Orlando (36 page)

Authors: Virginia Woolf

BOOK: Orlando

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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
³⁸(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 her. 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 house-maids 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 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
³⁹coming 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.

Index

A., Lord,
135

Abbey, Westminster,
39

Addison, Joseph,
119
,
138
,
145

Alexandra, Queen,
55

Anne, Queen,
136

Archduchess Harriet of Finster-Aarhorn (
see
Archduke Harry),
77
,
126
–8

Archduke, Harry, the,
169

Arlington House,
137

Bartholomew, Widow,
161
,
162
,
165

Bartolus, Captain Nicholas Benedict,
109
,
115
,
138

Basket, Butler,
163

Boswell, James,
154

Brigge, John Fenner,
90
,
94

Browne, Sir Thomas,
51
,
54
,
57

Browning, Robert,
193

C, Marquis of,
135
,
169

Canute, the elk-hound,
169

Carlyle, Thomas,
193

Carpenter, Nurse,
50

Charles the Second, King,
83

Chesterfield, Lady,
134

Chesterfield, Lord,
148
,
201

Chubb, Eusebius,
158

Cicero,
71

Clorinda,
23

Consort, the Prince,
208

Cumberland, Earl of,
21
,
208

Deffand, Madame du,
139

Donne, John,
62
,
198

Drake,
226

Dryden, John,
119
,
138
,
219

Dupper, Mr.,
49
,
53
,
58
,
120
,
121
,
181

Elizabeth, Queen,
15
,
16
,
17
,
18
,
19
,
69

Euphrosyne,
23

Favilla,
23

Field, Mrs.,
50

Frost, the Great,
24

Gladstone, Mrs.,
177

Greene, Nicholas (afterwards Sir),
58
–65,
71
,
192
,
225

Greenwich,
60

Grimsditch, Mrs.,
49
,
51
,
53
,
74
,
120
,
121
,
208

Gulliver’s Travels,
146

Gwynn, Nell,
83

Hall, the falconer,
53

Hartopp, Miss Penelope,
91

Hercules, Death of, tragedy by Orlando,
65

Isham, Mr.,
58

James the First, King,
24
,
47
,
69

Johnson, Samuel,
154

Jonson, Ben,
62

Kew Gardens,
203

Keynes, Mrs. J. M. (
see
Lopokova, Madame)

Leicester Square,
150

Lock, Rape of the,
145

Lopokova, Madame,
217

Louise,
208

M., Mr.,
135
,
169

Marlowe,
61
,
62

Marshall & Snelgrove’s,
207

Mary, Queen of Scots,
122

Melbourne, Lord,
166

Moray, the Earl of,
27

Nell,
151

Nelson,
226

Oak Tree, The,
54
,
189
,
192
,
195
,
215
,
224

Orlando, appearance as a boy,
12
; writes his first play,
13
; visits Queen at Whitehall,
18
; made Treasurer and Steward,
18
; his loves,
19
; and Russian Princess,
26
–46; his first trance,
47
; retires into solitude,
49
; love of reading,
52
; his romantic dramas, literary ambitions,
54
,
57
,
58
,
70
,
71
,
72
; and Greene,
59
,
63
,
65
; his great-grandmother Moll,
60
; buys elk-hounds,
66
; and his poem
The Oak Tree,
67
,
77
,
102
,
122
,
163
; and his house,
73
–6; and the Archduchess Harriet,
77
–81; Ambassador at Constantinople,
82
–99; created a Duke,
90
; second trance,
94
; marriage to Rosina Pepita, a gipsy,
94
; becomes a woman,
97
; with the gipsies,
99
–107; returns to England,
108
; lawsuits,
119
; and Archduke Harry,
126
; in London society,
133
; entertains the wits,
144
; and Mr. Pope,
148
; and Nell,
151
; confused with her cousin,
153
; returns to her country house,
161
; breaks her ankle,
170
; declared a woman,
176
; engagement,
174
; marriage,
181
; birth of her first son,
204