlando was engaged to another. The Lady Margaret O'Brien O'Dare O'Reilly Tyrconnel – that was the real name of Euphrosyne who wore Orlando's splendid sapphire ring on her finger – had the supreme right to his attention. Yet when she skated, which she did rather clumsily, no one was at her side, and, if she fell, which she did rather heavily, no one pulled her to her feet. Although she was naturally phlegmatic and did not believe that a foreigner could take her Orlando away, at last even the Lady Margaret herself started to suspect that there was something going on.

Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando tried to hide his feelings less and less. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company. Next moment it would be noticed that the Muscovite was missing too. But what bothered the Court most was that the couple was often seen disappearing among the crowd of common people in the public part of the river.

'Take me away. I hate your English Court,' the Princess would say to Orlando. She could not stand it. It was full of old women, she said, who stared in her face, and of young men who stepped on her toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles wide on which one could gallop six horses all day long without meeting a soul. Besides, she wanted to see the Tower[16], the Beefeaters[17], the Heads on Temple Bar[18], and the jewelers' shops in the city.

So Orlando took her into the city, showed her the Beefeaters and the rebels' heads, and bought her whatever she liked. But this was not enough. Each needed the other's company more and more. Instead of taking the road to London, they would turn the other way and would soon reach the frozen parts of the Thames[19] where not a living soul ever came their way.

Thus, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short and because it was the name of a white Russian fox[20] he had had as a boy – a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so violently that his father had it killed – had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love, they would fall to the ground. Wrapped in a great fur cloak, Orlando would take her in his arms and for the first time murmur the words of love. Then, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been nothing. And laughing at him, she would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat. Then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man's beard and that woman's skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the green tapestries that were always stirred by the wind in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for them; nothing was too great.

Then, suddenly, Orlando would fall into one of his melancholic moods. He would lie face down on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. 'All ends in death,' Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice, his face clouded with gloom. 'All ends in death.' But Sasha – who had no English blood in her, who was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns slower, and sentences often left unfinished – Sasha stared at him, perhaps laughed at him because he must have seemed childish to her, and said nothing. When the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, she pulled him to his feet, and he forgot the frozen waters, or the night coming, or the old woman, or whatever it was. He tried to tell her what she was like – with the passion of a poet whose poetry is squeezed out of him by pain. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, gold? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill – like nothing he had seen or known in England. Words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another language. English was too simple for Sasha. In all she said, there was something hidden; in all she did, there was some secret, like the green flame hidden in the emerald.