at that!" she exclaimed,
some days later when an absurd truncated carriage  without  any horses began
to glide  about of its own accord. A carriage without any horses indeed! She
was called away just as she said that, but came back  again after a time and
had another look out of the window. It was odd sort of weather nowadays. The
sky itself, she  could not  help thinking, had changed. It was no longer  so
thick, so watery,  so prismatic now  that King Edward  - see, there  he was,
stepping out of his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady  opposite -
had succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky
seemed  made  of metal,  which in hot  weather tarnished  verdigris,  copper
colour or  orange  as  metal does in a  fog.  It was a little alarming- this
shrinkage. Everything seemed  to have shrunk. Driving past Buckingham Palace
last night, there  was  not a  trace of  that  vast  erection  which she had
thought everlasting; top hats, widows' weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths,
all had  vanished and left not a stain,  not a puddle even, on the pavement.
But  it  was  now - after another interval she had  come  back again to  her
favourite station in the window - now, in the  evening, that the  change was
most remarkable. Look at the lights in the  houses! At a touch, a whole room
was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit;  and one was precisely the  same as the
other. One could see everything in the little square-shaped boxes; there was
no privacy; none of those lingering  shadows and odd corners that there used
to be; none of those women  in aprons carrying  wobbly  lamps which they put
down carefully on this table  and on that.  At a touch,  the whole room  was
bright.  And the  sky  was  bright  all  night long; and  the pavements were
bright; everything was bright. She  came  back again at mid-day. How  narrow
women have grown lately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight, shining,
identical.  And men's faces  were as  bare as the  palm of one's  hand.  The
dryness of the atmosphere brought out the colour in everything and seemed to
stiffen the muscles of the cheeks. It was harder  to cry now. Water was  hot
in two seconds. Ivy had perished or been scraped off houses. Vegetables were
less fertile; families  were  much  smaller. Curtains  and  covers had  been
frizzled  up  and  the walls  were bare  so  that new  brilliantly  coloured
pictures of  real  things like  streets,  umbrellas, apples,  were  hung  in
frames, or painted  upon the wood. There was something definite and distinct
about the  age, which reminded  her of the eighteenth  century, except  that
there  was  a distraction, a desperation  - as  she was  thinking this,  the
immensely  long  tunnel  in which  she  seemed to have  been travelling  for
hundreds  of years  widened;  the  light  poured  in;  her  thoughts  became
mysteriously tightened and  strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in
her back  and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time  her  hearing
quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle  in the room so that the
clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds
the light  went on  becoming brighter  and  brighter, and she saw everything
more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was
a terrific  explosion right in her  ear. Orlando  leapt as  if she  had been
violently struck on the head. Ten  times she was struck. In  fact it was ten
o'clock in the  morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was
the present moment.
     No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart,
and turned pale. For  what more terrifying revelation can there be than that
it is the present  moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible
because the past shelters us on one side and the  future on another. But  we
have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already. She ran
downstairs, she jumped into her motorcar, she  pressed  the self-starter and
was off.  Vast blue blocks of building rose  into  the air; the red cowls of
chimneys  were spotted  irregularly  across  the  sky; the  road shone  like
silver-headed   nails;  omnibuses  bore  down  upon   her  with   sculptured
white-faced  drivers;  she  noticed  sponges,  bird-cages,  boxes  of  green
American cloth.  But she did not  allow these  sights to sink into  her mind
even the fraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow plank of the present,
lest she  should fall into the raging torrent beneath.  "Why don't you  look
where you're  going to?...Put your hand out, can't you?" - that  was all she
said sharply, as if the words  were jerked out of her. For  the streets were
immensely crowded;  people crossed  without looking where  they  were going.
People buzzed and  hummed round the  plate-glass  windows within  which  one
could see a glow of  red, a blaze of yellow, as  if they  were bees, Orlando
thought - but her thought that they  were bees was violently snipped off and
she  saw, regaining perspective with  one  flick of her  eye, that they were
bodies. "Why don't you look where you're going?" she snapped out.
     At  last,  however, she drew up at  Marshall & Snelgrove's and went
into the shop. Shade and scent enveloped her. The present fell from her like
drops of  scalding water. Light swayed up and down like  thin  stuffs puffed
out by a summer breeze. She took a list from her  bag and began reading in a
curious  stiff  voice  at first, as if she  were holding the words  -  boy's
boots,  bath  salts,  sardines  - under a tap of  many-coloured  water.  She
watched them change as  the light fell on them. Bath and boots became blunt,
obtuse;   sardines  serrated  itself  like  a  saw.  So  she  stood  in  the
ground-floor department of Messrs  Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way
and that; snuffed this smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then she
got into  the lift, for the good reason that the  door stood  open; and  was
shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose,
is  magic. In the eighteenth century we  knew how everything  was  done; but
here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying
- but how  it's done I can't even  begin  to  wonder.  So my belief in magic
returns. Now the lift gave a  little jerk as  it stopped at the first floor;
and she had a vision  of innumerable  coloured stuffs flaunting in a  breeze
from which came distinct, strange smells; and each time the lift stopped and
flung its doors  open, there  was another slice of the world  displayed with
all  the smells of that world clinging to it. She was reminded  of the river
off  Wapping in  the  time  of Elizabeth,  where the treasure ships  and the
merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and curiously  they had smelt! How
well she  remembered the feel of rough  rubies  running  through her fingers
when she dabbled them in a  treasure sack!  And then  lying with  Sukey - or
whatever her name was - and having Cumberland's lantern flashed on them! The
Cumberlands had a house in Portland Place now and  she had lunched with them
the other day  and ventured a little joke with the old man about alms-houses
in the Sheen Road. He had winked.  But here as the lift could go  no higher,
she must get out  - Heaven knows into what  "department" as  they called it.
She stood still to consult her shopping  list, but was  blessed if she could
see,  as the list bade her, bath salts, or  boy's boots  anywhere about. And
indeed,  she was about to  descend again, without buying anything,  but  was
saved from that outrage by saying  aloud automatically the  last item on her
list; which happened to be "sheets for a double bed".
     "Sheets for  a double bed," she said to a man at  a counter  and,  by a
dispensation of Providence, it was  sheets that the man  at  that particular
counter  happened  to  sell.  For  Grimsditch,  no,  Grimsditch   was  dead;
Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was  dead; Louise then - Louise had come to her
in  a great taking the other day, for she had found a  hole in the bottom of
the  sheet  in  the royal  bed.  Many kings  and  queens had  slept there  -
Elizabeth; James; Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the sheet had
a hole  in it. But Louise was  positive she knew who had done it. It was the
Prince Consort.
     "Sale  bosch!"  she said  (for  there  had  been another war; this time
against the Germans).
     "Sheets for a double bed," Orlando repeated dreamily, for  a double bed
with a silver counterpane in a room fitted in a taste which she  now thought
perhaps a little vulgar - all in silver; but she  had  furnished it when she
had a passion for that metal.  While the man went to get sheets for a double
bed, she took  out a little looking-glass and  a powder puff. Women were not
nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering herself with  the
greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself first turned woman and
lay on the  deck of the "Enamoured Lady".  She gave her  nose the right tint
deliberately. She never  touched her  cheeks. Honestly,  though she  was now
thirty-six, she scarcely  looked a day older. She looked just as pouting, as
sulky, as  handsome, as rosy (like  a million-candled Christmas tree,  Sasha
had said)  as she  had done that day on the ice, when the  Thames was frozen
and they had gone skating -
     "The best Irish  linen, Ma'am," said the shopman, spreading the  sheets
on the counter, - and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here,  as
she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between the
departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-goods department,
a whiff  of scent, waxen,  tinted as  if  from pink  candles, and  the scent
curved like a shell  round a figure -  was  it a  boy's or was it a girl's -
young, slender,  seductive - a girl,  by  God! furred, pearled,  in  Russian
trousers; but faithless, faithless!
     "Faithless!" cried Orlando (the man had gone)  and all the  shop seemed
to  pitch and  toss with yellow water and far off she saw  the masts  of the
Russian ship  standing out to sea,  and then, miraculously (perhaps the door
opened again) the conch which  the scent had made became a platform, a dais,
off  which  stepped  a  fat,  furred  woman,  marvellously  well  preserved,
seductive, diademed, a  Grand Duke's  mistress; she  who,  leaning over  the
banks  of  the Volga,  eating sandwiches, had  watched men  drown; and began
walking down the shop towards her.
     "Oh Sasha!" Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should have
come to  this; she had  grown  so fat;  so lethargic; and she bowed her head
over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in fur, and a girl in
Russian trousers,  with  all these smells of wax candles, white flowers, and
old ships that it brought with it might pass behind her back unseen.
     "Any napkins, towels, dusters today, Ma'am?" the shopman persisted. And
it is  enormously  to the  credit  of the shopping  list, which  Orlando now
consulted, that  she was able  to reply with every appearance of  composure,
that there was  only  one thing in the world  she wanted  and  that was bath
salts; which was in another department.
     But descending in the lift again -  so insidious  is the  repetition of
any  scene - she was again sunk far  beneath the present moment; and thought
when the lift bumped on  the ground, that  she  heard a pot broken against a
river bank. As for finding the  right department, whatever  it might be, she
stood engrossed among  the  handbags,  deaf  to  the suggestions of  all the
polite, black, combed, sprightly shop assistants, who descending as they did
equally and some of them, perhaps, as proudly, even from  such depths of the
past as she did,  chose to  let down the impervious screen of the present so
that  today  they  appeared  shop assistants in  Marshall &  Snelgrove's
merely. Orlando stood there hesitating.  Through the great  glass doors  she
could see the traffic in Oxford  Street. Omnibus  seemed to pile itself upon
omnibus  and  then  to jerk  itself apart. So the ice blocks had pitched and
tossed that day on the Thames. An old  nobleman in  furred slippers had  sat
astride one of them.  There  he went  - she could see him now - calling down
maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood.
     "Time has  passed over me,"  she  thought,  trying to  collect herself;
"this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is  any longer
one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in
the ice. Someone lights a  pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers.
When I step out of doors - as I do now," here she stepped on to the pavement
of Oxford Street, "what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells.
I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?" Her eyes filled with tears.
     That Orlando had gone  a little too far  from the present moment  will,
perhaps, strike the reader who  sees  her  now  preparing  to get  into  her
motor-car with  her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And
indeed, it cannot  be denied that the  most successful  practitioners of the
art  of  life,  often  unknown  people  by  the  way,  somehow  contrive  to
synchronize the sixty  or seventy different times which beat  simultaneously
in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime
in unison, and the present  is neither  a violent  disruption nor completely
forgotten in  the past. Of them we can justly  say that they  live precisely
the  sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the
rest some we  know to be  dead though they walk  among us; some  are not yet
born though  they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years
old though  they call themselves thirty-six. The true length  of a  person's
life, whatever the "Dictionary of National Biography"  may say, is always  a
matter  of  dispute. For  it  is a  difficult  business - this time-keeping;
nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any  of the arts; and it
may have been her love of poetry  that was to blame for  making Orlando lose
her  shopping list  and start home  without the sardines, the bath salts, or
the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car,  the
present  again struck  her  on  the head.  Eleven  times she  was  violently
assaulted.
     "Confound it  all!" she cried, for it is  a  great shock to the nervous
system, hearing a clock strike - so much  so that for some time now there is
nothing to be said  of her save that she frowned slightly, changed her gears
admirably, and cried out, as before, "Look where you're going!"  "Don't  you
know your own mind?" "Why didn't you say so then?" while the motor-car shot,
swung, squeezed, and slid, for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street,
down  Haymarket, down Northumberland Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to the
left, straight on, to the right, straight on again...
     The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October
1928. People  spilt off the  pavement. There were  women with shopping bags.
Children ran out. There were sales at drapers'  shops. Streets  widened  and
narrowed. Long vistas steadily  shrunk together.  Here was  a market. Here a
funeral. Here  a procession with banners upon  which was written "Ra  - Un",
but what else?  Meat was very red. Butchers stood  at the door. Women almost
had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin - that was over a porch. A woman looked
out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn
and Applebed, Undert - . Nothing could be seen whole  or read  from start to
finish.  What was seen  begun - like two friends starting to meet each other
across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes  the body and
mind were like scraps of torn paper  tumbling from  a sack and,  indeed, the
process  of motoring fast out of London so much  resembles  the chopping  up
small of identity which precedes unconsciousness  and  perhaps  death itself
that it is an open  question  in  what sense Orlando  can  be  said  to have
existed at the present moment. Indeed we  should  have  given her over for a
person  entirely disassembled  were it  not that here, at  last,  one  green
screen  was held out on the right, against  which the  little  bits of paper
fell more slowly; and then another  was  held out  on  the left  so that one
could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and
then  green screens were  held continuously on either side, so that her mind
regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage,
a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.
     When this  happened, Orlando heaved a  sigh of relief, lit a cigarette,
and puffed  for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as
if the person she wanted might not be there, "Orlando?" For if there are (at
a venture) seventy-six different times all  ticking in the mind at once, how
many different people are there not  - Heaven  help us - all having lodgment
at one  time  or another  in the  human  spirit? Some  say  two thousand and
fifty-two. So that it is the most  usual thing  in the world for a person to
call, directly they are alone,  Orlando? (if that is one's  name) meaning by
that, Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Hence,  the  astonishing  changes we  see  in  our  friends. But  it  is not
altogether plain sailing, either, for  though one may  say, as  Orlando said
(being  out in  the  country  and needing another self  presumably) Orlando?
still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built
up, one  on top  of another, as  plates are piled  on a waiter's hand,  have
attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of  their
own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name)
so that one will only come if  it  is raining, another in a room with  green
curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it
a  glass  of  wine -  and so on;  for everybody  can multiply from  his  own
experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him
- and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.
     So Orlando,  at the turn by the barn, called "Orlando?"  with a note of
interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.
     "All right then," Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on
these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to
call  upon,  far  more than  we  have  been able to find room for,  since  a
biography is  considered complete if  it merely  accounts for  six or  seven
selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing then, only
those selves we have found room for, Orlando may  now have called on the boy
who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it  up again; the boy who
sat on the  hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the
bowl  of rose water; or she may  have called  upon the young man who fell in
love with Sasha; or upon the  Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or  upon the
Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the  woman to come to
her; the Gipsy;  the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life;  the
Patroness  of Letters;  the  woman  who  called Mar (meaning  hot  baths and
evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop
(meaning  the death we die daily) or all three together  - which meant  more
things than we have space to write out - all were different and she may have
called upon any one of them.
     Perhaps;  but what appeared  certain (for we are now  in the  region of
"perhaps" and "appears") was that the one she  needed most kept  aloof,  for
she  was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as  she  drove  -
there  was  a  new  one  at  every  corner  -  as  happens  when,  for  some
unaccountable reason, the  conscious self,  which  is the uppermost, and has
the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but  one self. This  is what  some
people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we
have it  in us to be;  commanded and locked up by the  Captain self, the Key
self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking
this  self as the reader can judge  from  overhearing her talk as  she drove
(and  if  it is  rambling  talk,  disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes
unintelligible, it is the reader's fault  for listening to a lady talking to
herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding  in brackets which
self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may well be wrong).
     "What then? Who then?" she said. "Thirty-six; in a motor-car;  a woman.
Yes, but  a million other things as  well. A  snob am  I? The garter  in the
hall?  The  leopards? My ancestors?  Proud of them? Yes!  Greedy, luxurious,
vicious?  Am  I? (here a new self  came  in). Don't  care  a  damn  if I am.
Truthful?  I think  so. Generous? Oh, but that don't count (here a  new self
came in). Lying in bed of a morning listening to  the pigeons on fine linen;
silver dishes; wine; maids;  footmen.  Spoilt? Perhaps.  Too many things for
nothing. Hence my books  (here she mentioned fifty  classical titles;  which
represented,  so  we  think, the early romantic  works  that she  tore  up).
Facile, glib, romantic. But (here another self came in) a duffer, a fumbler.
More clumsy I couldn't be. And - and - (here she hesitated for a word and if
we suggest "Love" we may be wrong, but certainly she laughed and blushed and
then cried out ) - A toad set in  emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles
on the ceiling!  (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was
sunk in  gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over
crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was
passing  a  clump) growing there a thousand years. And  barns  (she passed a
tumbledown barn  at the  edge of  the road). And  sheep dogs (here one  came
trotting  across the road. She  carefully avoided it).  And the  night.  But
people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.)
I  don't know.  Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here  she turned
into  the High  Street  of  her  native town, which was crowded,  for it was
market  day,  with  farmers, and  shepherds,  and  old  women  with  hens in
baskets.) I  like peasants. I understand crops. But (here another  self came
skipping over  the top of her  mind like the beam  from a lighthouse). Fame!
(She laughed.) Fame!  Seven  editions. A prize. Photographs  in  the evening
papers (here she alluded to the "Oak Tree" and "The Burdett Coutts" Memorial
Prize which she had won; and we must snatch space to remark how discomposing
it  is for her  biographer  that this  culmination to  which the  whole book
moved, this peroration with which the book was to end, should be dashed from
us on  a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that  when we write of a
woman, everything is out of place - culminations and perorations; the accent
never  falls where  it  does with  a man). Fame!  she  repeated.  A poet - a
charlatan; both every morning as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to
meet; to  meet,  to  dine; fame - fame!  (She had here to slow down to  pass
through the crowd of market people. But  no one noticed her. A porpoise in a
fishmonger's  shop attracted  far more attention than a  lady who had  won a
prize and  might,  had  she chosen, have  worn three  coronets one on top of
another on her brow.) Driving very slowly she now hummed as if it  were part
of  an old song, "With my guineas I'll buy flowering trees, flowering trees,
flowering trees and walk among my flowering trees and tell my sons what fame
is". So she hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and there like a
barbaric necklace of heavy beads. "And walk  among my  flowering trees," she
sang, accenting the words strongly, "and see the moon rise slow, the waggons
go..." Here she stopped short and looked ahead of her intently at the bonnet
of the car in profound meditation.
     "He  sat at Twitchett's table," she mused, "with a dirty  ruff on...Was
it old Mr Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh-p-re? (for when  we
speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole.) She
gazed  for  ten  minutes  ahead  of her, letting the  car come almost  to  a
standstill.
     "Haunted!" she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. "Haunted! ever
since  I  was a child. There  flies the wild goose. It flies past the window
out  to  sea.  Up  I jumped  (she  gripped  the steering-wheel tighter)  and
stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. I've seen it, here - there
- there - England, Persia, Italy. Always it flies fast out to sea and always
I fling after it words like nets (here she flung her hand out) which shrivel
as I've seen nets shrivel  drawn  on deck  with  only  sea-weed in them; and
sometimes there's an inch of silver - six  words - in the bottom of the net.
But never  the great fish who lives in  the coral groves." Here she bent her
head, pondering deeply.
     And it was at this moment, when  she had ceased  to call  "Orlando" and
was deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom she had called
came of its own accord; as was  proved by the change that now  came over her
(she had passed through the lodge gates and was entering the park).
     The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition
makes the round  and solidity  of a surface is added  to it, and the shallow
becomes deep  and  the near  distant;  and  all  is  contained  as  water is
contained by the  sides  of a well.  So  she was  now darkened, stilled, and
become,  with the  addition  of this  Orlando, what  is  called, rightly  or
wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable
that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two
thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate,  but
when communication is established they fall silent.
     Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up  the curving drive  between the elms
and oaks through the falling turf of the park whose  fall was so gentle that
had it  been water it would have spread  the beach with a smooth green tide.
Planted  here and in  solemn groups were beech trees and oak trees. The deer
stepped among  them, one white  as snow, another with  its head on one side,
for some wire netting had caught in its  horns. All this,  the trees,  deer,
and  turf,  she observed with the  greatest satisfaction as  if her mind had
become  a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them  completely. Next
minute she drew up in the courtyard where, for so many hundred years she had
come,  on horseback or  in  coach and six, with men riding  before or coming
after;  where  plumes  had tossed, torches flashed, and  the same  flowering
trees that let their leaves  drop now had shaken their blossoms. Now she was
alone.  The autumn  leaves were falling. The porter opened the great  gates.
"Morning, James," she said, "there're some things in the car. Will you bring
'em  in?" words of no beauty, interest, or significance themselves,  it will
be conceded,  but now so plumped out with meaning  that they fell  like ripe
nuts from a tree, and proved that when the  shrivelled  skin of the ordinary
is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true
indeed of every  movement and action now, usual though they were; so that to
see Orlando change her  skirt for a pair of  whipcord  breeches  and leather
jacket, which  she  did in less than three  minutes, was to be ravished with
the  beauty  of movement as if  Madame Lopokova  were using her highest art.
Then she strode into the dining-room  where her  old  friends  Dryden, Pope,
Swift,  Addison regarded her demurely at first as who  should say Here's the
prize  winner! but  when  they reflected  that two hundred  guineas  was  in
question,  they  nodded their  heads approvingly. Two  hundred guineas, they
seemed to say; two hundred guineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herself
a  slice of bread  and ham,  clapped  the  two  together  and began  to eat,
striding up and down the room, thus shedding her company habits in a second,
without thinking. After five or six such  turns, she tossed  off a glass  of
red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her hand, strode
down the long  corridor and  through a dozen  drawing-rooms and so  began  a
perambulation of the house,  attended  by  such elk-hounds and  spaniels  as
chose to follow her.
     This,  too, was all in the  day's  routine. As soon would she come home
and  leave her  own  grandmother without  a kiss as come back and leave  the
house unvisited.  She fancied that  the rooms brightened  as  she  came  in;
stirred,  opened their eyes as if they  had been dozing in her absence.  She
fancied, too, that,  hundreds and thousands of times as she had  seen  them,
they never looked the same twice, as if so long a  life as theirs had stored
in them a myriad moods which changed with  winter and summer, bright weather
and dark, and her own fortunes and the people's characters who visited them.
Polite, they always were to  strangers, but a  little  weary: with her, they
were entirely open and at their  ease. Why  not indeed?  They had known each
other for close on four centuries now. They had nothing to conceal. She knew
their  sorrows  and joys. She knew  what age  each part of them was and  its
little secrets - a  hidden drawer, a concealed cupboard, or some  deficiency
perhaps, such as a part made up, or added later.  They, too, knew her in all
her moods and changes. She had hidden nothing from them; had come to them as
boy and woman, crying and  dancing, brooding  and gay.  In this window-seat,
she had written her first verses; in that  chapel, she had been married. And
she would be buried here, she reflected, kneeling  on the window-sill in the
long gallery and sipping her Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it,
the body of the heraldic leopard would be  making yellow pools  on the floor
the day they lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in no
immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come  and go forever
with the reds on the panels and the greens on the  sofa. For  the room - she
had  strolled  into the Ambassador's bedroom -  shone like  a shell that has
lain at  the  bottom of the sea  for centuries and has been crusted over and
painted  a  million tints by the water; it was rose  and yellow,  green  and
sand-coloured.  It  was frail  as a  shell,  as iridescent and as  empty. No
Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of
the house still  beat. Gently  opening a door, she stood on the threshold so
that  (as she fancied) the room could  not see  her and watched the tapestry
rising and falling  on the eternal  faint breeze  which never failed to move
it. Still  the hunter  rode; still Daphne flew. The heart  still  beat,  she
thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail indomitable heart
of the immense building.
     Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery whose
floor  was  laid  with  whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of chairs with all
their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out for
Elizabeth, for  James, for  Shakespeare  it might be,  for Cecil, who  never
came. The sight made her gloomy. She unhooked the rope that fenced them off.
She sat on the Queen's chair; she opened  a  manuscript book  lying  on Lady
Betty's table; she  stirred her fingers in the aged rose leaves; she brushed
her short hair with King James' silver brushes: she bounced up and down upon
his  bed (but no King  would ever sleep  there  again, for all Louise's  new
sheets) and pressed her  cheek against the worn silver counterpane that  lay
upon it. But everywhere were  little lavender bags to keep the  moth out and
printed notices, "Please do not touch", which, though she had put them there
herself,  seemed to  rebuke her. The house was no  longer hers entirely, she
sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past  the touch and control
of the living. Never would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was
in the  bedroom that  had been  old  Nick Greene's), or holes  burnt in  the
carpet.  Never  two hundred  servants come  running  and brawling  down  the
corridors with  warming pans and great branches  for  the great  fireplaces.
Never would ale  be brewed and candles made and saddles  fashioned and stone
shaped in the workshops outside  the house.  Hammers and mallets were silent
now. Chairs and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold  were locked in
glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.
     So she sat at the end of the  gallery with her  dogs couched round her,
in Queen  Elizabeth's  hard  armchair. The gallery  stretched far away  to a
point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep  into the
past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking;
the  great men she had known;  Dryden,  Swift,  and Pope; and  statesmen  in
colloquy; and  lovers dallying in the window-seats; and  people  eating  and
drinking at the long  tables; and the wood  smoke curling round  their heads
and  making them  sneeze  and  cough. Still  further  down, she saw sets  of
splendid dancers formed for the quadrille.  A fluty, frail, but nevertheless
stately music began  to  play.  An organ boomed. A coffin was borne into the
chapel.  A marriage procession came out of it. Armed  men with helmets  left
for the wars. They brought banners back from Flodden  and Poitiers and stuck
them on  the wall. The long gallery  filled itself thus, and  still  peering
further,  she  thought  she could  make out  at  the  very  end,  beyond the
Elizabethans and the  Tudors,  some one  older,  further, darker,  a  cowled
figure,  monastic,  severe, a monk, who went with his  hands clasped, and  a
book in them, murmuring -
     Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so
demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder. Her
own face,  that had been dark and  sombre as  she  gazed, was lit as  by  an
explosion of gunpowder. In  this same light everything near her showed  with
extreme distinctness. She  saw two flies circling round and noticed the blue
sheen on their bodies;  she saw a knot  in the  wood where her foot was, and
her dog's ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a bough creaking in the
garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift screaming past the window. Her
own  body quivered and  tingled as if suddenly  stood naked in a hard frost.
Yet,  she kept, as she had  not done  when the  clock struck ten  in London,
complete  composure (for she  was now one and entire, and presented,  it may
be,  a  larger surface  to  the  shock  of  time).  She  rose,  but  without
precipitation, called  her dogs, and went firmly but with great alertness of
movement down the staircase and out into the garden. Here the shadows of the
plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of  earth
in the flower beds as if  she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the
intricacy  of the  twigs of every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and
the marking of veins and  petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along
the  path,  and every button  on his gaiters was  visible; she saw Betty and
Prince, the cart horses, and never  had she marked so clearly the white star
on Betty's forehead, and the three long hairs that fell down below  the rest
on Prince's tail. Out  in  the  quadrangle the old grey  walls of  the house
looked like a scraped new photograph; she  heard the loud speaker condensing
on the terrace  a dance tune that people were listening to in the red velvet
opera house at Vienna.  Braced and strung up by  the present moment  she was
also  strangely afraid, as if  whenever the gulf of  time  gaped and  let  a
second through some unknown danger might come with it. The  tension  was too
relentless and  too  rigorous to  be endured long  without  discomfort.  She
walked  more  briskly than she  liked, as if  her  legs were  moved for her,
through the garden and out into the park.  Here  she  forced herself,  by  a
great  effort,  to  stop by the carpenter's shop, and  to stand  stock-still
watching  Joe  Stubbs  fashion a cart wheel. She  was standing with her  eye
fixed on his  hand when  the quarter  struck. It hurtled  through her like a
meteor, so  hot  that no  fingers  can  hold  it. She  saw  with  disgusting
vividness that the thumb  on Joe's right hand was without a finger  nail and
there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The
sight  was so  repulsive  that she  felt  faint for  a  moment,  but in that
moment's darkness, when  her  eyelids  flickered,  she  was relieved  of the
pressure of the present. There was something strange in  the shadow that the
flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by
looking now at  the  sky) is  always absent from the  present -  whence  its
terror, its nondescript  character  - something  one trembles to pin through
the body  with a name and call beauty, for it  has no  body,  is as a shadow
without  substance  or quality  of  its  own,  yet has the  power  to change
whatever it adds itself to. This shadow  now, while she flickered her eye in
her faintness in the  carpenter's shop, stole out,  and attaching  itself to
the innumerable sights she had been receiving,  composed them into something
tolerable, comprehensible. Her  mind began  to toss like  the sea. Yes,  she
thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she  turned from  the carpenter's
shop to climb the hill, I can begin  to live  again. I am by the Serpentine,
she  thought,  the little  boat is  climbing  through  the  white arch  of a
thousand deaths. I am about to understand...
     Those  were  her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot  conceal
the fact that  she  was now a very indifferent witness to the truth  of what
was before her  and might easily have mistaken a sheep  for a cow, or an old
man called  Smith for one who  was called  Jones and was no relation  of his
whatever.  For  the shadow of  faintness which the thumb  without a nail had
cast had  deepened now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest
from  sight), into a pool  where things dwell in darkness  so deep that what
they are we scarcely know. She now  looked  down into  this  pool or sea  in
which everything  is  reflected  - and, indeed, some say that all  our  most
violent passions, and art and religion,  are the reflections which we see in
the dark hollow at  the back of the  head when the visible world is obscured
for  the  time.  She  looked  there   now,  long,  deeply,  profoundly,  and
immediately the  ferny path up the hill along  which she was walking  became
not entirely a path,  but partly  the  Serpentine; the  hawthorn bushes were
partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and  gold-mounted canes;
the sheep  were partly tall  Mayfair houses; everything was partly something
else, as  if  her mind had  become a forest with glades  branching  here and
there; things  came nearer, and further, and mingled and  separated and made
the strangest  alliances and combinations in  an incessant chequer  of light
and  shade.  Except  when Canute,  the  elk-hound, chased  a rabbit  and  so
reminded  her  that  it  must  be  about half  past  four  -  it was  indeed
twenty-three minutes to six - she forgot the time.
     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 shou