igarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects,
we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration
for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on
whom one has lavished  so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp
altogether and indulging - witness her  sighs and gasps, her  flushing,  her
palings, her eyes  now bright as  lamps, now haggard as dawns - what is more
humiliating than to see all this  dumb  show of  emotion and excitement gone
through before  our  eyes  when we know  that  what causes it -  thought and
imagination - are of no importance whatsoever?
     But Orlando was a  woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when
we  are writing the life of a woman, we may, it  is agreed, waive our demand
for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's
whole  existence.  And if we look for a  moment  at Orlando  writing at  her
table,  we must  admit  that  never was there a woman more  fitted for  that
calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in
the  prime  of life,  she  will soon  give over this pretence of writing and
thinking  and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper  (and  as long as  she
thinks  of a  man,  nobody objects to a woman thinking).  And then  she will
write  him  a little  note (and as long as she  writes  little  notes nobody
objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation  for  Sunday dusk
and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle  under the window
- all of which is, of  course, the very stuff  of life and the only possible
subject  for fiction.  Surely Orlando must have  done one  of these  things?
Alas, - a  thousand times,  alas, Orlando did  none of them. Must it then be
admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love?
She  was kind to dogs, faithful to  friends, generosity  itself  to  a dozen
starving poets, had a passion  for poetry. But  love - as the male novelists
define it - and who,  after all, speak with  greater authority - has nothing
whatever  to do  with kindness,  fidelity,  generosity, or  poetry. Love  is
slipping off one's petticoat and - But we all know what love is. Did Orlando
do  that? Truth  compels us to say no, she did not. If then,  the subject of
one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine,
we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
     The only resource now left us is to look out  of the window. There were
sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two
rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm,  another a snail.
One flutters to a branch, another  takes a little  run on  the  turf. Then a
servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is
engaged  on some  intrigue with one of  the maids in the pantry,  but as  no
visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope  for the best
and leave it.  Clouds  pass, thin or  thick, with some  disturbance  of  the
colour of  the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers  the hour in  its usual
cryptic way.  One's  mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,
about this same life. Life, it sings, or  croons rather, like a  kettle on a
hob.  Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the  baize apron of  the
under-footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
     Let  us go, then, exploring, this summer morning,  when all are adoring
the  plum blossom and the bee. And humming  and hawing,  let us  ask  of the
starling (who is  a more sociable bird than the lark) what  he may  think on
the  brink of  the dustbin,  whence he  picks  among the sticks  combings of
scullion's hair. What's  life, we ask, leaning  on  the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries  the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we
meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and
out and  peeping and  picking at daisies as the way is of writers  when they
don't  know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me
what life is; Life, Life, Life!
     We trudge on then by  the moor path, to the high  brow of the wine-blue
purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and  dream  there  and see
there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he
says (if sawings like his  can be given  a name so sacred and tender) Life's
labour, or so we interpret the  whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant
agrees and the bees, but  if we lie here long enough to ask  the moths, when
they come at  evening,  stealing among the  paler heather bells,  they  will
breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one  hears from telegraph wires in
snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
     Having asked  then of man  and of bird  and the insects,  for fish, men
tell us, who have  lived  in  green caves, solitary for years  to  hear them
speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is- having asked them
all and grown  no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once
in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it
was life's meaning?) back we must go  and say straight out to the reader who
waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is - alas, we don't know.
     At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction,
Orlando  pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to
the window, and exclaimed, "Done!"
     She  was almost felled to the ground  by  the extraordinary sight which
now met  her eyes. There was the garden and some  birds. The world was going
on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
     "And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
     Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that
she had suffered  dissolution,  and perhaps some faintness actually attacked
her. For a moment she stood looking at the  fair, indifferent spectacle with
staring eyes. At  length she was revived  in a singular way.  The manuscript
which reposed above  her heart began shuffling  and beating  as if it were a
living thing, and, what was  still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was
between  them,  Orlando, by inclining  her  head, could make out what it was
that it was saying. It wanted  to be read. It must be  read. It would die in
her bosom if it  were not  read. For the first  time in her  life she turned
with violence  against nature. Elk-hounds and  rose bushes were about her in
profusion. But elk-hounds and  rose  bushes can none of  them read. It is  a
lamentable oversight  on  the part of Providence which had never  struck her
before. Human  beings  alone  are  thus  gifted.  Human  beings  had  become
necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London
at once.
     "There's  just  time  to  catch  the  eleven forty five,  M'Lady," said
Basket. Orlando  had not yet realized the invention of the steam engine, but
such  was  her absorption  in  the  sufferings of a  being, who,  though not
herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for  the
first  time, took her  seat in a railway carriage, and had  the rug arranged
about her knees without giving a thought to"that stupendous invention, which
had (the historians say) completely  changed the face of Europe  in the past
twenty  years"  (as, indeed, happens  much  more frequently than  historians
suppose). She noticed only  that it was extremely  smutty; rattled horribly;
and the  windows  stuck. Lost  in thought, she was  whirled  up to London in
something less than an hour and stood  on the platform at Charing Cross, not
knowing where to go.
     The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days
in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part to
an umbrella factory. She had bought  another  in Mayfair which was sanitary,
convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair
that  her poem  would  be relieved  of its  desire?  Pray  God, she thought,
remembering the brightness  of  their ladyships' eyes  and  the  symmetry of
their lordship's legs, they haven't taken to reading there. For  that  would
be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady  R.'s. The same sort of talk would
be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might have  shifted from
the  General's left leg to his right, perhaps.  Mr L. might have stayed  ten
days with R. instead of T. Then Mr  Pope would come  in. Oh! but Mr Pope was
dead. Who were the wits now, she wondered - but that was not a question  one
could  put to a porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by
the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets
of the strangest little boxes  on wheels were drawn up by  the pavement. She
walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all
sizes,  drawn by blood horses  and  by dray  horses, conveying one  solitary
dowager  or  crowded  to  the  top by  whiskered  men  in  silk  hats,  were
inextricably mixed. Carriages,  carts, and omnibuses seemed  to her eyes, so
long  used  to the  look  of  a  plain  sheet  of  foolscap,  alarmingly  at
loggerheads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the
street  sounded  violently and  hideously  cacophonous.  Every  inch of  the
pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and  out between their
own bodies  and the lurching and  lumbering traffic with incredible agility,
poured incessantly east and west. Along  the edge of the pavement stood men,
holding out trays of  toys,  and bawled.  At corners, women sat beside great
baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses'
noses,  holding  printed sheets  to  their  bodies,  bawled  too,  Disaster!
Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had  arrived at  some moment of
national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She
looked anxiously at people's  faces.  But that confused her still more. Here
would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as if he knew some
terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering
his way along as if it were a festival  for  all the world. Indeed, she came
to the conclusion that there was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each
man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?
     She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast
windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing  gowns,  and flowers,
and fishing  rods,  and  luncheon  baskets; while  stuff of  every  hue  and
pattern, thickness  or  thinness, was  looped  and festooned  and  ballooned
across and across.  Sometimes she passed down avenues  of  sedate  mansions,
soberly numbered "one", "two", "three",  and so on right up  to two or three
hundred,  each the copy of  the other, with two  pillars and six steps and a
pair  of  curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid on tables,  and  a
parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out of another, until her
mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open squares with
black  shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat  men in  the  middle, and  war
horses prancing,  and  columns  rising  and  fountains falling  and  pigeons
fluttering.  So  she  walked and walked along pavements between houses until
she felt very hungry, and  something fluttering  above her heart rebuked her
with having forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript. "The Oak Tree".
     She  was  confounded  at  her own neglect. She stopped  dead where  she
stood. No coach  was in sight. The street, which was wide and  handsome, was
singularly  empty.  Only one elderly  gentleman was  approaching.  There was
something vaguely familiar  to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she  felt
certain  that she had met him at some time or other.  But where? Could it be
that this gentleman, so neat, so portly,  so prosperous, with a cane  in his
hand and a  flower  in his  button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed
white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was! - her old, her very old
friend, Nick Greene!
     At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognized her. "The
Lady Orlando!" he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.
     "Sir Nicholas!" she  exclaimed. For she  was made aware  intuitively by
something  in  his  bearing  that  the  scurrilous  penny-a-liner,  who  had
lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen
in the world and become  certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine
things into the bargain.
     With  another bow, he acknowledged that  her conclusion was correct; he
was a Knight;  he was a Litt.D.; he  was a Professor. He was the author of a
score of  volumes. He was,  in short, the  most  influential critic  of  the
Victorian age.
     A violent tumult  of emotion besieged  her  at meeting  the man who had
caused  her,  years  ago, so  much pain. Could this be  the plaguy, restless
fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the Italian
fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest that  they had
seen the  sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now sprucely dressed  in a
grey morning suit, had  a  pink flower in his  button-hole,  and grey  suede
gloves  to match. But even  as she marvelled, he made another bow, and asked
her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow was a thought
overdone perhaps,  but the  imitation of  fine  breeding was creditable. She
followed  him,  wondering, into a  superb restaurant,  all red plush,  white
table-cloths, and  silver  cruets, as unlike as could  be the  old tavern or
coffee house with its  sanded floor,  its wooden benches, its bowls of punch
and chocolate, and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid  his gloves neatly
on the table beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same
man. His nails were clean; where they used to be an  inch long. His chin was
shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links; where
his ragged linen used to dip  in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he had
ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her of his taste in
Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same man. "Ah!" he said,
heaving a  little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, "ah! my dear lady,
the  great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare,  Ben  Jonson -
those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison  - those  were the heroes. All,
all are dead now. And whom  have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!"
- he threw an immense amount  of scorn into his voice. "The truth of it is,"
he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, "that all our young writers are in
the pay of the booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their
tailor's bills. It is an age," he  said, helping himself  to hors-d'oeuvres,
"marked  by  precious conceits  and wild  experiments -  none  of  which the
Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant."
     "No, my dear lady," he continued, passing  with approval  the turbot au
gratin, which  the  waiter exhibited for  his sanction, "the great  days are
over. We  live in degenerate times. We must  cherish  the past; honour those
writers -  there are still a few left of 'em -  who take antiquity for their
model  and  write, not for pay but - "  Here Orlando almost shouted "Glawr!"
Indeed she could have  sworn that she had heard him say the very same things
three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but the spirit
was the same.  Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,
some  change there was.  For while  he  ran on about taking Addison as one's
model (it had been Cicero once,  she thought) and lying in  bed of a morning
(which she was proud to think her pension  paid quarterly enabled him to do)
rolling the  best works of the best authors round and round on  one's tongue
for an hour, at least, before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of
the present time and the deplorable condition of our native  tongue (he  had
lived long in America, she believed) might be purified - while he ran  on in
much the same way that Greene had  run  on three hundred  years ago, she had
time  to  ask herself,  how was  it  then that  he had changed? He had grown
plump; but he was  a man verging  on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature
had  been a prosperous  pursuit  evidently;  but  somehow the  old restless,
uneasy vivacity had  gone. His stories,  brilliant  as  they  were,  were no
longer  quite  so free and easy. He  mentioned, it is true, "my dear  friend
Pope" or "my illustrious friend Addison" every  other second, but he had  an
air of respectability about him  which was depressing, and he preferred,  it
seemed,  to  enlighten her about  the doings and  sayings of  her own  blood
relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the poets.
     Orlando was unaccountably disappointed.  She had thought of  literature
all  these years  (her seclusion, her  rank, her sex must be  her excuse) as
something  wild  as  the wind, hot as fire,  swift as  lightning;  something
errant,  incalculable,  abrupt,  and  behold,  literature  was   an  elderly
gentleman in  a grey  suit  talking about duchesses.  The  violence  of  her
disillusionment was  such that some hook or  button fastening the upper part
of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell "The Oak Tree", a poem.
     "A manuscript!" said Sir Nicholas,  putting on his gold pince-nez. "How
interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it." And once
more,  after  an interval of some three hundred years,  Nicholas Greene took
Orlando's  poem  and, laying  it down among the coffee  cups and the liqueur
glasses, began to read it. But now  his verdict was very different from what
it  had been then. It  reminded him, he said as he turned over the pages, of
Addison's "Cato". It compared favourably with Thomson's "Seasons". There was
no  trace  in  it, he  was  thankful to say,  of  the modern spirit.  It was
composed with  a  regard to  truth, to nature,  to the dictates of the human
heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It
must, of course, be published instantly.
     Really Orlando did not know what he meant.  She had always  carried her
manuscripts about with her in the bosom  of her dress. The  idea tickled Sir
Nicholas considerably.
     "But what about royalties?" he asked.
     Orlando's mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some  dusky potentates who
happened to be staying there.
     Sir Nicholas  was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to
the fact that  Messrs - (here  he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers)
would be delighted, if he  wrote them a line, to put the book on their list.
He could probably arrange for a royalty of  ten per cent on all copies up to
two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would
himself write a  line  to Mr  -,  who  was  the  most  influential;  then  a
compliment - say a little puff of her own poems - addressed  to  the wife of
the editor of  the  - never did any harm.  He  would call  -.  So he ran on.
Orlando  understood  nothing  of all this, and  from  old experience did not
altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit
to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So
Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a  neat parcel; flattened it
into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with
many compliments on both sides, they parted.
     Orlando  walked up the  street. Now that  the poem was gone, -  and she
felt a bare place in  her breast where  she had been used to carry it -  she
had nothing to do but reflect  upon whatever  she liked  - the extraordinary
chances  it might be of the human lot.  Here she was in St James's Street; a
married  woman;  with a ring on her finger; where there  had been  a  coffee
house once there was now a  restaurant; it  was about half past three in the
afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three  pigeons; a mongrel terrier
dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought
popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow
the cause of  it). And it  may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable,
as  the reader chooses to consider it upon her  relations  with her  husband
(who was  at the  Horn), that whenever  anything popped violently  into  her
head,  she went straight  to the nearest telegraph office and  wired to him.
There  was  one,  as it happened,  close at hand.  "My God Shel," she wired;
"life literature  Greene toady" - here  she dropped into  a  cypher language
which they had invented between  them so that a whole spiritual state of the
utmost complexity  might be conveyed in a word  or two without the telegraph
clerk  being any  wiser, and  added  the words "Rattigan Glumphoboo",  which
summed  it up precisely.  For  not only had the events of the morning made a
deep  impression on her, but  it cannot have escaped the  reader's attention
that Orlando was growing up - which is not necessarily growing better -  and
"Rattigan  Glumphoboo" described a very complicated spiritual  state - which
if the reader puts  all his intelligence at  our service he may discover for
himself.
     There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was
probable,  she thought,  glancing at the sky,  where the upper  clouds raced
swiftly past, that there was a gale at  Cape Horn, so that her husband would
be at the mast-head, as likely as  not, or cutting away some  tattered spar,
or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving the post office, she
turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which was a  shop so common in
our day that  it  needs  no  description, yet, to her eyes,  strange in  the
extreme; a shop where they sold books. All  her life long Orlando had  known
manuscripts;  she  had  held in her  hands  the rough  brown sheets on which
Spenser had written in his  little crabbed hand;  she had seen Shakespeare's
script and Milton's. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios,
often with a sonnet in her  praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But
these innumerable  little volumes, bright,  identical,  ephemeral,  for they
seemed bound  in  cardboard  and  printed  on tissue  paper,  surprised  her
infinitely. The whole works of  Shakespeare cost  half a crown, and could be
put  in your  pocket. One could hardly read  them, indeed, the  print was so
small,  but it was a  marvel, none the less. "Works" - the  works  of  every
writer she had known or heard of  and many more stretched from end to end of
the long shelves. On tables and chairs, more "works" were piled and tumbled,
and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often works about other works
by Sir Nicholas and a score of others whom, in her  ignorance, she supposed,
since they were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave
an astounding  order to  the  bookseller  to  send  her  everything  of  any
importance in the shop and left.
     She  turned into Hyde  Park, which  she had known of  old (beneath that
cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through  the  body
by Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often  to blame in the matter, began
framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life literature
Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her
with suspicion and were  only brought to a favourable opinion  of her sanity
by noticing  the pearl necklace which she wore. She had carried off a  sheaf
of papers and critical journals from the book shop, and at  length, flinging
herself  on  her  elbow beneath a tree, she spread these pages round her and
did her  best to fathom the noble art of  prose composition as these masters
practised it. For still the old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred
type of a weekly newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying
on her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she
had  once known - John  Donne. But she had pitched herself, without  knowing
it, not far  from  the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in
her ears. Carriage  wheels rushed  ceaselessly  in a circle.  Leaves  sighed
overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers
crossed the grass within  a  few steps of her.  Once a gigantic rubber  ball
bounced on  the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds,  and  blues broke through
the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She
read  a  sentence and  looked up at  the sky; she looked up at the  sky  and
looked down  at  the newspaper.  Life? Literature? One to  be made  into the
other? But how monstrously difficult!  For  - here came  by  a pair of tight
scarlet trousers  -  how would  Addison have put  that? Here  came  two dogs
dancing on their  hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading
Sir Nicholas and his  friends (as she did in the intervals  of looking about
her), she somehow got the impression - here she rose and walked -  they made
one feel - it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling - one must never, never
say what one thought. (She  stood on the banks of  the Serpentine.  It was a
bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made
one  feel, she continued, that  one must always, always write like  somebody
else. (The  tears formed themselves in her  eyes.) For really, she  thought,
pushing a  little boat off  with her  toe,  I don't think  I could (here the
whole of Sir Nicholas' article came before  her as articles do,  ten minutes
after  they  are read,  with the look of his  room, his  head, his  cat, his
writing-table, and the time of  the day  thrown in), I don't think I  could,
she  continued, considering  the article  from this point of view, sit in  a
study, no, it's  not a study, it's a mouldy kind of  drawing-room,  all  day
long, and  talk to pretty  young men, and tell them little anecdotes,  which
they  mustn't  repeat,  about what Tupper said about  Smiles; and  then, she
continued, weeping bitterly,  they're all  so manly; and  then, I do  detest
Duchesses; and I  don't like  cake; and though I'm spiteful  enough, I could
never  learn  to be as  spiteful as  all that, so how can  I be a critic and
write  the  best  English  prose  of my time? Damn it  all!  she  exclaimed,
launching a  penny steamer so vigorously that  the poor  little boat  almost
sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
     Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state  of mind (as nurses
call  it) - and the  tears still stood in  Orlando's eyes - the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is  bigger and much
more  important  and  yet remains  the  same  thing.  If  one  looks at  the
Serpentine in this  state of mind, the waves soon  become just as big as the
waves on  the Atlantic; the toy  boats become indistinguishable  from  ocean
liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and the wave
she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape  Horn; and as she
watched  the toy boat climb the  ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop's ship
climb up  and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white  crest with a
thousand deaths in it arched  over  it; and  through the thousand deaths  it
went and  disappeared.  "It's sunk!" she cried out in  an  agony - and then,
behold, there it  was  again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on
the other side of the Atlantic.
     "Ecstasy!" she cried. "Ecstasy! Where's the post office?" she wondered.
"For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him..." And  repeating "A toy boat
on  the  Serpentine",  and  "Ecstasy",  alternately, for  the thoughts  were
interchangeable and meant  exactly the same thing, she hurried towards  Park
Lane.
     "A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat," she repeated, thus enforcing upon
herself the fact that  it is not articles by  Nick Greene on John  Donne nor
eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's  something
useless, sudden, violent; something  that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a
spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them);
free from  taint,  dependence,  soilure of humanity or  care for one's kind;
something rash,  ridiculous,  like my  hyacinth,  husband I  mean, Bonthrop:
that's what it is -a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy - it's ecstasy that
matters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope
Gate, for the consequence of not  living with one's husband, except when the
wind is sunk,  is that one talks nonsense aloud  in Park Lane.  It  would no
doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen
Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in  a
flash. She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him  instantly. She did
not care in the least what  nonsense  it might make, or  what dislocation it
might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene's article had plunged her in the
depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she
repeated: "Ecstasy, ecstasy", as she stood waiting to cross.
     But the traffic was heavy that  spring afternoon, and kept her standing
there,  repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy,  or a toy boat on the Serpentine, while
the wealth and power of  England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in
four-in-hand, victoria and barouche  landau. It was as if a golden river had
coagulated and massed itself in  golden blocks across  Park Lane. The ladies
held card-cases  between their fingers; the gentlemen  balanced gold-mounted
canes between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One
thought only  disturbed  her,  a thought familiar  to all  who  behold great
elephants,  or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is: how do  these
leviathans  to whom obviously  stress,  change,  and activity are repugnant,
propagate  their  kind? Perhaps, Orlando  thought,  looking  at the stately,
still faces, their time of propagation is over;  this is  the fruit; this is
the consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an  age. Portly and
splendid  there  they  sat. But  now, the policeman let  fall  his hand; the
stream  became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved,
dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.
     So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street, where,
when the meadow-sweet blew there, she  could remember curlew calling and one
very old man with a gun.
     She could remember, she thought, stepping  across the threshold of  her
house, how Lord  Chesterfield  had said  - but  her memory was checked.  Her
discreet  eighteenth-century hall,  where  she  could see Lord  Chesterfield
putting his hat  down  here  and  his coat  down there  with  an elegance of
deportment  which it was a pleasure to  watch, was  now  completely littered
with  parcels. While she had  been sitting  in Hyde Park the  bookseller had
delivered her order, and the house was crammed - there were parcels slipping
down the staircase - with  the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey
paper  and neatly tied with string. She carried  as many of these packets as
she could  to her room,  ordered footmen to bring  the  others, and, rapidly
cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by innumerable volumes.
     Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order.
For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian  literature meant not
merely four great names separate and distinct but  four great names sunk and
embedded in a  mass of  Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans,  Buckles,
Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons -  all  vocal,  clamorous, prominent,  and
requiring as much attention  as anybody else. Orlando's  reverence for print
had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the
benefit of  what light might  filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she
tried to come to a conclusion.
     And now  it was clear  that there  are  only two  ways  of coming to  a
conclusion  upon  Victorian  literature  - one is to write it out  in  sixty
volumes octavo, the other  is to squeeze  it into six lines of the length of
this one.  Of the two  courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us  to
choose  the second; and so we  proceed. Orlando then came to  the conclusion
(opening  half-a-dozen  books)  that  it  was very odd  that there was not a
single dedication to a nobleman among  them; next (turning over a vast  pile
of memoirs)  that several of  these writers had family trees half as high as
her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound
note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina  Rossetti came to  tea;  next
(here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that
literature since it  ate all these dinners must  be growing very  corpulent;
next (she was invited  to a score of lectures on the Influence  of this upon
that; the  Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the
same engaging kind) that literature since it  listened to all these lectures
must  be growing  very dry; next (here she attended a  reception given by  a
peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing
very respectable;  next  (here  she  visited  Carlyle's  sound-proof room at
Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling  must be growing very
delicate; and so at last  she reached her final conclusion, which was of the
highest importance  but which, as  we have already much overpassed our limit
of six lines, we must omit.
     Orlando, having  come to this  conclusion,  stood  looking  out of  the
window  for  a  considerable space of  time. For,  when anybody  comes  to a
conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and  must  wait
for the unseen antagonist to return it to  them. What would be sent her next
from the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her
hands  clasped,  she  stood  for  a considerable  space  of time  wondering.
Suddenly  she started  - and here we could  only  wish that,  as on a former
occasion,  Purity,  Chastity,  and Modesty would  push  the  door  ajar  and
provide, at  least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up
what now has to be told delicately, as a  biographer should.  But no! Having
thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando  and  seen it fall  short by
several inches,  these  ladies had given up  all  intercourse with her these
many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen
this pale  March  morning  to mitigate, to veil, to  cover, to  conceal,  to
shroud  this undeniable  event whatever it may be?  For  after  giving  that
sudden, violent start, Orlando -  but Heaven be praised, at this very moment
there  struck  up   outside   one  of  these  frail,  reedy,  fluty,  jerky,
old-fashioned  barrel-organs  which are still  sometimes played  by  Italian
organ-grinders  in back  streets.  Let  us  accept  the intervention, humble
though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with all
its  gasps and groans, to  fill this  page with sound until the moment comes
when it is impossible to deny its coming; which the  footman has seen coming
and  the maid-servant; and the reader  will have  to  see too;  for  Orlando
herself is clearly unable to  ignore it any  longer  -  let the barrel-organ
sound and transport us on thought, which is no more than a little boat, when
music sounds, tossing on the waves; on thought,  which is, of all  carriers,
the most clumsy, the most  erratic, over the roof  tops and the back gardens
where washing is hanging to - what is this place? Do you recognize the Green
and in the middle  the steeple, and the gate  with a lion couchant on either
side? Oh  yes, it is Kew! Well,  Kew will do. So  here we are  at Kew, and I
will  show  you to-day (the  second  of March) under the  plum tree, a grape
hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on  the almond tree; so that to walk
there is to  be thinking  of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth  in
October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said,
and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging
a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and  there to sit, waiting the
kingfisher,  which,  it is said, was seen once to cross in  the evening from
bank to bank.
     Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.
     Behold,  meanwhile,  the factory chimneys and  their  smoke; behold the
city  clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the  old lady taking her
dog for  a walk and the servant girl wearing  her new hat for the first time
not at  the  right  angle.  Behold  them all.  Though Heaven has  mercifully
decreed that the secrets of  all hearts are  hidden so that we  are lured on
for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that  does not exist;  still through
our cigarette  smoke, we see blaze up  and salute the splendid fulfilment of
natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw
blazing - such silly hops  and skips the mind  takes when it slops like this
all over the saucer and the  barrel-organ plays  - saw blazing  a  fire in a
field against minarets near Constantinople.
     Hail! natural  desire! Hail!  happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure
of all sorts, flowers and  wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates;
and half-crown tickets  out of  London on  Sundays, and  singing  in a  dark
chapel  hymns  about  death,  and  anything,  anything  that  interrupts and
confounds the tapping of  typewriters and  filing of  letters and forging of
links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows
on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink
and scrawled a token in passing). Hail,  happiness! kingfisher flashing from
bank to bank, and all  fulfilment of natural desire,  whether it is what the
male novelist says  it is;  or prayer; or denial; hail!  in whatever form it
comes, and may there be more forms,  and stranger. For dark flows the stream
-  would it  were true, as  the rhyme hints "like a dream" - but  duller and
worser than  that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent,
habitual, under trees  whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue  of the
wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.
     Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which
bloat  the sharp image  as  spotted  mirrors do  the  face in  a country-inn
parlour;  dreams which splinter the whole and  tear us asunder and  wound us
and split  us apart in the night when we would  sleep;  but sleep, sleep, so
deep that all  shapes  are ground  to  dust of  infinite softness, water  of
dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth,
prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.
     But  wait! but wait! we are not  going, this time, visiting  the  blind
land. Blue, like a  match struck right  in the ball of the innermost eye, he
flies, burns,  bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher;  so that now floods
back refluent like a  tide, the red,  thick stream  of life again; bubbling,
dripping; and  we rise, and our  eyes (for how handy a rhyme  is to pass  us
safe over the awkward transition from  death to life) fall  on  -  (here the
barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).
     "It's a very fine boy, M'Lady," said Mrs  Banting, the midwife, putting
her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In  other words Orlando was safely
delivered of a son  on Thursday, March the  20th,  at three  o'clock  in the
morning.
     Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage;
nothing  of the  same  sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by  any
means, the same day. No - for  if we look out of the window, as Orlando  was
doing at the moment, we  shall  see that Park Lane  itself has  considerably
changed. Indeed one might stand there  ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood
now, without seeing a single barouche landau. "Look