in she dipped her pen and off it went:
     She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
     Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve
     Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
     Had faded into paleness, broken by
     Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,
     but here,  by an abrupt movement  she  spilt the  ink over the page and
blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all
of a stew. Nothing  more repulsive  could  be imagined than to  feel the ink
flowing  thus in cascades of involuntary  inspiration. What had happened  to
her?  Was it the damp, was it  Bartholomew, was it Basket, what  was it? she
demanded. But the  room was empty. No one answered  her, unless the dripping
of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
     Meanwhile, she became conscious, as  she  stood at  the  window,  of an
extraordinary  tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a
thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales.
Now her toes tingled;  now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about
the thigh  bones.  Her hairs  seemed to erect themselves. Her arms  sang and
twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years
or so. But all  this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands;
and then in one hand, and  then in one finger of that hand, and then finally
to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the
second finger of  the  left hand. And when she raised it to  see what caused
this  agitation, she  saw nothing  -  nothing but the vast  solitary emerald
which Queen  Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It
was of  the  finest water.  It was worth  ten thousand pounds at  least. The
vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are  dealing with  some
of  the darkest manifestations of the  human soul)  to  say No, that is  not
enough; and, further, to assume a note  of interrogation, as though it  were
asking,  what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight -  till  poor
Orlando felt  positively  ashamed  of the second  finger  of her  left  hand
without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask
which  dress she should lay out for dinner, and  Orlando,  whose senses were
much quickened, instantly  glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly
perceived  what she  had  never  noticed before -  a thick  ring  of  rather
jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.
     "Let  me look at your ring, Bartholomew," she said, stretching her hand
to take it.
     At this,  Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a
rogue. She started back a pace or two,  clenched her hand and flung  it away
from her with a gesture that was noble in the  extreme. "No," she said, with
resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but as  for taking
off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope  nor Queen Victoria on
her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had put it  on  her finger
twenty-five  years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked
in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact,
Orlando understood her to say,  but her voice  was much broken with emotion;
that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be  assigned her
station  among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for  ever if she
let it out of her keeping for a second.
     "Heaven help us," said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the
pigeons at their pranks, "what a world we live in! What a world to be sure!"
Its  complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole  world was
ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to
church.  Wedding rings  were everywhere. She  drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck,
thin, thick, plain, smooth,  they glowed dully  on every  hand. Rings filled
the  jewellers' shops,  not  the flashing pastes  and  diamonds of Orlando's
recollection, but  simple bands without  a stone in them.  At the same time,
she began  to notice a new habit among the town people. In the old days, one
would  meet  a boy  trifling with a  girl under a hawthorn hedge  frequently
enough.  Orlando  had  flicked  many a  couple with the tip  of her whip and
laughed  and  passed on.  Now,  all that was  changed.  Couples  trudged and
plodded in the  middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman's
right hand was invariably passed through the man's left and her fingers were
firmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the  horses' noses were on them
that they  budged,  and then,  though  they moved it  was all  in one piece,
heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only  suppose that  some new
discovery  had  been  made about  the  race; that  they were  somehow  stuck
together, couple after couple, but who had  made  it and when, she could not
guess. It did not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits
and the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or
mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no indissoluble
alliance among  the brutes  that  she  could see. Could it be Queen Victoria
then,  or  Lord  Melbourne? Was  it  from  them that  the great discovery of
marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered,  was  said  to  be fond  of
dogs, and Lord  Melbourne,  she had  heard, was said to be fond of women. It
was  strange  - it was distasteful; indeed,  there  was  something  in  this
indissolubility of bodies  which was repugnant to her  sense of decency  and
sanitation.  Her  ruminations, however, were accompanied by  such a tingling
and twanging of the afflicted finger that  she could scarcely keep her ideas
in  order. They were languishing and ogling like a housemaid's fancies. They
made her blush. There was nothing for it but  to buy one of those ugly bands
and wear it like the rest. This she  did, slipping it, overcome with  shame,
upon her  finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. The tingling
persisted more violently,  more indignantly  than ever. She  did not sleep a
wink that night. Next  morning when she took up the pen to write, either she
could think of nothing, and  the  pen made one large lachrymose  blot  after
another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies
about early death and corruption, which were worse  than no thinking at all.
For it would seem  -  her case proved  it  -  that  we  write, not  with the
fingers, but with the whole person.  The nerve which controls the  pen winds
itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Though the  seat of her trouble seemed to  be the left hand, she could  feel
herself poisoned through  and through, and  was forced at length to consider
the   most  desperate  of  remedies,  which  was  to  yield  completely  and
submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.
     That   this  was  much  against   her  natural   temperament  has  been
sufficiently made plain.  When the sound of the  Archduke's  chariot  wheels
died away, the cry that rose to her lips was "Life! A  Lover!"  not "Life! A
Husband!" and  it was  in  pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and
run  about the world as has been shown in the previous  chapter. Such is the
indomitable  nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it  batters down
anyone  who tries  to make stand against it far  more effectually than those
who  bend  its  own  way. Orlando  had  inclined  herself naturally  to  the
Elizabethan  spirit,  to  the  Restoration  spirit,  to  the  spirit of  the
eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change
from one  age  to the other.  But the  spirit of the  nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and  broke her, and
she was aware of her defeat at its hands as  she had never  been before. For
it  is probable that the human spirit has  its place in time assigned to it;
some are born of this  age, some of that; and now that  Orlando was  grown a
woman, a  year  or two  past thirty indeed, the  lines of her character were
fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
     So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window  (Bartholomew had so
christened  the library) dragged down by the weight  of  the crinoline which
she had  submissively adopted.  It was heavier and more drab  than any dress
she had yet worn.  None had  ever so impeded her  movements. No longer could
she  stride through the  garden  with her dogs, or run  lightly  to the high
mound and fling  herself  beneath  the oak  tree. Her skirts  collected damp
leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the  breeze. The thin shoes  were
quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became
nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the
first  time in her life,  of ghosts  in  the  corridors.  All  these  things
inclined her,  step  by step, to submit to  the new discovery, whether Queen
Victoria's  or another's,  that each man and each woman has another allotted
to it for life, whom it  supports, by whom it  is supported, till death them
do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean;  to sit down; yes, to lie
down; never, never, never to get  up again. Thus did the  spirit  work  upon
her,  for  all  her past pride, and  as she came sloping  down the  scale of
emotion  to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place,  those  twangings and
tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the
sweetest melodies,  till  it seemed  as if angels were plucking harp-strings
with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
     But  whom  could she  lean upon?  She  asked that question of the  wild
autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he
had  married a very great lady and had hunted hares  in Roumania  these many
years  now; nor Mr  M.; he was become a Catholic; nor  the Marquis of C.; he
made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for fishes.
One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the
Kits of Drury  Lane,  much though she  favoured  them, scarcely did to  lean
upon.
     "Whom," she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping
her  hands  as she knelt on the  window-sill, and looking the very image  of
appealing womanhood  as  she did so, "can  I lean  upon?" Her  words  formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had
written of  its own accord. It was not Orlando who  spoke, but the spirit of
the age.  But whichever it was,  nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling
pell-mell  among the violet clouds of autumn. The  rain  had stopped at last
and there  was an  iridescence  in the sky which  tempted her to put on  her
plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
     "Everyone  is  mated  except  myself,"  she   mused,   as  she  trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and Pippin
even - transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to
have a partner.  "Whereas, I, who  am mistress of it all,"  Orlando thought,
glancing as she passed  at the innumerable emblazoned  windows  of the hall,
"am single, am mateless, am alone."
     Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down
unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open,  she  tapped with  a gloved
hand  for the  porter to unfasten  it for her. One must lean on someone, she
thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind  and help
him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals,  but  was too timid to ask
it. So  she  strayed  out  into  the  park  alone,  faltering  at first  and
apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys
to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.
     At  every step she glanced nervously lest  some  male  form  should  be
hiding behind a  furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss
her. But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky.  A steel-blue plume
from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers. She
had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.
The air blew  upon her  spirit  somewhat  and revived  it. As the rooks went
whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming
through the purplish  air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind
her, over the moor, up the hill.  She had not walked  so far for years.  Six
feathers had  she  picked from the  grass and drawn  between her fingers and
pressed  to  her lips  to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw,
gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool,  mysterious as the lake into which
Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur. A single feather quivered in the air
and fell  into the middle of it. Then,  some strange  ecstasy came over her.
Some wild notion she had  of following the birds to the rim of the world and
flinging herself on the spongy  turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while
the  rooks' hoarse  laughter  sounded over  her. She quickened her pace; she
ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle
was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent  of the
bog myrtle and  the meadow-sweet  was  in  her nostrils. The  rooks'  hoarse
laughter was  in  her ears. "I have found my mate," she murmured. "It is the
moor. I am nature's bride,"  she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the
cold embraces of the grass  as she lay  folded in her cloak in the hollow by
the pool. "Here  will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I  have found a
greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild
birds' feathers - the owl's,  the nightjar's. I shall  dream wild dreams. My
hands  shall wear  no wedding ring," she continued,  slipping  it  from  her
finger. "The roots shall twine about  them. Ah!"  she  sighed, pressing  her
head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, "I have sought happiness through many
ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life - and
behold,  death  is  better. I  have  known many  men  and  many women,"  she
continued; "none have I understood. It is better that I should lie  at peace
here with  only the sky above me - as  the gipsy told me years ago. That was
in Turkey." And she looked straight up into the marvellous  golden foam into
which the  clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it,
and  camels passing in single file through the rocky desert  among clouds of
red  dust; and then, when the camels  had passed, there were only mountains,
very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she
heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields  of
irises  and  gentian.  So  the  sky  changed  and  her  eyes slowly  lowered
themselves down and down  till they came to the rain-darkened  earth and saw
the great hump of  the South Downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and
where the land parted, there  was the sea, the sea  with  ships passing; and
she fancied  she heard  a gun  far out at sea, and thought at first, "That's
the Armada,"  and then thought "No,  it's Nelson," and  then remembered  how
those  wars were over and the  ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails
on the winding river were  those of pleasure  boats.  She saw,  too,  cattle
sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she  saw the lights coming
here and there  in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among  the cattle
as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out
and the stars  rose and tangled themselves about  the  sky. Indeed,  she was
falling asleep with the  wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the
ground when  she heard, deep  within, some hammer on an anvil,  or  was it a
heart beating? Tick-tock,  tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil,
or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought
it changed  to the trot  of a  horse's  hoofs;  one, two, three,  four,  she
counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as  it came nearer  and nearer, she
could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The
horse  was  almost on  her. She  sat  upright.  Towering  dark  against  the
yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the  plovers rising and falling  about him,
she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
     "Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!"
     "I'm dead, sir!" she replied.
     A few minutes later, they became engaged.
     The morning after, as they  sat at breakfast, he told her  his name. It
was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
     "I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous,
passionate, melancholy,  yet determined about him which went with the  wild,
dark-plumed name  -  a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue  gleam of
rooks'  wings, the hoarse  laughter of their  caws, the  snake-like twisting
descent of their feathers in  a  silver  pool,  and a thousand other  things
which will be described presently.
     "Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it.  For  if you see a ship
in  full  sail coming  with  the  sun  on  it  proudly  sweeping across  the
Mediterranean  from  the  South  Seas,  one  says  at  once,  "Orlando,"  he
explained.
     In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed,
as always  happens between  lovers, everything  of any importance about each
other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such
unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and  whether
they were beggars  or people of substance. He had a castle in the  Hebrides,
but it was ruined, he  told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting hall.  He
had  been  a soldier and a sailor,  and had explored the East. He was on his
way now to  join his brig at Falmouth, but  the wind  had fallen and it  was
only  when the  gale blew from the South-west that he  could put out to sea.
Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on
the weather vane. Mercifully its  tail pointed due east and was  steady as a
rock. "Oh! Shel, don't leave me!" she cried. "I'm passionately in  love with
you,"  she  said.  No  sooner had the words  left  her mouth  than  an awful
suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
     "You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
     "You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
     Never was  there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then
took place since the  world began. When it  was over  and they  were  seated
again she asked him, what was this talk  of  a South-west gale? Where was he
bound for?
     "For  the Horn," he said briefly, and  blushed. (For a man had to blush
as a woman  had, only at  rather different things.)  It was only  by dint of
great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that  she  gathered
that  his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures  -
which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the  teeth of  a gale. Masts had  been
snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him).
Sometimes the ship had  sunk,  and he had been left  the only survivor on  a
raft with a biscuit.
     "It's  about all a  fellow  can do nowadays," he said  sheepishly,  and
helped himself to great  spoonfuls  of  strawberry jam. The vision which she
had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking  peppermints, for
which  he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he
roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the
tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of  a finer  flavour  than any  she had
cried before: "I  am a woman,"  she  thought,  "a real woman, at last."  She
thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare
and unexpected delight. Had she  not been lame  in the left foot, she  would
have sat upon his knee.
     "Shel, my darling,"  she began  again, "tell me..."  and so they talked
two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would
profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well
that  they  could  say  anything, which is  tantamount to saying nothing, or
saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy
the  best  boots  in London, things which  have  no lustre taken  from their
setting,  yet  are  positively of amazing beauty within it.  For it has come
about,  by  the wise economy  of nature, that our  modern spirit can  almost
dispense  with language; the commonest  expressions do, since no expressions
do;  hence the most  ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the
most poetic  is precisely  that  which  cannot be written  down.  For  which
reasons we leave  a great  blank here, which  must be taken to indicate that
the space is filled to repletion.
     After some days more of this kind of talk,
     "Orlando, my dearest," Shel was beginning, when  there was  a scuffling
outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there was a
couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.
     "Show 'em up," said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck,
taking up, by instinct, a stand with his  hands  behind him in  front of the
fireplace. Two  officers in bottlegreen  uniforms  with truncheons  at their
hips then entered the  room and stood at  attention. Formalities being over,
they  gave into Orlando's  own  hands,  as  their  commission  was, a  legal
document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs  of sealing wax,
the  ribbons, the oaths, and the  signatures, which  were all of the highest
importance.
     Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her
right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to
the matter.
     "The lawsuits are settled," she read out..."some in  my favour,  as for
example...others  not.  Turkish  marriage  annulled  (I  was  ambassador  in
Constantinople,  Shel,"  she explained)  "Children pronounced  illegitimate,
(they said I had  three  sons  by  Pepita, a  Spanish dancer). So they don't
inherit, which is  all to the good...Sex?  Ah! what about sex? My sex,"  she
read out  with some solemnity,  "is pronounced  indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment  ago, Shel?), female. The
estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity  descend  and are  tailed
and  entailed upon  the heirs male  of my body, or in default of marriage" -
but here she grew impatient with  this legal verbiage, and said, "but  there
won't  be any default of marriage, nor of  heirs either, so the rest  can be
taken as  read."  Whereupon she  appended  her  own  signature  beneath Lord
Palmerston's and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of
her titles, her  house,  and her estate - which  was now so much shrunk, for
the  cost  of  the  lawsuits  had  been  prodigious,  that,  though she  was
infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.
     When the result of the  lawsuit was  made  known (and  rumour flew much
quicker than the telegraph which  has  supplanted  it), the whole  town  was
filled with rejoicings.
     [Horses were  put  into  carriages for the  sole purpose of being taken
out. Empty barouches and landaus  were trundled  up and down the High Street
incessantly. Addresses were read  from  the Bull. Replies were made from the
Stag. The town was  illuminated. Gold caskets  were securely sealed in glass
cases. Coins were well and  duly laid under stones. Hospitals  were founded.
Rat and  Sparrow  clubs were  inaugurated. Turkish women by the  dozen  were
burnt in effigy  in the market-place,  together with  scores of peasant boys
with  the label "I am  a  base Pretender",  lolling  from their mouths.  The
Queen's cream-coloured ponies were soon seen  trotting  up the avenue with a
command to Orlando to dine and  sleep at the Castle, that  very same  night.
Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from
the  Countess of  R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston,  the Marchioness of P.,  Mrs
W.E. Gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding
her of  ancient alliances between their family and her own,  etc.] -  all of
which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason
that  a  parenthesis it was  without any  importance in  Orlando's life. She
skipped it, to get on with the text. For when  the bonfires were blazing  in
the marketplace,  she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone.  So fine
was the weather that  the trees stretched  their  branches motionless  above
them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red  and gold, so slowly that one
could watch it for half an  hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest
at last, on Orlando's foot.
     "Tell me, Mar," she would say (and here it must be explained, that when
she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy,
amorous,  acquiescent mood, domestic, languid  a little, as if  spiced  logs
were burning, and it  was  evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet
perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a  nightingale might
be singing  even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at  distant
farms, a cock crowing - all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)
- "Tell me, Mar," she would say, "about Cape Horn." Then  Shelmerdine  would
make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and
an empty snail shell or two.
     "Here's the north," he would say. "There's the south. The wind's coming
from  hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing  due west;  we've just lowered the
top-boom  mizzen: and  so  you see - here, where this  bit  of grass is, she
enters  the current which you'll find marked - where's my map and compasses,
Bo'sun?  Ah!  thanks,  that'll  do,  where the snail  shell  is. The current
catches her on the starboard side, so we  must rig the  jib-boom or we shall
be  carried to the larboard, which  is where that beech  leaf is, -  for you
must understand my dear"  - and so he would  go on, and she would listen  to
every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without
his  having  to tell  her,  the  phosphorescence on the  waves; the  icicles
clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there
reflected  on  the destiny  of man; came down again; had  a whisky and soda;
went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read
Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought  a monkey;  debated  the true
end of  life;  decided in favour  of Cape Horn,  and so on. All  this  and a
thousand  other things she understood him to  say, and so  when she replied,
Yes,  negresses  are  seductive,  aren't they? he having  told  her that the
supply of biscuits now gave out,  he was surprised and delighted to find how
well she had taken his meaning.
     "Are you  positive you  aren't a  man?" he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,
     "Can it be possible you're not a woman?" and then they must  put  it to
the proof  without more ado. For each was so surprised  at the  quickness of
the  other's  sympathy,  and it  was to each  such a revelation that a woman
could be as tolerant  and free-spoken as  a man,  and a  man as strange  and
subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.
     And so they  would go  on  talking or rather, understanding,  which has
become the main art of  speech  in  an age when words  are growing daily  so
scanty in comparison with ideas that "the biscuits ran out" has to stand for
kissing a negress  in  the  dark  when  one has  just read Bishop Berkeley's
philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the  most
profound  masters of style can tell the truth,  and when  one meets a simple
one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any  doubt at  all,  that the
poor man is lying.)
     So  they would  talk; and then, when her  feet were fairly covered with
spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away  into the heart of
the  woods  in  solitude, leaving  Bonthrop  sitting there among  the  snail
shells, making models of Cape  Horn. "Bonthrop," she  would say,  "I'm off,"
and when she called him by his second name, "Bonthrop", it should signify to
the  reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt  them both as specks  on a
desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily,
die at  dinner  tables,  or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and
with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or  Lady Derby  asking her out
every  night to  dinner,  the  desire  for death would overcome her, and  so
saying "Bonthrop", she  said in  effect, "I'm dead", and pushed her way as a
spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep
into solitude as if the  little flicker  of noise and movement were over and
she were free now to take her way - all of  which the  reader should hear in
her  voice when she said  "Bonthrop",  and  should also add,  the  better to
illumine the word,  that  for him too  the same  word signified, mystically,
separation and  isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in
unfathomable seas.
     After some  hours of death, suddenly a  jay shrieked "Shelmerdine", and
stooping, she picked  up one  of those autumn crocuses which to some  people
signify that very word, and put it with the jay's feather that came tumbling
blue through the  beech woods, in her breast.  Then she called "Shelmerdine"
and  the word went  shooting this way and  that  way through the  woods  and
struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells  in the grass. He
saw her,  and heard  her coming to him with the crocus and the jay's feather
in her  breast, and cried "Orlando", which meant  (and it must be remembered
that when bright  colours like blue and yellow  mix themselves in our  eyes,
some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken
as if  something  were  breaking through; which proved to  be a ship in full
sail, heaving and  tossing  a little dreamily, rather as if she  had a whole
year of summer days  to make  her voyage  in; and so the  ship  bears  down,
heaving this way, heaving  that way, nobly, indolently,  and  rides over the
crest of this wave and sinks into the  hollow of  that one, and so, suddenly
stands over you (who are in  a little cockle shell of  a boat, looking up at
her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap
on deck - as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
     Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the
26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine recited
Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which  had started
to fall slowly enough  from a treetop whipped briskly across Orlando's foot.
A second leaf followed and  then a third. Orlando shivered  and turned pale.
It was the wind.  Shelmerdine  - but it would be more proper now to call him
Bonthrop - leapt to his feet.
     "The wind!" he cried.
     Together  they ran  through  the woods, the wind plastering  them  with
leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts,
frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after
till they reached the Chapel,  and there a scattering  of lights was  lit as
fast  as  could be, one knocking over this bench, another  snuffing out that
taper. Bells  were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr Dupper
catching at the ends of his white  tie and asking where was the prayer book.
And they  thrust  Queen  Mary's  prayer  book in  his hands and he searched,
hastily fluttering the pages, and said, "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and
Lady Orlando, kneel down"; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and
now  they were  dark  as  the  light  and  shadow came flying helter-skelter
through the painted windows; and among  the banging of innumerable doors and
a sound like brass pots beating,  the organ  sounded, its growl  coming loud
and faint  alternately, and Mr  Dupper, who was  grown a very old man, tried
now to raise his voice above  the uproar and could not be heard and then all
was quiet  for a moment,  and one word - it  might be "the jaws of  death" -
rang  out clear,  while all the estate servants kept pressing in  with rakes
and whips  still  in  their  hands to listen, and some sang loud and  others
prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap
of  thunder, so that no one heard the word  Obey spoken or saw, except as  a
golden  flash,  the  ring pass  from hand to  hand.  All  was  movement  and
confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing
and the rain pouring,  and  the Lady Orlando, with  her ring on  her finger,
went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for
the horse was  bitted and  bridled and the foam was still on  his flank, for
her husband to mount,  which  he  did with  one bound, and the  horse  leapt
forward  and  Orlando,   standing  there,  cried   out  "Marmaduke  Bonthrop
Shelmerdine!" and he answered her "Orlando!" and the words went  dashing and
circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher  and higher,
further and further, faster and  faster they circled, till  they crashed and
fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
     <img alt="0x01 graphic" src="StrangeNoGraphicData">


        CHAPTER 6.
     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 c