Orlando. A Biography / Орландо
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But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had finished telling her that she was a fox, an olive tree, or a green hilltop, and had given her the whole history of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; he paused and asked her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had she brothers? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she answered, an awkwardness came between them. At first he suspected that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of her own people; so he did not press her. But he felt that her silence could not be for that reason, because she dressed in velvet and pearls, and her manners were exquisite.
What, then, was she hiding from him?
Skating farther than usual that day, they reached the part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen in the middle of it. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy with its double-headed black eagle on the main mast. Sasha had left some of her clothing on board, and, thinking the ship was empty, they climbed on deck and went looking for it. They had not gone too far when a fine young man appeared out of nowhere and, saying something in Russian, probably offered to help the Princess to find what she wanted because he then lit a candle and disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, waiting for her, thought only of the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of ways of making her his own. There were difficulties to overcome. She wanted to live in Russia where there were frozen rivers and wild horses. It was true that a landscape of pine and snow did not excite him. Nor was he ready to ruin his career. Still, he would do anything for her. As for his marriage to the Lady Margaret, it was absurd. Nothing mattered now compared with Sasha herself. On the first dark night they would flee. They would take ship to Russia. So he thought, walking up and down the deck.
It was almost evening; the sun was setting; and Sasha had been gone for an hour or more. Suddenly, overcome with a bad feeling, Orlando rushed the way he had seen them go into the lower part of the ship; and, after walking among chests and barrels in the darkness, he finally saw a light in the corner. They were seated there. For one second, he saw Sasha sitting on the sailor's knee; saw her lean towards him; saw them embrace. Then the light was clouded by his rage. He howled, and Sasha jumped up and stood between him and the sailor. Then a deadly sickness came over Orlando and they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy to drink.
When he had returned to his senses[21] and was sitting on the deck, he saw Sasha standing over him, taking care of him, so that now he began to doubt what he had seen. Maybe it had just been the shadow moving in the candle light? The box was heavy, she said; the sailor was helping her to lift it. Orlando believed her one moment, but the next he was filled with anger at her again. Then Sasha herself turned white; she stamped her feet; she said let her Gods kill her if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of a sailor. Indeed, looking at them together, Orlando could not understand how his imagination had painted such a picture. She was so slim and delicate, and the man looked so wild and brutal. So he agreed; he believed her; and asked her to forgive him. Yet when they were getting down the ship's side, Sasha stopped, turned back to the sailor and said some Russian greetings, not a word of which Orlando could understand. But there was something in her tone that reminded Orlando of an incident that had happened some nights ago. He had found her in a corner with a candle-end which she had picked from the floor. She was biting it in secret. It was pink; it was covered with gold; it was from the King's table; but it was made of fat, and she ate it. Was there not, he thought, something peasant about her? But again, as they skated towards London, all his suspicions melted.
It was a beautiful evening. As the sun set, all the domes, spires, and turrets of London rose in blackness against the red sunset clouds. The ice had become so blue and so smooth that they seemed to be skating faster and faster to the city all the time. Sasha was nicer to him than usual and even more delightful. She seldom talked about her past life, but now she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling. Then he told her of the horses in the snow at home, and how they would walk into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket. And then she praised him; for his love of animals; for his legs. He told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet he immediately thought how she was like the spring and green grass and blue waters. Later, as they stopped, panting, she said, that he was like a Christmas tree, decorated with a million candles and yellow globes; lighting a whole street with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his black and crimson cloak – he looked as if he was lit with a million candles that were burning within.
All the colors soon faded. Night came. When the orange light of sunset was gone, the torches and bonfires lit up the river. Then the strangest transformation happened: all the churches and palaces seemed to be floating on the air. As Orlando and Sasha skated closer to the carnival, they heard people shout as a rocket flew into the air. Above and around this brilliant circle was the deep black of a winter's night. And then, into this darkness, there began to rise many flowering rockets; snakes; a crown. At one moment, the woods and the hills showed green as on a summer's day; the next moment, all was winter and blackness again.
There was a great crowd on the river: tailors; fishwives; horse sellers; scholars; maids; servants; drunkards; sober citizens. Indeed, all the common people of the London streets were there, stamping their feet, whistling. Most stood opposite a stage upon which some kind of show was going on. A black man was waving his arms. A woman in white lay on a bed. And when the Moor strangled the woman in her bed, Orlando suddenly felt as if it was Sasha whom he killed with his own hands.
At last the play ended, and all had grown dark. The tears were streaming down Orlando's face. Looking up into the sky, he saw that there was nothing but blackness there. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. Our life ends in the grave, and worms eat us.
Even as he thought this, some hope rose in his memory. The night was dark, so dark; but it was such a night as this that they had been waiting for; it was on such a night as this that they had planned to flee. He remembered everything. The time had come. He embraced Sasha and whispered in her ear, 'Jour de ma vie![22]' It was their signal. At midnight they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars[23]. Horses waited there. Everything was ready. So they parted – she went to her tent, he to his.
Long before midnight Orlando was in the little courtyard of the inn, waiting. The night was of an extraordinary blackness and stillness. Many times Orlando's heart jumped at the sound of some footsteps on the cobbled street, or at the rustle of a woman's dress. But they passed, and the street was quieter than before. The lights in the houses went out, and the street lanterns were few there. The darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando checked the saddles a dozen times at least till he could be sure that everything was ready. Though it was still some twenty minutes to midnight, he could not make himself go indoors. He listened to every footstep, every sound, as if it could be an omen to his venture. Yet, he had no fear for Sasha. She would love this adventure. She would come alone, in her cloak and trousers, dressed like a man. Her light footsteps would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly, something hit him in the face, softly, yet heavily. He started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on his forehead and cheeks. It took him a minute to realize that these blows were raindrops falling. At first, they fell slowly, one by one. But soon the rain began to pour. In five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin[24].
He quickly put the horses under cover and stood in the doorway from where he could still see the courtyard. The air was now thicker than ever, and the rain was so heavy that no footsteps could be heard above it. The roads would be under water now, but he did not think about it. He was looking at the cobbled pathway, waiting for Sasha to come. Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her, but then the image disappeared.
Suddenly, with an awful ominous voice, which raised fears in Orlando's soul, St. Paul's[25] struck the first stroke of midnight. Orlando had decided that she would come on the sixth stroke. But the sixth stroke passed; then the seventh came, and the eighth; and they seemed to promise death and disaster. When the twelfth struck, he knew that he was doomed. He could not reason; she might be late; she might be stopped; she might be lost. The passionate heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit.
Orlando felt as if he was bitten by a thousand poisonous snakes. He stood in the doorway in the rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he dropped to his knees. He could hear great guns booming, loud noises of falling oak trees, and terrible wild cries. But Orlando stood there till Paul's clock struck two, and then, crying aloud, 'Jour de ma vie!' he jumped on his horse and galloped he knew not where.
By some instinct, he rode along the river bank in the direction of the sea. It was almost morning; the sky was turning a pale yellow, and the rain nearly stopped. He found himself on the banks of the Thames at Wapping and saw the most extraordinary sight. Where there had been thick ice for three months and more, now was a stream of yellow waters. The river broke free in the night. There were icebergs everywhere. Some of them were as broad as a field and as high as a house; others were no bigger than a man's hat. The river was flowing and twisting like a snake, tossing the icebergs from bank to bank, smashing them against the piers, destroying everything that stood in their way.
But the most awful sight was the terror of the people trapped in the night on the moving islands of ice. Whether they jumped into the water, or stayed on the ice, their doom was certain. Some of these poor creatures were standing on their knees, praying. One old man was reading aloud from a holy book. As they were carried out to sea, some could be heard crying for help, confessing their sins and making promises if God would hear their prayers. Others sat still and silent, staring blindly before them. One group of young sailors were shouting tavern songs. An old nobleman went down not far from where Orlando stood. Many drowned holding some silver pot or other treasure tightly; and some poor ones drowned because they jumped from the bank into the river as they saw valuable possessions of all sorts being carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights was a cat with its kitten; a table laid for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed.
Astonished, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch the waters flow as they went past him. At last, he spurred his horse and galloped along the river bank in the direction of the sea. He reached that place where – not even two days ago – the ships of the Ambassadors had stood frozen. Quickly, he counted them all: the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turkish. All were still there, except for the Russian ship. For a moment, Orlando thought that it must have sunk; but then, raising his eyes, he saw the shape of a ship on the horizon, with the black eagles flying from the mast.
The ship of the Muscovite Embassy was going out to sea.
2
In the summer that followed that terrible winter which saw the frost, the flood, the deaths of many people, and which ruined Orlando's hopes, as he was banned from Court, he went to his great house in the country and lived there in solitude.
One June morning – it was Saturday the 18th – Orlando did not get up at his usual hour, and when his servants went to call him, he was found asleep and could not be awakened. He lay as if in a trance, almost without breathing. The dogs were barking under his window; drums were beaten in his room; his feet were covered with mustard – still he did not wake up, take food, or show any sign of life for seven whole days.
On the seventh day, he woke at his usual time – a quarter before eight – and sent everyone out of his room, which was natural enough. Strangely enough, he was not aware of any trance, but simply dressed himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a usual night's sleep. Yet some change – as it was suspected – must have taken place in his brain, because though he was perfectly rational and even gloomier than before, he seemed to have forgotten some events of his past life. He would listen when people spoke of the great frost, or the skating, or the carnival, but he never gave any sign that he had witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six months were discussed, he seemed puzzled, as if he was listening to stories which some other person had already told him. If Russia was mentioned, or Princesses, or ships, he would become gloomy and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him. But the doctors only told him to lie in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, and left him to himself. In their opinion, all the strangeness was due to the fact that he had been asleep for a week.
But if it was sleep, then what was its nature? Was it a cure? Was it the finger of death? Are people made so that they have to take death in small doses daily or they could not go on with their life? Had Orlando died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life?
Now Orlando led a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace at Court and his grief were partly the reason of it. He seldom invited anyone to visit him, though he still had many friends. To be alone, in the great house of his fathers, suited him well. Solitude was his choice. Nobody quite knew how he spent his time. In the dark of the evening, the servants, whose business was to dust empty rooms and to tidy the beds that were never slept in, watched a light passing along the galleries and the banqueting-halls, up the stairs, into the bedrooms, and knew that it was their master taking a walk through the house, alone. None of them dared follow him, of course, because the house was haunted by a great variety of ghosts.
When the light disappeared, Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, that she hoped his Lordship had not had any bad accident. Mr. Dupper would answer that his Lordship was probably on his knees, among the tombs of his ancestors, in the Chapel, half a mile away on the south side. They agreed that it was such a pity to see a fine nobleman moping about the house when he might be hunting the fox and deer. In short, all his serving men and women thought that his Lordship was a handsome and pleasant gentleman; they respected him and cursed the foreign Princess.
Indeed, Mr. Dupper was right. Orlando now enjoyed the thoughts of death, and, after walking along galleries and ballrooms with a candle in his hand, looking at picture after picture, he would come into the family chapel and sit for hours watching the tapestries stir in the moonlight. Even this was not enough for him, so he would go down into the sepulcher where his ancestors lay, coffin upon coffin, for ten generations together. The place was so seldom visited that the rats made holes in the coffins, and a bone or a skull would catch at his cloak or roll under his foot as he passed. It was a grim sepulcher, dug deep beneath the house as if the first Lord of the family had wished to show how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh: how people that dance and sing above must then lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring loses its ruby and the eye shines no more.
'Nothing is left of all these Princes, except the dates,' Orlando would say, taking a skeleton hand in his, bending it this way and that, then putting it back with the other bones. 'Whose hand was it? The right or the left? The hand of man or woman, of old or young? Had it held a rose or cold steel?'
So, taking his candle, he returned to that curious, moody walking down the galleries, looking for something among the pictures. Soon it was interrupted by a spasm of sobbing when he saw a snow landscape painting by an unknown artist. Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting the bones of his ancestors, he stood there, shaking with sobs, desiring a treacherous woman in Russian trousers. She had gone. She had left him. He would never see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he went back to his room. And Mrs.
Grimsditch, seeing the light in the window, thanked God his Lordship was safe again.
Back in his room, Orlando sat at the table and opened the works of Sir Thomas Browne[26].
Strangely, Orlando had many moods: melancholy, laziness, passion, love of solitude. But the mood for books was an early one. As a child, he was sometimes found at midnight still reading. When servants took his candle away, he used glow-worms. When they took the glow-worms away, he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it simply, he was a nobleman infected with a love of literature. Many people of his time, especially of his rank, did not have the infection and thus were free to run or ride or make love. But some were early infected by this disease, the nature of which was to substitute an illusion for reality. So when Orlando opened a book, everything around him turned to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house, one hundred and fifty servants, his eighty horses, countless carpets, sofas, and china – all disappeared.
So Orlando would sit by himself, reading in solitude. He would often read six hours into the night; and when the servants came to him for orders, he would put away his book and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This broke the hearts of Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, and of all the others. A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the sick or the dying.
But worse was yet to come[27]. Orlando fell in love with writing. It is a disaster for any man, and especially for a rich one. He would give every penny he had to write one little book and become famous; yet no gold would buy him the treasure of a well-written line.
Happily, Orlando was strong enough, and the disease never broke him down as it had broken many others. Yet when he had read for an hour or so, and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night[28] and all were asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key out of his pocket, and unlocked a great cabinet which stood in the corner. Inside there were about fifty drawers, and in each drawer lay a thick document, all written in Orlando's hand. He paused, thinking which one to open.
The truth was that Orlando had been afflicted with this disease for many years. Never had any boy asked for sweets or apples as Orlando asked for paper and ink. He would hide behind curtains, or in the cupboard behind his mother's bedroom, with an inkpot in one hand, a pen in another, and a roll of paper on his knee. Thus he had written, before he turned twenty-five, about forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all very long. One of them he had had printed; but he had never dared show it even to his mother because for a nobleman, as he knew, to write was a disgrace.
Now, however, was the dead of night, and he was alone, so he chose one thick document called 'Xenophila: A Tragedy', and another thin one, called simply 'The Oak Tree'. But then he paused.
People's Memory is a strange thing. Dipping his pen in the ink, Orlando suddenly saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and immediately asked himself a million questions. Where was she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead?
But then a different face overlay the face of the Princess in Orlando's mind. Whose is it?he asked himself. And looking at the new picture which lay on top of the old, he had to wait perhaps half a minute before he could say to himself, This is the face of that rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett's room so many years ago when old Queen Elizabeth came here; and I saw him, sitting at the table, as I stopped on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes. But who the devil was he? Not a nobleman; not one of us… A poet, I dare say!
Orlando paused because Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big, bright eyes. Still he looked, still he paused. Once before he had paused, and Love had burst into his life. From Love he had suffered, and now, again, he paused, and in jumped Ambition, and Poetry, and Desire of Fame. Standing upright, alone in his room, he vowed that he would be the first poet of his family and would make a name for himself[29]. His ancestors had fought and killed, but what was left of all that killing, and drinking, and love-making, and hunting, and riding, and eating? A skull; a finger. Then, turning to the book of Sir Thomas Browne and comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, he cried that their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.
He soon saw, however, that the battles to win a kingdom were not even half as hard as the battle which he was now fighting to win immortality against the English language. Anyone familiar with the composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed horrible; corrected and tore the paper up; cut out; put in; was excited; was in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; found ideas and lost them; acted his people's parts as he ate; as he walked; now cried; now laughed; chose between this style and that; and still could not decide whether he was a genius or the greatest fool in the world.
To find the answer to this last question after many months of his battle, he decided to break the solitude of years and meet with the outer world. He had a friend in London, Giles Isham, of Norfolk, who knew certain writers and could put him in touch with[30] some of them. For Orlando, there was a glory about a man who had written a book and had it printed. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit behind a curtain and hear them talk. He thought with pride that he himself had always been called a scholar and laughed at for his love of solitude and books. He had never been good at pretty phrases. He would often stand still and blush when talking to ladies. He had twice fallen from his horse. Recalling these episodes of his social life, he hoped that all the troubles of his youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the country proved that he himself was not an aristocrat by birth, but a writer. For the first time since the night of the great flood he was happy.
He now paid Mr. Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr. Nicholas Greene[31] of Clifford's Inn a document in which Orlando expressed his admiration for his works – as Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time; and his desire to meet him in person, if Mr. Nicholas Greene would be so kind as to visit him. That last thing Orlando almost did not dare ask for because he had nothing to offer in return. To Orlando's delight, quite soon, Mr. Greene accepted the Noble Lord's invitation and thus was received at seven o'clock on Monday, April the twenty-first, in the southern hall of the main building.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there. Judges and warriors had stood there. The loveliest ladies of the land had come there. There were coats of arms[32] with their lions and their leopards. There were the long tables with the gold and silver plates. There were vast marble fireplaces where nightly a whole oak tree, with its million leaves and its bird nests, was burnt to ashes. Nicholas Greene, the poet, stood there now, dressed in his old hat and a shabby black coat, holding a small bag in one hand.