Search and Destroy
Quelle: Spotify
CHAPTER 1.He--for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it--was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut.Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the
shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the
barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the
breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic
house of the lord who had slain him.Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and
fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many
colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the
rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only,
and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away
from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room
and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he
cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string
it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so thathis enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The
skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was
so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this
way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the
hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they
had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on
their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow
pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the
stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in
the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand
on the window-sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured
red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing. Thus, those who like
symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that
though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders
were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light,
Orlando's face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun
itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happythe mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life
of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of
novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to
office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever
seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at,
was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was
covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker
than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly
drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing
disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark,
the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these
catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and
eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly
we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had
eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have
brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a
marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his
temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize.
Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand
disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore.Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in
green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind
her; sights exalted him--the birds and the trees; and made him in love
with death--the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up thespiral stairway into his brain--which was a roomy one--all these sights,
and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began
that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good
biographer detests, But to continue--Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat
down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what
they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book
labelled 'Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,' and dipped an old stained
goose quill in the ink.Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent,
evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages
of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories;
horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was
never a word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned
with a fluency and sweetness which, considering his age--he was not yet
seventeen--and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its
course to run, were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a
halt. He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing,
nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and
here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which
happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of
course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in
literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy;
bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of
green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover,
nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among
flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think 'how many more
suns shall I see set', etc. etc. (the thought is too well known to be
worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one's cloak, strides out
of the room, and catches one's foot on a painted chest as one does so.
For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener,
coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let
himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He skirted all stables,
kennels, breweries, carpenters' shops, washhouses, places where they make
tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins--for the
house was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts--and
gained the ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is
perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and
the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this
clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a
chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel
himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
So, after a long silence, 'I am alone', he breathed at last, opening his
lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly uphill
through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a
place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that
nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty
or perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see
the English Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and
pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and
armadas with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon
firing; and forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a
watch tower; and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that
of Orlando's father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls.
To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the city;
and perhaps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter,
the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowdon herself showed mountainous
among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood counting, gazing,
recognizing. That was his father's house; that his uncle's. His aunt
owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The heath was
theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger,
and the butterfly.He sighed profoundly, and flung himself--there was a passion in his
movements which deserves the word--on the earth at the foot of the oak
tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's
spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be;
or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he
was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship--it was anything indeed, so
long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he couldattach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the
heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening
about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he
lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the
little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his
limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the
deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows
dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility
and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his
body.
After an hour or so--the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds had
turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black--a
trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill sound came from
the valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a spot compact and
mapped out; a maze; a town, yet girt about with walls; it came from the
heart of his own great house in the valley, which, dark before, even as
he looked and the single trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itself with
other shriller sounds, lost its darkness and became pierced with lights.
Some were small hurrying lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to
answer summonses; others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt
in empty banqueting-halls made ready to receive guests who had not come;
and others dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of
troops of serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding,
and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from
her chariot. Coaches turned and wheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed
their plumes. The Queen had come.
Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at a wicket
gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his room. He tossed
his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to the other. He dipped
his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his finger nails. With no more
than six inches of looking-glass and a pair of old candles to help him,
he had thrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and
shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias in less than ten
minutes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was flushed. He was
excited, But he was terribly late.
By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast
congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres
distant on the other side of the house. But half-way there, in the back
quarters where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs Stewkley's
sitting-room stood open--she was gone, doubtless, with all her keys to
wait upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the servant's dinner table
with a tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat,
shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of
hodden brown. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He
seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his
mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed
and clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did
not see Orlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a
poet? Was he writing poetry? 'Tell me', he wanted to say, 'everything in
the whole world'--for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas
about poets and poetry--but how speak to a man who does not see you? who
sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead? So Orlando
stood gazing while the man turned his pen in his fingers, this way and
that way; and gazed and mused; and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen
lines and looked up. Whereupon Orlando, overcome with shyness, darted off
and reached the banqueting-hall only just in time to sink upon his knees
and, hanging his head in confusion, to offer a bowl of rose water to the
great Queen herself.
Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed hands in
water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long
fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed,
sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a hand that had only to raise itself
for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that
smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was
yet caparisoned in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very
upright though perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though
strung together by a thousand fears; and the Queen's eyes were light
yellow. All this he felt as the great rings flashed in the water and then
something pressed his hair--which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing
nothing more likely to be of use to a historian. And in truth, his mind
was such a welter of opposites--of the night and the blazing candles, of
the shabby poet and the great Queen, of silent fields and the clatter of
serving men--that he could see nothing; or only a hand.
By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a head. But if
it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the
attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and
terror, surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of
state by a lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are
to be trusted, wide open. The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so
reverently, so innocently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs
that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a
heart of gold; and loyalty and manly charm--all qualities which the old
woman loved the more the more they failed her. For she was growing old
and worn and bent before her time. The sound of cannon was always in her
ears. She saw always the glistening poison drop and the long stiletto. As
she sat at table she listened; she heard the guns in the Channel; she
dreaded--was that a curse, was that a whisper? Innocence, simplicity,
were all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them
against. And it was that same night, so tradition has it, when Orlando
was sound asleep, that she made over formally, putting her hand and seal
finally to the parchment, the gift of the great monastic house that had
been the Archbishop's and then the King's to Orlando's father.
Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a queen
without knowing it. And perhaps, for women's hearts are intricate, it was
his ignorance and the start he gave when her lips touched him that kept
the memory of her young cousin (for they had blood in common) green in
her mind. At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not
passed, and Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and
a dozen histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was
to attend the Queen at Whitehall.'Here', she said, watching him advance down the long gallery towards her,
'comes my innocent!' (There was a serenity about him always which had the
look of innocence when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.)
'Come!' she said. She was sitting bolt upright beside the fire. And she
held him a foot's pace from her and looked him up and down. Was she
matching her speculations the other night with the truth now visible? Did
she find her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips,
hands--she ran them over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but
when she saw his legs she laughed out loud. He was the very image of a
noble gentleman. But inwardly? She flashed her yellow hawk's eyes upon
him as if she would pierce his soul. The young man withstood her gaze
blushing only a damask rose as became him. Strength, grace, romance,
folly, poetry, youth--she read him like a page. Instantly she plucked a
ring from her finger (the joint was swollen rather) and as she fitted it
to his, named him her Treasurer and Steward; next hung about him chains
of office; and bidding him bend his knee, tied round it at the slenderest
part the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was denied him.
When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent him to
Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about to sail for
the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she bear to think of
that tender flesh torn and that curly head rolled in the dust? She kept
him with her. At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at
the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze
and the huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him
down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and
old) and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition--she had
not changed her dress for a month--which smelt for all the world, he
thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where
his mother's furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace.
'This', she breathed, 'is my victory!'--even as a rocket roared up and
dyed her cheeks scarlet.For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw
one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid
ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be
the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which
she leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange
domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright
in her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it,
never kept her warm.
Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was
lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on
the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags
were barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear
of spies always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of
murderers always open, a boy--could it be Orlando?--kissing a girl--who
in the Devil's name was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted
sword she struck violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came
running; she was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken
after that and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man's
treachery.It was Orlando's fault perhaps; yet, after all, are we to blame Orlando?The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets;
nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different.
The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may
believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was
divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder
and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular
half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell
vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness.
Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets
sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they
sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As
for using the artifices of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or
preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The
withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age
were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The
sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in
rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their
seasons were short as the flowers'. Plucked they must be before
nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all. Thus, if Orlando
followed the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age itself, and
plucked his flower in the window-seat even with the snow on the ground
and the Queen vigilant in the corridor we can scarcely bring ourselves to
blame him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him do.
As for the girl, we know no more than Queen Elizabeth herself did what
her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana, for he
made rhymes to them all in turn; equally, she may have been a court lady,
or some serving maid. For Orlando's taste was broad; he was no lover of
garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination
for him.
Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait in
him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain grandmother
of his had worn a smock and carried milkpails. Some grains of the Kentish
or Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, fine fluid which came to him
from Normandy. He held that the mixture of brown earth and blue blood was
a good one. Certain it is that he had always a liking for low company,
especially for that of lettered people whose wits so often keep them
under, as if there were the sympathy of blood between them. At this
season of his life, when his head brimmed with rhymes and he never went
to bed without striking off some conceit, the cheek of an innkeeper's
daughter seemed fresher and the wit of a gamekeeper's niece seemed
quicker than those of the ladies at Court. Hence, he began going
frequently to Wapping Old Stairs and the beer gardens at night, wrapped
in a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and the garter at his knee.
There, with a mug before him, among the sanded alleys and bowling greens
and all the simple architecture of such places, he listened to sailors'
stories of hardship and horror and cruelty on the Spanish main; how some
had lost their toes, others their noses--for the spoken story was never
so rounded or so finely coloured as the written. Especially he loved to
hear them volley forth their songs of 'the Azores, while the parrakeets,
which they had brought from those parts, pecked at the rings in their
ears, tapped with their hard acquisitive beaks at the rubies on their
fingers, and swore as vilely as their masters. The women were scarcely
less bold in their speech and less free in their manner than the birds.
They perched on his knee, flung their arms round his neck and, guessing
that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak, were
quite as eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself.
Nor was opportunity lacking. The river was astir early and late with
barges, wherries, and craft of all description. Every day sailed to sea
some fine ship bound for the Indies; now and again another blackened and
ragged with hairy men on board crept painfully to anchor. No one missed a
boy or girl if they dallied a little on the water after sunset; or raised
an eyebrow if gossip had seen them sleeping soundly among the treasure
sacks safe in each other's arms. Such indeed was the adventure that befel
Orlando, Sukey, and the Earl of Cumberland. The day was hot; their loves
had been active; they had fallen asleep among the rubies. Late that night
the Earl, whose fortunes were much bound up in the Spanish ventures, came
to check the booty alone with a lantern. He flashed the light on a
barrel. He started back with an oath. Twined about the cask two spirits
lay sleeping. Superstitious by nature, and his conscience laden with many
a crime, the Earl took the couple--they were wrapped in a red cloak, and
Sukey's bosom was almost as white as the eternal snows of Orlando's
poetry--for a phantom sprung from the graves of drowned sailors to
upbraid him. He crossed himself. He vowed repentance. The row of alms
houses still standing in the Sheen Road is the visible fruit of that
moment's panic. Twelve poor old women of the parish today drink tea and
tonight bless his Lordship for a roof above their heads; so that illicit
love in a treasure ship--but we omit the moral.
Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of this way
of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, but of the
primitive manner of the people. For it has to be remembered that crime
and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they
have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of
our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be
unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call 'life' and 'reality'
are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed, any
equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek 'life' that
Orlando went among them; not in quest of 'reality' that he left them. But
when he had heard a score of times how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey
her honour--and they told the stories admirably, it must be admitted--he
began to be a little weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be cut
off in one way and maidenhood lost in another--or so it seemed to
him--whereas the arts and the sciences had a diversity about them which
stirred his curiosity profoundly. So, always keeping them in happy
memory, he left off frequenting the beer gardens and the skittle alleys,
hung his grey cloak in his wardrobe, let his star shine at his neck and
his garter twinkle at his knee, and appeared once more at the Court of
King James. He was young, he was rich, he was handsome. No one could have
been received with greater acclamation than he was.
It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their
favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in
marriage--Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne--so he called them in his
sonnets.
To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-mannered gentle lady
enough;--indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months and a
half; but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood.
A hare brought up roasted at her father's table turned her faint. She was
much under the influence of the Priests too, and stinted her underlinen
in order to give to the poor. She took it on her to reform Orlando of his
sins, which sickened him, so that he drew back from the marriage, and did
not much regret it when she died soon after of the small-pox.
Favilla, who comes next, was of a different sort altogether. She was the
daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer assiduity and
the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court, where her address in
horsemanship, her fine instep, and her grace in dancing won the
admiration of all. Once, however, she was so ill-advised as to whip a
spaniel that had torn one of her silk stockings (and it must be said in
justice that Favilla had few stockings and those for the most part of
drugget) within an inch of its life beneath Orlando's window. Orlando,
who was a passionate lover of animals, now noticed that her teeth were
crooked, and the two front turned inward, which, he said, is a sure sign
of a perverse and cruel disposition in women, and so broke the engagement
that very night for ever.
The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his flames. She was
by birth one of the Irish Desmonds and had therefore a family tree of her
own as old and deeply rooted as Orlando's itself. She was fair, florid,
and a trifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, had a perfect set of
teeth in the upper jaw, though those on the lower were slightly
discoloured. She was never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee; fed
them with white bread from her own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals;
and was never dressed before mid-day owing to the extreme care she took
of her person. In short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a
nobleman as Orlando, and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both
sides were busy with covenants, jointures, settlements, messuages,
tenements, and whatever is needed before one great fortune can mate with
another when, with the suddenness and severity that then marked the
English climate, came the Great Frost.
The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever
visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the
ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her
usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to
powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast
struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was
enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no
uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon
the road. The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses,
and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment,
one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a
third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed,
upon the hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so
extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was
commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of
Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the
solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to
stone where they stood. The Church could give little help in the matter,
and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part
preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching-posts for sheep,
or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle,
which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day.
But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the
trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of
the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King
seized the opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with
the citizens. He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of
twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be
swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park or pleasure
ground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc. at his
expense. For himself and the courtiers, he reserved a certain space
immediately opposite the Palace gates; which, railed off from the public
only by a silken rope, became at once the centre of the most brilliant
society in England. Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs,
despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda.
Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the Turk in
striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals strode
up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon and
telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers
dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when
the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered
motionless in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and
oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and
purple fire. But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to
melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the
hardness of steel. So clear indeed was it that there could be seen,
congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder.
Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was
one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would
revive puzzled the philosophers. Near London Bridge, where the river had
frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was
plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last
autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying
her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and
farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she
were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips
hinted the truth. 'Twas a sight King James specially liked to look upon,
and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him. In short,
nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But
it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the frost
continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and
stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of
flute and trumpet the courtiers danced.
Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe and
lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absentminded. He much preferred the
plain dances of his own country, which he danced as a child to these
fantastic foreign measures. He had indeed just brought his feet together
about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some
such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the
Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the
loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the
sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name
or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed
entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar
greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the
extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images,
metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his
mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and
a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know
whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.
(For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here
hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme
to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the
taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same
time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things
is out of the question.)...A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow--so he
raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be--no woman
could skate with such speed and vigour--swept almost on tiptoe past him,
Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of
his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the
skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever
had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which
looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally,
coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the
King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the
unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She
was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to
hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to
toss his arm with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his
lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as
if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon
his arm.
The stranger's name, he found, was the Princess Marousha Stanilovska
Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she had come in the train of the
Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father,
to attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In
their great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent; drinking some
black liquid which they spat out now and then upon the ice. None spoke
English, and French with which some at least were familiar was then
little spoken at the English Court.
It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became
acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table
spread under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. The
Princess was placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis Vere and
the other the young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see the
predicament she soon had them in, for though both were fine lads in their
way, the babe unborn had as much knowledge of the French tongue as they
had. When at the beginning of dinner the Princess turned to the Earl and
said, with a grace which ravished his heart, 'Je crois avoir fait la
connaissance d'un gentilhomme qui vous etait apparente en Pologne l'ete
dernier,' or 'La beaute des dames de la cour d'Angleterre me met dans le
ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus gracieuse que votre reine, ni
une coiffure plus belle que la sienne,' both Lord Francis and the Earl
showed the highest embarrassment. The one helped her largely to
horse-radish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made him beg for a
marrow bone. At this the Princess could no longer contain her laughter,
and Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars' heads and stuffed
peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in
wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a
tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and
bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten
cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had
meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it
tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone
through with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his
blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters
flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry
landscape; his manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a
more daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the
flower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand--in fact he
was rattling off one of his most impassioned sonnets when the Princess
addressed him, 'Would you have the goodness to pass the salt?'
He blushed deeply.
'With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,' he replied, speaking French
with a perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, he spoke the tongue as his
own; his mother's maid had taught him. Yet perhaps it would have been
better for him had he never learnt that tongue; never answered that
voice; never followed the light of those eyes...
The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat
beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the nauseating mixture
they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the
men in England? Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her
hair rigged up like a Maypole (comme une grande perche mal fagotee)
really the Queen? And did the King always slobber like that? And which of
those popinjays was George Villiers? Though these questions rather
discomposed Orlando at first, they were put with such archness and
drollery that he could not help but laugh; and he saw from the blank
faces of the company that nobody understood a word, he answered her as
freely as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of
the Court.
Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more attention than
mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her side, and their
conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was carried on with such
animation, provoked such blushes and laughter, that the dullest could
guess the subject. Moreover, the change in Orlando himself was
extraordinary. Nobody had ever seen him so animated. In one night he had
thrown off his boyish clumsiness; he was changed from a sulky stripling,
who could not enter a ladies' room without sweeping half the ornaments
from the table, to a nobleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. To see
him hand the Muscovite (as she was called) to her sledge, or offer her
his hand for the dance, or catch the spotted kerchief which she had let
drop, or discharge any other of those manifold duties which the supreme
lady exacts and the lover hastens to anticipate was a sight to kindle the
dull eyes of age, and to make the quick pulse of youth beat faster. Yet
over it all hung a cloud. The old men shrugged their shoulders. The young
tittered between their fingers. All knew that a Orlando was betrothed to
another. The Lady Margaret O'Brien O'Dare O'Reilly Tyrconnel (for that
was the proper name of Euphrosyne of the Sonnets) wore Orlando's splendid
sapphire on the second finger of her left hand. It was she who had the
supreme right to his attentions. Yet she might drop all the handkerchiefs
in her wardrobe (of which she had many scores) upon the ice and Orlando
never stooped to pick them up. She might wait twenty minutes for him to
hand her to her sledge, and in the end have to be content with the
services of her Blackamoor. When she skated, which she did rather
clumsily, no one was at her elbow to encourage her, and, if she fell,
which she did rather heavily, no one raised her to her feet and dusted
the snow from her petticoats. Although she was naturally phlegmatic, slow
to take offence, and more reluctant than most people to believe that a
mere foreigner could oust her from Orlando's affections, still even the
Lady Margaret herself was brought at last to suspect that something was
brewing against her peace of mind.
Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando took less and less care to hide his
feelings. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company as soon
as they had dined, or steal away from the skaters, who were forming sets
for a quadrille. Next moment it would be seen that the Muscovite was
missing too. But what most outraged the Court, and stung it in its
tenderest part, which is its vanity, was that the couple was often seen
to slip under the silken rope, which railed off the Royal enclosure from
the public part of the river and to disappear among the crowd of common
people. For suddenly the Princess would stamp her foot and cry, 'Take me
away. I detest your English mob,' by which she meant the English Court
itself. She could stand it no longer. It was full of prying old women,
she said, who stared in one's face, and of bumptious young men who trod
on one's toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was
like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles broad on which
one could gallop six horses abreast all day long without meeting a soul.
Besides, she wanted to see the Tower, the Beefeaters, the Heads on Temple
Bar, and the jewellers' shops in the city. Thus, it came about that
Orlando took her into the city, showed her the Beefeaters and the rebels'
heads, and bought her whatever took her fancy in the Royal Exchange. But
this was not enough. Each increasingly desired the other's company in
privacy all day long where there were none to marvel or to stare. Instead
of taking the road to London, therefore, they turned the other way about
and were soon beyond the crowd among the frozen reaches of the Thames
where, save for sea birds and some old country woman hacking at the ice
in a vain attempt to draw a pailful of water or gathering what sticks or
dead leaves she could find for firing, not a living soul ever came their
way. The poor kept closely to their cottages, and the better sort, who
could afford it, crowded for warmth and merriment to the city.
Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was
the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy--a creature soft as
snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father
had it killed--hence, they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating
and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach,
where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur
cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time,
he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and
they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other
loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth,
and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once more
in his arms and give him for love's sake, one more embrace. And then they
would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor
old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at
it with a chopper of cold steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they
would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor
and Pagan; of this man's beard and that woman's skin; of a rat that fed
from her hand at table; of the arras that moved always in the hall at
home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for such converse,
nothing was too great.
Then suddenly, Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy;
the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of
it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and
look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is
right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates
happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin
fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes
of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true
Church (in his view the Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port,
anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea.
'All ends in death,' Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face clouded
with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent
see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the
biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so
keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden
extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this
time of his life indulged.)
'All ends in death,' Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice. But
Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where
the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left
unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them--Sasha stared at him,
perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said
nothing. But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she
disliked, so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly,
so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunately always in French, which
notoriously loses its flavour in translation) that he forgot the frozen
waters or night coming or the old woman or whatever it was, and would try
to tell her--plunging and splashing among a thousand images which had
gone as stale as the women who inspired them--what she was like. Snow,
cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was
like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look
down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green
hill which is yet clouded--like nothing he had seen or known in England.
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another
landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too
honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed
and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however
daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in
the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only
outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone
with the steady beam of an Englishwoman--here, however, remembering the
Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and
swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the
flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the
pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half
pressed out of him by pain.
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she was a
fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the whole
history of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in
Britain; how they had come from Rome with the Caesars and had the right
to walk down the Corso (which is the chief street in Rome) under a
tasselled palanquin, which he said is a privilege reserved only for those
of imperial blood (for there was an orgulous credulity about him which
was pleasant enough), he would pause and ask her, Where was her own
house? What was her father? Had she brothers? Why was she here alone with
her uncle? Then, somehow, though she answered readily enough, an
awkwardness would come between them. He suspected at first that her rank
was not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of the savage
ways of her people, for he had heard that the women in Muscovy wear
beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist down; that both
sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear meat with their
fingers and live in huts where an English noble would scruple to keep his
cattle; so that he forebore to press her. But on reflection, he concluded
that her silence could not be for that reason; she herself was entirely
free from hair on the chin; she dressed in velvet and pearls, and her
manners were certainly not those of a woman bred in a cattle-shed.
What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the tremendous
force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which
shifts suddenly and makes the whole pile shake. The agony would seize him
suddenly. Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how
to quiet him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages
pleased her and she provoked them purposely--such is the curious
obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament.
To continue the story--skating farther than their wont that day they
reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored and been
frozen in midstream. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy
flying its double-headed black eagle from the main mast, which was hung
with many-coloured icicles several yards in length. Sasha had left some
of her clothing on board, and supposing the ship to be empty they climbed
on deck and went in search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own
past, Orlando would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this
refuge before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far when
a fine young man started up from some business of his own behind a coil
of rope and saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he was one of
the crew and would help the Princess to find what she wanted, lit a lump
of candle and disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought only of the
pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means for making her
irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there were and hardships
to overcome. She was determined to live in Russia, where there were
frozen rivers and wild horses and men, she said, who gashed each other's
throats open. It is true that a landscape of pine and snow, habits of
lust and slaughter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his
pleasant country ways of sport and tree-planting; relinquish his office;
ruin his career; shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka
instead of canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve--for what purpose, he
knew not. Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her
sake. As for his marriage to the Lady Margaret, fixed though it was for
this day sennight, the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave
it a thought. Her kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a great lady; his
friends would deride him for ruining the finest career in the world for a
Cossack woman and a waste of snow--it weighed not a straw in the balance
compared with Sasha herself. On the first dark night they would fly. They
would take ship to Russia. So he pondered; so he plotted as he walked up
and down the deck.
He was recalled, turning westward, by the sight of the sun, slung like an
orange on the cross of St Paul's. It was blood-red and sinking rapidly.
It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this hour and more. Seized
instantly with those dark forebodings which shadowed even his most
confident thoughts of her, he plunged the way he had seen them go into
the hold of the ship; and, after stumbling among chests and barrels in
the darkness, was made aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they
were seated there. For one second, he had a vision of them; saw Sasha
seated on the sailor's knee; saw her bend towards him; saw them embrace
before the light was blotted out in a red cloud by his rage. He blazed
into such a howl of anguish that the whole ship echoed. Sasha threw
herself between them, or the sailor would have been stifled before he
could draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sickness came over Orlando, and
they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy to drink before he
revived. And then, when he had recovered and was sat upon a heap of
sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before his dizzied eyes
softly, sinuously, like the fox that had bit him, now cajoling, now
denouncing, so that he came to doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle
guttered; had not the shadows moved? The box was heavy, she said; the man
was helping her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment--for who can
be sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to find?--the
next was the more violent with anger at her deceit. Then Sasha herself
turned white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go that night, and
called upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in
the arms of a common seaman. Indeed, looking at them together (which he
could hardly bring himself to do) Orlando was outraged by the foulness of
his imagination that could have painted so frail a creature in the paw of
that hairy sea brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his
stockings, wore common wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray
horse upon which some wren or robin has perched in its flight. So he
yielded; believed her; and asked her pardon. Yet when they were going
down the ship's side, lovingly again, Sasha paused with her hand on the
ladder, and called back to this tawny wide-cheeked monster a volley of
Russian greetings, jests, or endearments, not a word of which Orlando
could understand. But there was something in her tone (it might be the
fault of the Russian consonants) that reminded Orlando of a scene some
nights since, when he had come upon her in secret gnawing a candle-end in
a corner, which she had picked from the floor. True, it was pink; it was
gilt; and it was from the King's table; but it was tallow, and she gnawed
it. Was there not, he thought, handing her on to the ice, something rank
in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant born? And he
fancied her at forty grown unwieldy though she was now slim as a reed,
and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again as they
skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast, and he felt
as if he had been hooked by a great fish through the nose and rushed
through the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent.
It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes,
spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against
the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at Charing;
there the dome of St Paul's; there the massy square of the Tower
buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob
at the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey
windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in
Orlando's fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of
angels (in Orlando's fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs
perpetually. All the time they seemed to be skating in fathomless depths
of air, so blue the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they
sped quicker and quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about
them, and cutting in the air with their wings the very same sweeps that
they cut on the ice with their skates.
Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more
delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told
him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling
across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf. Upon
which he told her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would
stray into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with
porridge from a bucket. And then she praised him; for his love of beasts;
for his gallantry; for his legs. Ravished with her praises and shamed to
think how he had maligned her by fancying her on the knees of a common
sailor and grown fat and lethargic at forty, he told her that he could
find no words to praise her; yet instantly bethought him how she was like
the spring and green grass and rushing waters, and seizing her more
tightly than ever, he swung her with him half across the river so that
the gulls and the cormorants swung too. And halting at length, out of
breath, she said, panting slightly, that he was like a million-candled
Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia) hung with yellow globes;
incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; (so one might translate
it) for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his black and
crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own radiance,
from a lamp lit within.
All the colour, save the red of Orlando's cheeks, soon faded. Night came
on. As the orange light of sunset vanished it was succeeded by an
astonishing white glare from the torches, bonfires, flaming cressets, and
other devices by which the river was lit up and the strangest
transformation took place. Various churches and noblemen's palaces, whose
fronts were of white stone showed in streaks and patches as if floating
on the air. Of St Paul's, in particular, nothing was left but a gilt
cross. The Abbey appeared like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything
suffered emaciation and transformation. As they approached the carnival,
they heard a deep note like that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed
louder and louder until it became an uproar. Every now and then a great
shout followed a rocket into the air. Gradually they could discern little
figures breaking off from the vast crowd and spinning hither and thither
like gnats on the surface of a river. Above and around this brilliant
circle like a bowl of darkness pressed the deep black of a winter's
night. And then into this darkness there began to rise with pauses, which
kept the expectation alert and the mouth open, flowering rockets;
crescents; serpents; a crown. At one moment the woods and distant hills
showed green as on a summer's day; the next all was winter and blackness
again.
By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure
and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who
were pressing as near to the silken rope as they dared. Loth to end their
privacy and encounter the sharp eyes that were on the watch for them, the
couple lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives;
horse dealers, cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their
whimples; orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a
crowd of little ragamuffins such as always haunt the outskirts of a
crowd, screaming and scrambling among people's feet--all the riff-raff of
the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting
dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching; here uproarious,
there glum; some of them with mouths gaping a yard wide; others as little
reverent as daws on a house-top; all as variously rigged out as their
purse or stations allowed; here in fur and broadcloth; there in tatters
with their feet kept from the ice only by a dishclout bound about them.
The main press of people, it appeared, stood opposite a booth or stage
something like our Punch and Judy show upon which some kind of theatrical
performance was going forward. A black man was waving his arms and
vociferating. There was a woman in white laid upon a bed. Rough though
the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of steps and
sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and whistling, or
when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel on to the ice which
a dog would scramble for, still the astonishing, sinuous melody of the
words stirred Orlando like music. Spoken with extreme speed and a daring
agility of tongue which reminded him of the sailors singing in the beer
gardens at Wapping, the words even without meaning were as wine to him.
But now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which
was as if torn from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor
seemed to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in
her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands.
At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down
his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there
too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the
grave. Worms devour us.
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn--
Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The night
was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they
had waited for; it was on such a night as this that they had planned to
fly. He remembered everything. The time had come. With a burst of passion
he snatched Sasha to him, and hissed in her ear 'Jour de ma vie!' It was
their signal. At midnight they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars.
Horses waited there. Everything was in readiness for their flight. So
they parted, she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hour of the
time.
Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so inky a
blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen, which was all to
the good, but it was also of the most solemn stillness so that a horse's
hoof, or a child's cry, could be heard at a distance of half a mile. Many
a time did Orlando, pacing the little courtyard, hold his heart at the
sound of some nag's steady footfall on the cobbles, or at the rustle of a
woman's dress. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home
belated; or some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so
innocent. They passed, and the street was quieter than before. Then those
lights which burnt downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the
poor of the city lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by
one, were extinguished. The street lanterns in these purlieus were few at
most; and the negligence of the night watchman often suffered them to
expire long before dawn. The darkness then became even deeper than
before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the saddle
girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all these
things a dozen times at least till he could find nothing more needing his
attention. Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to midnight, he
could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn parlour, where the
hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to a
few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their ditties, and
telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till they toppled
off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor. The darkness was
more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He listened to every
footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail
from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his
heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he had
no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would
come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her
footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a
blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with
expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The
blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had
lasted so long that it took him a minute to realize that these were
raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain. At first, they
fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became
sixty; then six hundred; then ran themselves together in a steady spout
of water. It was as if the hard and consolidated sky poured itself forth
in one profuse fountain. In the space of five minutes Orlando was soaked
to the skin.
Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath the
lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air
was thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the
downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it. The
roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and
perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight
he scarcely thought. All his senses were bent upon gazing along the
cobbled pathway--gleaming in the light of the lantern--for Sasha's
coming. Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about
with rain strokes. But the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and
ominous voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair
of anguish in Orlando's soul, St Paul's struck the first stroke of
midnight. Four times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition
of a lover, Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she
would come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and
the eighth, and to his apprehensive mind they seemed notes first
heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster. When the twelfth
struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for the rational
part of him to reason; she might be late; she might be prevented; she
might have missed her way. The passionate and feeling heart of Orlando
knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling one after another. The
whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision.
The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from
concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more
poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain
without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees.
The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom.
Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard.
There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Orlando
stood there immovable till Paul's clock struck two, and then, crying
aloud with an awful irony, and all his teeth showing, 'Jour de ma vie!'
he dashed the lantern to the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he
knew not where.
Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to
take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the dawn broke,
which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and
the rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off
Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes.
Where, for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such
thickness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had
been stood on its pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters.
The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur
spring (to which view many philosophers inclined) had risen from the
volcanic regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such vehemence
that it swept the huge and massy fragments furiously apart. The mere look
of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and confusion.
The river was strewn with icebergs. Some of these were as broad as a
bowling green and as high as a house; others no bigger than a man's hat,
but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down a whole convoy of ice
blocks sinking everything that stood in their way. Now, eddying and
swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to be hurtling
itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank, so that
they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was
the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human
creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting
and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped
into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. Sometimes
quite a cluster of these poor creatures would come down together, some on
their knees, others suckling their babies. One old man seemed to be
reading aloud from a holy book. At other times, and his fate perhaps was
the most dreadful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrow tenement
alone. As they swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for
help, making wild promises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and
vowing altars and wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so
dazed with terror that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly
before them. One crew of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their
liveries, roared and shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado,
and were dashed against a tree and sunk with blasphemies on their lips.
An old nobleman--for such his furred gown and golden chain proclaimed
him--went down not far from where Orlando stood, calling vengeance upon
the Irish rebels, who, he cried with his last breath, had plotted this
devilry. Many perished clasping some silver pot or other treasure to
their breasts; and at least a score of poor wretches were drowned by
their own cupidity, hurling themselves from the bank into the flood
rather than let a gold goblet escape them, or see before their eyes the
disappearance of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables, possessions
of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange
sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid sumptuously
for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary
number of cooking utensils.
Dazed and astounded, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch the
appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming
to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard
along the river bank in the direction of the sea. Rounding a bend of the
river, he came opposite that reach where, not two days ago, the ships of
the Ambassadors had seemed immovably frozen. Hastily, he made count of
them all; the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still
floated, though the French had broken loose from her moorings, and the
Turkish vessel had taken a great rent in her side and was fast filling
with water. But the Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. For one moment
Orlando thought it must have foundered; but, raising himself in his
stirrups and shading his eyes, which had the sight of a hawk's, he could
just make out the shape of a ship on the horizon. The black eagles were
flying from the mast head. The ship of the Muscovite Embassy was standing
out to sea.
Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would
breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless
woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless,
mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the
swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a
little straw.
Zeige deinen Freunden, dass dir Search and Destroy von Thirty Seconds To Mars gefällt:
Kommentare