the great cloud which hung, not only over london, but over the whole of the british isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. a change seemed to have come over the climate of england. rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than they began again. the sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. but what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house — damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. so gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of the change, the constitution of england was altered and nobody knew it. everywhere the effects were felt. the hardy country gentleman, who had sat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the brothers adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. rugs appeared; beards were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. the chill which he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house; furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare. then a change of diet became essential. the muffin was invented and the crumpet. coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home — which had become extremely important — was completely altered.
outside the house — it was another effect of the damp — ivy grew in unparalleled profusion. houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. no garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery, a wilderness, a maze. what light penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown and purple plush. but the change did not stop at outward things. the damp struck within. men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. in a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. the sexes drew further and further apart. no open conversation was tolerated. evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. and just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. the life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. she married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. thus the british empire came into existence; and thus — for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork — sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. but eusebius chubb shall be our witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who could do nothing to stop it. there is a passage towards the end of his memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one morning ‘all about nothing’ he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went for a turn in his garden. soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery. innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. he seemed to himself ‘to crush the mould of a million more under his feet’. thick smoke exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. he reflected that no fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance. wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. cucumbers ‘came scrolloping across the grass to his feet’. giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves. hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. then, remembering with a sigh his own fecundity and his poor wife jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? he looked upwards into the sky. did not heaven itself, or that great frontispiece of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the instigation of the heavenly hierarchy? for there, winter or summer, year in year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide above the british isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was copied there. he went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.
while this went on in every part of england, it was all very well for orlando to mew herself in her house at blackfriars and pretend that the climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. even she, at length, was forced to acknowledge that times were changed. one afternoon in the early part of the century she was driving through st james’s park in her old panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with strange prismatic colours as it passed. such a sight was sufficiently strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause her to pull the window down and look at it. the puce and flamingo clouds made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves that she was insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins dying in ionian seas. but what was her surprise when, as it struck the earth, the sunbeam seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy (for it had something of a banquet-table air)— a conglomeration at any rate of the most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a vast mound where the statue of queen victoria now stands! draped about a vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow’s weeds and bridal veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments — the whole supported like a gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in flowing white; on the left by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers. the incongruity of the objects, the association of the fully clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted orlando with the most profound dismay. she had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent, so hideous, and so monumental. it might, and indeed it must be, the effect of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the first breeze that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past, as if it were destined to endure for ever. nothing, she felt, sinking back into the corner of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that garish erection. only the noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust; but there they would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north, eternally. she looked back as her coach swept up constitution hill. yes, there it was, still beaming placidly in a light which — she pulled her watch out of her fob — was, of course, the light of twelve o’clock mid-day. none other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever. she was determined not to look again. already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly. but what was more peculiar a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her cheeks as she passed buckingham palace and her eyes seemed forced by a superior power down upon her knees. suddenly she saw with a start that she was wearing black breeches. she never ceased blushing till she had reached her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.
once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which she snatched from her bed. she explained to the widow bartholomew (who had succeeded good old grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.
‘so do we all, m’lady,’ said the widow, heaving a profound sigh. ‘the walls is sweating,’ she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the finger-prints to be marked there. the ivy had grown so profusely that many windows were now sealed up. the kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely tell a kettle from a cullender. a poor black cat had been mistaken for coals and shovelled on the fire. most of the maids were already wearing three or four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was august.
‘but is it true, m’lady,’ the good woman asked, hugging herself, while the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, ‘that the queen, bless her, is wearing a what d’you call it, a —,’ the good woman hesitated and blushed.
‘a crinoline,’ orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached blackfriars). mrs bartholomew nodded. the tears were already running down her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. for it was pleasant to weep. were they not all of them weak women? wearing crinolines the better to conceal the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child? to bear fifteen or twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
‘the muffins is keepin’ ‘ot,’ said mrs bartholomew, mopping up her tears, ‘in the liberry.’
and wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins orlando now sat down.
‘the muffins is keepin’ ‘ot in the liberry’— orlando minced out the horrid cockney phrase in mrs bartholomew’s refined cockney accents as she drank — but no, she detested the mild fluid — her tea. it was in this very room, she remembered, that queen elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on the table when lord burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of the subjunctive. ‘little man, little man,’— orlando could hear her say —’is “must” a word to be addressed to princes?’ and down came the flagon on the table: there was the mark of it still.
but when orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her arm-chair with a curse. tomorrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. and then (here she blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on...the blushes came and went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. one might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her cheeks. and if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the crinoline being blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous position must excuse her (even her sex was still in dispute) and the irregular life she had lived before.
at length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed as if the spirit of the age — if such indeed it were — lay dormant for a time. then orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained — the manuscript of her poem, ‘the oak tree’. she had carried this about with her for so many years now, and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out. she turned back to the first page and read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. she had been working at it for close three hundred years now. it was time to make an end. meanwhile she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read, how very little she had changed all these years. she had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. she had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.
‘after all,’ she thought, getting up and going to the window, ‘nothing has changed. the house, the garden are precisely as they were. not a chair has been moved, not a trinket sold. there are the same walks, the same lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, i dare say, has the same carp in it. true, queen victoria is on the throne and not queen elizabeth, but what difference...’
no sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the door was flung wide and in marched basket, the butler, followed by bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. orlando, who had just dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which spread and meandered round her pen. it was some infirmity of the quill, she supposed; it was split or dirty. she dipped it again. the blot increased. she tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came. next she began to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed monster, something between a bat and a wombat. but as for writing poetry with basket and bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. no sooner had she said ‘impossible’ than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. her page was written in the neatest sloping italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life:
i am myself but a vile link
amid life’s weary chain,
but i have spoken hallow’d words,
oh, do not say in vain!
will the young maiden, when her tears,
alone in moonlight shine,
tears for the absent and the loved,
murmur —
she wrote without a stop as bartholomew and basket grunted and groaned about the room, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.
again she dipped her pen and off it went:—
she was so changed, the soft carnation cloud
once mantling o’er her cheek like that which eve
hangs o’er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,
had faded into paleness, broken by
bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,
but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink ever the page and blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. she was all of a quiver, all of a stew. nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. what had happened to her? was it the damp, was it bartholomew, was it basket, what was it? she demanded. but the room was empty. no one answered her, unless the dripping of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales. now her toes tingled; now her marrow. she had the queerest sensations about the thigh bones. her hairs seemed to erect themselves. her arms sang and twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years or so. but all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands; and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the second finger of the left hand. and when she raised it to see what caused this agitation, she saw nothing — nothing but the vast solitary emerald which queen elizabeth had given her. and was that not enough? she asked. it was of the finest water. it was worth ten thousand pounds at least. the vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some of the darkest manifestations of the human soul) to say no, that is not enough; and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight? till poor orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand without in the least knowing why. at this moment, bartholomew came in to ask which dress she should lay out for dinner, and orlando, whose senses were much quickened, instantly glanced at bartholomew’s left hand, and instantly perceived what she had never noticed before — a thick ring of rather jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.
‘let me look at your ring, bartholomew,’ she said, stretching her hand to take it.
at this, bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a rogue. she started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it away from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. ‘no,’ she said, with resolute dignity, her ladyship might look if she pleased, but as for taking off her wedding ring, not the archbishop nor the pope nor queen victoria on her throne could force her to do that. her thomas had put it on her finger twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. in fact, orlando understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with emotion; that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she let it out of her keeping for a second.
‘heaven help us,’ said orlando, standing at the window and watching the pigeons at their pranks, ‘what a world we live in! what a world to be sure!’ its complexities amazed her. it now seemed to her that the whole world was ringed with gold. she went in to dinner. wedding rings abounded. she went to church. wedding rings were everywhere. she drove out. gold, or pinchbeck, thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. rings filled the jewellers’ shops, not the flashing pastes and diamonds of orlando’s recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. at the same time, she began to notice a new habit among the town people. in the old days, one would meet a boy trifling with a girl under a hawthorn hedge frequently enough. orlando had flicked many a couple with the tip of her whip and laughed and passed on. now, all that was changed. couples trudged and plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. the woman’s right hand was invariably passed through the man’s left and her fingers were firmly gripped by his. often it was not till the horses’ noses were on them that they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one piece, heavily, to the side of the road. orlando could only suppose that some new discovery had been made about the race; that they were somehow stuck together, couple after couple, but who had made it and when, she could not guess. it did not seem to be nature. she looked at the doves and the rabbits and the elk-hounds and she could not see that nature had changed her ways or mended them, since the time of elizabeth at least. there was no indissoluble alliance among the brutes that she could see. could it be queen victoria then, or lord melbourne? was it from them that the great discovery of marriage proceeded? yet the queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of dogs, and lord melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. it was strange — it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and sanitation. her ruminations, however, were accompanied by such a tingling and twanging of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas in order. they were languishing and ogling like a housemaid’s fancies. they made her blush. there was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands and wear it like the rest. this she did, slipping it, overcome with shame, upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. the tingling persisted more violently, more indignantly than ever. she did not sleep a wink that night. next morning when she took up the pen to write, either she could think of nothing, and the pen made one large lachrymose blot after another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all. for it would seem — her case proved it — that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. the nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.
that this was much against her natural temperament has been sufficiently made plain. when the sound of the archduke’s chariot wheels died away, the cry that rose to her lips was ‘life! a lover!’ not ‘life! a husband!’ and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and run about the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. such is the indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those who bend its own way. orlando had inclined herself naturally to the elizabethan spirit, to the restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age to the other. but the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. for it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now that orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
so she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (bartholomew had so christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which she had submissively adopted. it was heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn. none had ever so impeded her movements. no longer could she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. her skirts collected damp leaves and straw. the plumed hat tossed on the breeze. the thin shoes were quickly soaked and mud-caked. her muscles had lost their pliancy. she became nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. all these things inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether queen victoria’s or another’s, that each man and each woman has another allotted to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them do part. it would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again. thus did the spirit work upon her, for all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those twangings and tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if angels were plucking harp-strings with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
but whom could she lean upon? she asked that question of the wild autumn winds. for it was now october, and wet as usual. not the archduke; he had married a very great lady and had hunted hares in roumania these many years now; nor mr m.; he was become a catholic; nor the marquis of c.; he made sacks in botany bay; nor the lord o.; he had long been food for fishes. one way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the nells and the kits of drury lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean upon.
‘whom’, she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of appealing womanhood as she did so, ‘can i lean upon?’ her words formed themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had written of its own accord. it was not orlando who spoke, but the spirit of the age. but whichever it was, nobody answered it. the rooks were tumbling pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. the rain had stopped at last and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
‘everyone is mated except myself,’ she mused, as she trailed disconsolately across the courtyard. there were the rooks; canute and pippin even — transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to have a partner. ‘whereas, i, who am mistress of it all,’ orlando thought, glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned windows of the hall, ‘am single, am mateless, am alone.’
such thoughts had never entered her head before. now they bore her down unescapably. instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. one must lean on someone, she thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and help him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid to ask it. so she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.
at every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss her. but there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. a steel-blue plume from one of them fell among the heather. she loved wild birds’ feathers. she had used to collect them as a boy. she picked it up and stuck it in her hat. the air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. as the rooks went whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind her, over the moor, up the hill. she had not walked so far for years. six feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn between her fingers and pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw, gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, mysterious as the lake into which sir bedivere flung the sword of arthur. a single feather quivered in the air and fell into the middle of it. then, some strange ecstasy came over her. some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while the rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her. she quickened her pace; she ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. her ankle was broken. she could not rise. but there she lay content. the scent of the bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. the rooks’ hoarse laughter was in her ears. ‘i have found my mate,’ she murmured. ‘it is the moor. i am nature’s bride,’ she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by the pool. ‘here will i lie. (a feather fell upon her brow.) i have found a greener laurel than the bay. my forehead will be cool always. these are wild birds’ feathers — the owl’s, the nightjar’s. i shall dream wild dreams. my hands shall wear no wedding ring,’ she continued, slipping it from her finger. ‘the roots shall twine about them. ah!’ she sighed, pressing her head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, ‘i have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life — and behold, death is better. i have known many men and many women,’ she continued; ‘none have i understood. it is better that i should lie at peace here with only the sky above me — as the gipsy told me years ago. that was in turkey.’ and she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it, and camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only mountains, very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields of irises and gentian. so the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered themselves down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw the great hump of the south downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with ships passing; and she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and thought at first, ‘that’s the armada,’ and then thought ‘no, it’s nelson’, and then remembered how those wars were over and the ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails on the winding river were those of pleasure boats. she saw, too, cattle sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. indeed, she was falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a heart beating? tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought it changed to the trot of a horse’s hoofs; one, two, three, four, she counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. the horse was almost on her. she sat upright. towering dark against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. he started. the horse stopped.
‘madam,’ the man cried, leaping to the ground, ‘you’re hurt!’
‘i’m dead, sir!’ she replied.
a few minutes later, they became engaged.
the morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. it was marmaduke bonthrop shelmerdine, esquire.
‘i knew it!’ she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous, passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild, dark-plumed name — a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of rooks’ wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things which will be described presently.
‘mine is orlando,’ she said. he had guessed it. for if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the mediterranean from the south seas, one says at once, ‘orlando’, he explained.
in fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance. he had a castle in the hebrides, but it was ruined, he told her. gannets feasted in the banqueting hall. he had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the east. he was on his way now to join his brig at falmouth, but the wind had fallen and it was only when the gale blew from the south-west that he could put out to sea. orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on the weather vane. mercifully its tail pointed due east and was steady as a rock. ‘oh! shel, don’t leave me!’ she cried. ‘i’m passionately in love with you,’ she said. no sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
‘you’re a woman, shel!’ she cried.
‘you’re a man, orlando!’ he cried.
never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then took place since the world began. when it was over and they were seated again she asked him, what was this talk of a south-west gale? where was he bound for?
‘for the horn,’ he said briefly, and blushed. (for a man had to blush as a woman had, only at rather different things.) it was only by dint of great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she gathered that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures — which is to voyage round cape horn in the teeth of a gale. masts had been snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him). sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a raft with a biscuit.
‘it’s about all a fellow can do nowadays,’ he said sheepishly, and helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. the vision which she had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than any she had cried before: ‘i am a woman,’ she thought, ‘a real woman, at last.’ she thanked bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare and unexpected delight. had she not been lame in the left foot, she would have sat upon his knee.
‘shel, my darling,’ she began again, ‘tell me...’ and so they talked two hours or more, perhaps about cape horn, perhaps not, and really it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in london, things which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. for it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. for which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion.
after some days more of this kind of talk,
‘orlando, my dearest,’ shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling outside, and basket the butler entered with the information that there was a couple of peelers downstairs with a warrant from the queen.
‘show ‘em up,’ said shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck, taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the fireplace. two officers in bottlegreen uniforms with truncheons at their hips then entered the room and stood at attention. formalities being over, they gave into orlando’s own hands, as their commission was, a legal document of some very impressive sort; judging by the blobs of sealing wax, the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest importance.
orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to the matter.
‘the lawsuits are settled,’ she read out...’some in my favour, as for example...others not. turkish marriage annulled (i was ambassador in constantinople, shel,’ she explained) ‘children pronounced illegitimate, (they said i had three sons by pepita, a spanish dancer). so they don’t inherit, which is all to the good...sex? ah! what about sex? my sex’, she read out with some solemnity, ‘is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt (what i was telling you a moment ago, shel?), female. the estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage’— but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, ‘but there won’t be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be taken as read.’ whereupon she appended her own signature beneath lord palmerston’s and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of her titles, her house, and her estate — which was now so much shrunk, for the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.
when the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings.
(horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the high street incessantly. addresses were read from the bull. replies were made from the stag. the town was illuminated. gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. coins were well and duly laid under stones. hospitals were founded. rat and sparrow clubs were inaugurated. turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘i am a base pretender’, lolling from their mouths. the queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to orlando to dine and sleep at the castle, that very same night. her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the countess if r., lady q., lady palmerston, the marchioness of p., mrs w.e. gladstone and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.)— all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in orlando’s life. she skipped it, to get on with the text. for when the bonfires were blazing in the marketplace, she was in the dark woods with shelmerdine alone. so fine was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest at last, on orlando’s foot.
‘tell me, mar,’ she would say (and here it must be explained, that when she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy, amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant farms, a cock crowing — all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)—’tell me, mar,’ she would say, ‘about cape horn.’ then shelmerdine would make a little model on the ground of the cape with twigs and dead leaves and an empty snail shell or two.
‘here’s the north,’ he would say. ‘there’s the south. the wind’s coming from hereabouts. now the brig is sailing due west; we’ve just lowered the top-boom mizzen: and so you see — here, where this bit of grass is, she enters the current which you’ll find marked — where’s my map and compasses, bo’sun? ah! thanks, that’ll do, where the snail shell is. the current catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf is,— for you must understand my dear —’ and so he would go on, and she would listen to every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there reflected on the destiny of man; came down again; had a whisky and soda; went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true end of life; decided in favour of cape horn, and so on. all this and a thousand other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied, yes, negresses are seductive, aren’t they? he having told her that the supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how well she had taken his meaning.
‘are you positive you aren’t a man?’ he would ask anxiously, and she would echo,
‘can it be possible you’re not a woman?’ and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. for each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.
and so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that ‘the biscuits ran out’ has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read bishop berkeley’s philosophy for the tenth time. (and from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)
so they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with spotted autumn leaves, orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart of the woods in solitude, leaving bonthrop sitting there among the snail shells, making models of cape horn. ‘bonthrop,’ she would say, ‘i’m off,’ and when she called him by his second name, ‘bonthrop’, it should signify to the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks on a desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily, die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and with the bonfires blazing and lady palmerston or lady derby asking her out every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so saying ‘bonthrop’, she said in effect, ‘i’m dead’, and pushed her way as a spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and movement were over and she were free now to take her way — all of which the reader should hear in her voice when she said ‘bonthrop,’ and should also add, the better to illumine the word, that for him too the same word signified, mystically, separation and isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in unfathomable seas.
after some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked ‘shelmerdine’, and stooping, she picked up one of those autumn crocuses which to some people signify that very word, and put it with the jay’s feather that came tumbling blue through the beech woods, in her breast. then she called ‘shelmerdine’ and the word went shooting this way and that way through the woods and struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells in the grass. he saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay’s feather in her breast, and cried ‘orlando’, which meant (and it must be remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes, some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken as if something were breaking through; which proved to be a ship in full sail, heaving and tossing a little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole year of summer days to make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down, heaving this way, heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the crest of this wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly stands over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap on deck — as orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the 26th of october, orlando was lying in the bracken, while shelmerdine recited shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which had started to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across orlando’s foot. a second leaf followed and then a third. orlando shivered and turned pale. it was the wind. shelmerdine — but it would be more proper now to call him bonthrop — leapt to his feet.
‘the wind!’ he cried.
together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts, frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after till they reached the chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that taper. bells were rung. people were summoned. at length there was mr dupper catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book. and they thrust queen mary’s prayer book in his hands and he searched, hastily fluttering the pages, and said, ‘marmaduke bonthrop shelmerdine, and lady orlando, kneel down’; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud and faint alternately, and mr dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all was quiet for a moment, and one word — it might be ‘the jaws of death’— rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang loud and others prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap of thunder, so that no one heard the word obey spoken or saw, except as a golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. all was movement and confusion. and up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing and the rain pouring, and the lady orlando, with her ring on her finger, went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt forward and orlando, standing there, cried out marmaduke bonthrop shelmerdine! and he answered her orlando! and the words went dashing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
十九世纪第一天出现的漫天乌云，不仅笼罩了伦敦，而且笼罩了整个英伦三岛。那乌云持续了很长时间，对生活在它阴影之下的人们来说，这时间长到了后果不同寻常的地步。或者说，它也没有羁留多久，因为它不断受到狂风的袭击。英格兰的气候似乎发生了变化，雨下得更勤，间隔更短，而且往往是风急雨骤。太阳偶尔露面，但它周围总是云雾缭绕，空气中的水气饱和了，于是阳光的缤纷色彩不复存在，紫、橙、红等颜色中的呆滞色调取代了十八世纪活泼的风景。在这伤痕累累、阴霾密布的天穹之下，包心菜不再碧绿鲜艳，白雪亦显得污迹斑斑。更糟糕的是，潮湿开始潜入每一所房屋。在一切危害中，潮湿最为邪恶，因为百叶窗可阻挡炎热的阳光，炉火可变严寒为温暖，惟有潮湿，它在我们的睡梦中偷偷潜入，无声无息，神出鬼没，无孔不入。木头因潮湿而膨胀，水壶因潮湿而长毛，铁器因潮湿而生锈，石头因潮湿而腐蚀。这个过程潜移默化，直到有一天，我们拉开抽屉或拎起煤桶，抽屉或煤桶在手中散了架，我们才会怀疑是这祸害造的孽。
于是，说不清哪一天哪一刻，不知不觉之间，英国的本性改变了。这一改变留下的影响无处不在。过去，一位体格强壮的乡绅，可以坐在屋子里，惬意地喝着麦芽酒，吃着牛肉，那屋子的设计或许出自亚当兄弟之手(亚当兄弟，罗伯特·亚当和詹姆斯·亚当，18世纪英国建筑师和家具设计，新古典主义“亚当式”建筑风格的创始人。)，很有古典气派。现在不行了，他开始觉得寒气逼人，不免在膝上围了毛毯，开始留长胡须，系紧裤腿。而且这位绅士腿部感觉到寒冷很快移到家里，为了保暖，他把家具覆盖起来，墙上挂了壁毯，桌上蒙了台布，屋里再没有什么东西是裸露的。后来，饮食也发生了根本的变化。发明了松糕和烤面饼，咖啡取代了饭后波尔多葡萄酒。此后，咖啡引出喝咖啡的起居室，起居室引出玻璃柜，玻璃柜引出人造花，人造花引出壁炉台，壁炉台引出钢琴，钢琴引出起居室抒情歌曲，而抒情歌曲又引出(我们跳过了一两个阶段)无数的小狗、地垫和瓷器装饰品。家彻底地改变了，它已经变得无比重要。
屋外，常春藤繁芜茂盛，这是潮湿的另一结果。曾经光秃秃的石头房子，现在覆盖了厚厚的一层绿苔。所有的花园，无论原本设计得多么堂皇，无不灌木丛生、荒草芜秽、迷宫密布。在婴儿出生的卧室，凡有光线透进的地方，当然是一片模糊的绿色。成人活动的起居室，光线穿透过褐色和紫色的长毛绒窗帘。然而，变化并非仅仅停留在表面，潮湿亦侵袭到人体内。男人感到内心的冰冷和头脑的迷乱。他们竭力将情感蜷缩到某个温暖的角落，不断尝试一个又一个逃避的手段。爱情、生育和死亡都局限于各式华丽辞藻之中。两性的距离愈拉愈远，双方甚至忍受不了坦诚的交谈，只能小心翼翼地相互回避，极力掩饰。恰似常春藤和常青树在屋外潮湿的泥土中疯长，同样的繁殖力也在屋内表现出来。普通女人的生活就是连续不断地生育。十九岁嫁人，三十岁时已有十五个或十八个孩子，因为双胞胎比比皆是。于是大英帝国应运而生。于是句子膨胀，形容词成倍增加，抒情诗变成了史诗，因为潮湿没有停止，反而像侵入木头一样侵入了墨水瓶。区区小事，原本只能作为专栏文章的主题，现在可以写成十卷、二十卷的百科全书。欧斯比俄斯·查布将是我们的见证人，他目睹了这一切如何对生性敏感的人的头脑发生影响，却根本无法加以阻止。在他的回忆录里，接近尾声处有一段话，描述一天上午，他在对开本上写了三十五页“废话”，然后拧紧墨水瓶盖，来到花园散心。他很快发现自己纠缠在灌木丛中，数不清的树叶在他头顶上方嘎吱作响，闪闪发光。他觉得自己“脚下踩碎了多得数不胜数的霉菌”。花园的尽头，有一堆潮湿的篝火冒着浓烟。他思忖道，世上的火，无论多大，也无望吞噬那一大片由植被生成的障碍。举目四望，植被繁芜错杂。黄瓜“蜷曲着爬过草地，伸展到他脚边”。硕大的菜花，长得高过一个又一个露天平台，直到按照他的混乱的想象，可与榆树比肩。母鸡接二连三下蛋，蛋的颜色浅浅的。这时，他叹了口气，记起自己的繁殖力和他可怜的妻子简，此刻她正在屋里，忍受第十五次分娩的阵痛。他自问还有什么可责怪那些禽类的呢?他仰视苍天。天堂本身，或天堂的前厅、即天空，岂不就意味着上苍赞同或鼓励这种繁殖吗?因为在那里，年复一年，无论冬夏，乌云如同鲸鱼一般——或者说如同大象一般——翻滚，他这样沉思着。但是，不，万里云霄给他留下明明白白、挥之不去的影像；整个天空就是一张宽大的羽毛床，覆盖在英伦三岛之上；菜园、卧室和鸡窝的繁殖力毫无例外在那里得到复制。他走进屋里，写下上面引用的那段话，然后把头放在瓦斯炉上，待人们发现时，他已经一命呜呼了。
这种情况在英国各地延续，但奥兰多尽可以隐居在布莱克弗里亚斯的家中，只当气候没有变，人们依旧能够随心所欲，想说什么就说什么，穿裙子穿裤子两可。不过到最后，甚至她也不得不承认，时代变了。世纪初的一个下午，她驱车穿过圣詹姆斯公园，还是她那辆镶木板的老式马车。这时，偶尔照临大地的阳光，有一束挣扎着穿透云层，给云彩镶上色彩缤纷的奇异花纹。既然十八世纪一碧如洗的天空不复存在，现在这样的景观成了奇观，足以让她放下窗子，放眼眺望。云彩呈紫褐色和火红色，令她想起爱奥尼亚海垂死的海豚，那种极度痛苦产生的快感，证明不知不觉之中，她已受到潮湿的感染。但让她惊奇的是，日光照射到地面时，似乎产生或者说照亮了一座金字塔、一场百牲祭，一堆战利品(因为它有一种筵席的气氛)。无论怎么说，那都是一大堆乌七八糟、相互抵牾的物品，杂乱无章地堆在现在矗立着维多利亚女王雕像的地方!一个有花叶雕饰但已磨损的巨大十字架竖在那里，上面垂挂了寡妇的丧服和新娘的面纱。水晶宫、柳条婴儿车、军用钢盔、纪念花圈、裤子、八字胡须、婚礼蛋糕、大炮、圣诞树、望远镜、灭绝的怪物、地球仪、地图、大象和数学仪器与其他赘物联在一起，就像一个巨大的盾徽，左边被一位身着飘逸白衣的女郎支撑，右边的支撑却是个一个彪形大汉，身穿大衣和鼓鼓囊囊的裤子。把毫不相称的各类物品放在一起，全身披挂杂以半身裸露、花里胡哨杂以彩格呢，这一切都让奥兰多觉得大煞风景。她一辈子从未同时看到如此之多寒伧和丑陋的庞然大物。这可能是，其实这必定是阳光照射水淋淋的空气所起的作用。一阵微风吹过，它就会消失殆尽。尽管如此，她乘车经过时，它却好似必定会永存下去。她缩回车里，觉得风雨雷电和阳光，一切都永远毁灭不了戳在那里的花哨玩艺儿。它的鼻子会斑驳脱落，喇叭会生锈；但它们会留在那里，永远指向东西南北。马车驶上宪法山，她回头看去。是的，它在那里，它在——她从男式裤子的表袋中掏出怀表——正午十二点的阳光下放射着光芒。再没有什么玩艺儿比它更乏味、更无想像力、对黎明与黄昏的暗示更无动于衷了，而它又经过如此精心谋划，打算永存下去。她下决心不再看它一眼。她已经感到自己的血流得很怠惰。然而更奇特的是，经过白金汉宫时，她的面色渐趋绯红，是一种鲜艳而罕见的红。有一股超凡的力量迫她低下头来看自己的膝盖。突然，她看到自己穿着黑色的马裤，不觉大惊失色，一路脸红到乡间宅邸。想想看四匹马小跑三十英里需要很长时间，我们希望她的脸红可以给人看作是贞洁的明证。
一到乡间大宅，她立即循着此时情理中最迫切的需要，抓起一条花锦缎被，紧紧裹住自己的身体。她对巴特洛莫寡妇(她接替善良的老格里姆斯迪奇当上管家)解释说这是因为她很冷。
“我们大家都一样，我的夫人，”那寡妇重重地叹了一口气说，口气中透出一股离奇、悲哀的满足，“墙都在冒汗。”这一点毫无疑问，她只要把手放在橡木板墙上，指痕就会印在那里。常春藤一个劲儿地疯长，许多窗户都被它封死了。厨房里黑乎乎的，几乎分不清哪里是壶，哪里是箩。一只可怜的黑猫被错当煤块，铲进了炉膛。女佣大多已穿上三四条红色法兰绒的衬裙，虽然这时是八月天。
“夫人，”那好女人问，抱了(着)双臂，金十字架在胸前上下起伏，“女王，保佑她，她穿的那个东西……你们叫什么来着?”这好女人吞吞吐吐，脸都红了。
“圈环衬裙，”奥兰多替她说出口(因为这个词儿已经传到了布莱克弗里亚斯)。巴特洛莫太太点点头。眼泪顺着她的双颊淌下来，但她泪中含笑。因为哭是一件快乐的事。她们岂不都是柔弱女子?穿圈环衬裙岂不就是为了更好地掩饰这一真相，惟一的真相、重要的真相，然而又是可悲的真相，每一谦卑女子总是尽力否认这一真相，直到无法否认、无法否认她将生育一个孩子这一真相?其实是生育十五到二十个孩子，于是一位谦卑女子，一生大部分时间都花在否认每年至少有一天必会真相大白的事实。
“松糕热着呢，”巴特洛莫太太说，一边抹眼泪，“在书房里。”
奥兰多裹着一条花锦缎被，面对一碟松糕，坐了下来。
“松糕热着呢，在书房里，”奥兰多一边喝茶，一边模仿巴特洛莫太太那做作的伦敦东区口音，装腔作势地从牙缝里挤出这句可怕的伦敦东区土话。啊，不，她讨厌这淡而无味的液体。她记得，就是在这房间里，伊丽莎白女王叉开腿站在壁炉旁，手握一只颈短肚大的啤酒壶。伯格雷勋爵大大咧咧，说话时不用虚拟语气，而用了祈使句，女王猛地将酒壶掷到桌上。“小东西，小东西，”奥兰多仿佛听见她在说：“‘必须’一词岂可随便对君主使用?”酒壶磕到桌上，现在还有痕迹。
奥兰多跳起来，仅仅想到那尊贵的女王，她就必得这样做，但她给被子绊了一下，跌回到椅子上，不禁咒骂了一句。她想，没办法，明天只得去买二十码黑色邦巴辛毛料，可能还得更多，做条裙子。然后(此处她脸红了)还得去买圈环衬裙，然后(她的脸又红了)是婴儿摇篮，然后是另一条圈环衬裙，等等，等等……她脸上红一阵白一阵，可以想见谦卑与羞愧几乎完美的交替重复。人们看到时代精神，时热时冷，吹拂着她的面颊。倘若时代精神有点儿不平衡，在为嫁人脸红之前先要为穿圈环衬裙脸红，那么，考虑到她的模棱两可的地位，和她以前不合常规的生活，她(甚至她的性别仍在争议之中)这样倒也情有可原了。
终于，双颊的红晕恢复了稳定，似乎时代精神——倘若这确实是时代精神——休眠了一段时间。这时，奥兰多开始在怀里摸索，好像是在找寻某个小盒子，或者说是失落了的爱情的信物。但她掏出来的并不是这类玩艺儿，而是一卷纸，上面有大海、血和旅行的污渍，那是她的诗作《大橡树》的手稿。她怀揣它经过了那么多年，历经千难万险，其中许多页污迹斑斑，有些页残破不全，因为住在吉卜赛人中间时，她一直处于无纸写字的窘境，只得在页边写满了字，行与行之间勾来勾去，整个手稿看起来就像一片针脚儿绵密的织补物。她翻回到第一页，日期一五八六年，是她自己那稚嫩的男孩笔迹。她一直在写这首诗，迄今已近三百年。该是结束的时候了。于是，她开始掀书页、蘸墨水、一会儿字斟句酌、一会儿一目十行，边看边想，所有这些年，她真的没有多少改变。她曾是郁郁寡欢的少年，像所有少年一样迷恋死亡；后来她变得多情而轻佻；又变得洒脱而玩世；她时而尝试散文，时而尝试戏剧。但如今一想，变来变去，却是万变不离其宗，她还是同样内向，喜爱沉思默想，她依然喜欢动物和自然，酷爱乡村和四季。
“毕竟，”她站起来，走到窗前，“一切都没有变。房子、花园原封未动。椅子没有挪过地方，小玩艺儿没有卖掉一件。一样的小径、一样的草坪、一样的树木、一样的池塘，我敢说，甚至塘里的鲤鱼都是原来的。不错，王位上坐的不再是伊丽莎白女王，而是维多利亚女王，但那又有什么分别……”
这想法刚刚形成，仿佛是为了指认它的荒唐，房门豁然大开，司膳总管巴斯克特走进来，身后跟着管家巴特洛莫，他们是来收拾茶具的。奥兰多把笔浸了墨水，正准备写下她对万物亘古不变的感想，一块墨渍阻止了她，这墨渍在笔的四周泅开。她很是气恼，猜想是笔管出了毛病：裂了或者脏了。她再次把它浸入墨水，墨渍更大了。她试着继续写下去，却毫无灵感。在这之后，她开始装饰那块墨渍，给它画上翅膀和胡须，直到它看上去像个圆头怪物，似蝙蝠，又似毛鼻袋熊。至于写诗，有巴斯克特和巴特洛莫在屋里，哪里又有可能。但令她惊诧万分的是，她刚想到这里，那笔就开始旋转飞舞，流利地写起来。纸面上出现了工整的意大利斜体字，而她一辈子从没看过比这更乏味的韵体诗：
我不过是微不足道的一环
连接生活疲惫不堪的锁链，
但我说过的神圣之言
啊，不会说得徒劳枉然!
年轻的女子，满眼晶莹的泪花
独自徘徊在月光下，
那泪水为远离的恋人挥洒
喃喃低语——
她不停地写，根本不睬巴特洛莫和巴斯克特在屋里一边咕哝抱怨，一边笼火和收拾松糕。
她又蘸了蘸墨水，提笔写道：
她的变化如此巨大，那朵柔嫩的康乃馨红云
当年曾覆盖她的双颊，仿佛黄昏
依偎天穹，闪烁玫瑰色的光彩，
如今已苍白失色，偶然现出
燃烧的鲜艳红晕，像火把照亮孤坟，
但此处，她倏地将墨水泼在纸上，希望永远挡住人们的目光。她浑身颤抖，心乱如麻。让不受意志控制的灵感驱动墨水流淌，再没有比这更可憎的事了。她究竟怎么啦?什么原因?难道是潮湿，还是巴特洛莫或巴斯克特?原因究竟在哪里?她追问着。但房间里空空荡荡，无人回答她的问题，只有雨打常春藤的滴答声。
与此同时，她站在窗前，开始觉得有一股奇特的刺痛和震颤遍布全身，仿佛她是由一千根金属细弦制成，微风轻轻吹拂，或有几根手指有意无意地在上面拨弄。她时而觉得脚趾刺痛，时而觉得骨髓刺痛。大腿骨四周有一些奇异无比的感觉。头发似乎竖了起来。手臂好似二十几年后发明的电报线那样发出嗖嗖和嘣嘣的声音。但所有这些焦躁不安，最后似乎都集中于她的两只手，然后是一只手，然后是那只手的一根手指头，最终它渐渐紧缩，围绕左手中指，形成窄窄一圈颤栗的感觉。她抬起那根手指，想看看是什么引起这不适的感觉。除了伊丽莎白女王赐给她的那只硕大的翡翠戒指，孤零零地戴在手指上，她什么也没看到。难道这还不够?她问道。那只戒指水色纯正，至少价值一万英镑。她所感到的战栗似乎在以古怪的方式(不过请记住，我们现在讲的，是人的灵魂深处最隐秘的一些表现)说，不够，还不够；而且带有拷问的色彩，好像在进一步问，这意味着什么?这疏漏，这奇怪的失察?直到可怜的奥兰多莫名其妙对自己左手中指有一种羞愧难当的感觉。这时，巴特洛莫进来请示，晚餐时她准备穿哪件衣服。奥兰多此时敏感多了，立即瞥了一眼巴特洛莫的左手，立即看到无名指上有一只粗大的黄色戒指，这是她过去从未注意的。那种黄，仿佛患了黄疸病似的。而她自己的无名指上却是光裸的，什么也没有。
“让我看看你的戒指，巴特洛莫，”她说，伸手欲把它摘下来。
巴特洛莫一惊，好像是有流氓当胸向她袭来，吓得退后两步，握紧拳头，猛地一挥，姿态极其庄重。“这可不行，”她凛然说道。夫人愿意的话，看就是了，至于摘下她的结婚戒指，无论大主教、教皇，还是在位的维多利亚女王，都休想逼她这样做。二十五年六个月零三星期前，她的托马斯把这戒指戴在她的手指上，她戴它睡觉，戴它干活，戴它洗澡，戴它祷告；还打算戴着它进坟墓。她的声音因为激动而结结巴巴的。事实上，奥兰多明白她要说的是，就是凭了这结婚戒指上的光辉，她在天使中才有一席之地。如果她有一秒钟照管不周，它的光泽就会受到永久的玷污。
“天可怜见，”奥兰多说，站在窗前，看着鸽子在窗外戏耍。“我们生活在一个什么样的世界上啊?真的，什么样的世界啊?”这世界之复杂，让她惊诧。她现在觉得，整个世界都套上了金指环。她进屋吃饭，结婚戒指数不胜数。她去教堂，结婚戒指触目皆是。她乘车出行，金戒指或仿金戒指，在每只手上闪着黯淡的光芒，它们或窄或宽，或普通或光滑。戒指充斥了珠宝店，它们不是奥兰多收集的那些闪光的人造宝石和钻石，而是简简单单的一个环，上面没有宝石。与此同时，她开始注意到城里人的一个新习气。过去，人们经常会遇到姑娘小伙儿在山楂树丛中调情。奥兰多曾多次用鞭梢轻轻抽打他们，然后大笑着跑开。现在，一切都变了。一对对男女如胶似漆般粘在一起，跌跌撞撞地走在路中央。女人的右手一律挽着男人的左手，手指紧紧扣在男人的手心里。常常是直到马鼻子撞到跟前，他们才会移动，即便如此，也是粘在一起，笨拙地移向路的一侧。
奥兰多只能假定对人类有了一些新的发现；他们粘在一起，一对又一对，但是谁把他们粘在一起，又是在何时，她无从猜测。似乎并不是大自然，因为她观察了鸽子、兔子和挪威犬，看不出大自然改变或修正了自己的方式，至少自伊丽莎白时代以来是如此。在她所能见到的兽类中间，根本没有牢不可破的同盟。那么，难道是维多利亚女王?或是莫尔本勋爵(莫尔本勋爵，维多利亚女王的第一任首相。)?对婚姻的伟大发现是否来自他们?但是，她沉思道，据说女王喜欢狗，而莫尔本勋爵，她听说，他喜欢女人。这很奇怪——很不雅观；不错，身体的这种如胶似漆，其中有某种东西与她的体面和卫生观相抵触。然而，伴随她的沉思默想的，是那根手指饱受刺痛和抽搐的折磨，让她几乎无法理清自己的思绪。它宛如女仆的白日梦，让人浑身无力，又不断撩拨人的神经。奥兰多因此而脸红，感到惟一可做的，就是买一只同样丑陋不堪的指环，如他人一样戴在手上。她这样做了，躲在窗帘的暗处，偷偷把它套在指上，心中觉得很是羞辱。但这于事无补，刺痛依然在继续，而且更剧烈、更不可抑制。那晚她彻夜无眠，第二天早晨，拿出笔写作，脑子里却是一片空白，墨水在纸上留下一摊又一摊污渍。还有比这更可怕的情形出现，那就是她的笔缓缓而行，对早夭和腐朽大发议论。这甚至比大脑一片空白还糟糕，因为我们似乎不是用手指而是用全部身心来写作。奥兰多的情形就证明了这一点，控制笔的神经缠绕身体的每一根纤维，钻心裂肺。虽然她的麻烦似乎在左手，但她可以感到自己已经鬼迷心窍，最终只得考虑铤而走险，以作补救之计，这就是彻底妥协，顺从时代精神，找一位丈夫。
这样做有悖她的天性，这一点我们已经表达得明白无误。当年大公的马车轮声逐渐远去，她脱口喊出的是“生活!恋人!”而非“生活!丈夫!”正是为了追寻这一目标，她迁到城里，奔走于前一章所描述的那个世界。然而，时代精神自有其不可违拗之处，它给所有试图抗拒者都带来巨大创痛，相形之下，那些识时务者的下场倒好些。奥兰多天生亲和伊丽莎白时代、王政复辟时期和十八世纪的精神，因此几乎觉不出从一个时代向另一时代的转变。但她的天性与十九世纪的精神格格不入，因此它击败了她，打垮了她，她知道自己前所未有地败在了它的手中。或许人的精神自有其归属；有人天生属于此一时代，有人属于彼一时代；奥兰多既然已是三十一、二岁的成年妇人，她的性格就已大体形成，容不得强扭了。
因此，她悲哀地站在起居室(巴特洛莫已把书房装饰得基督教的味道太浓)的窗前，已顺从地穿上圈环衬裙，它的重量坠得她直不起腰来。她以前穿过的衣服从来没有如此沉重、灰暗、碍手碍脚。她再不能与爱犬一起大步穿过花园，再不能轻快地跑上高坡，扑到大橡树下。她的裙裾拖带地上湿漉漉的树叶和稻草。插了翎毛的帽子给微风一吹就有掀翻的危险。薄薄的鞋子走几步路就会湿透，变成泥饼。她的肌肉失去了当年的柔韧。她变得非常神经质，惟恐护墙板后藏着强盗，而且一辈子头一次害怕走廊上有鬼魂出没。凡此种种，一步步逼迫她屈从无论是维多利亚女王还是别人的新发现，即无论男女，人人都有一个命定的终身伴侣，他供养她，或者说她由他供养，至死才分离。她觉得，有人可依靠，坐下来，甚至躺下去，永远永远不起来，也是一种慰藉。因此，尽管她过去那么骄傲，时代精神还是对她发生了作用。而且就在她的情绪低落到如此不同寻常的地步时，那些夹缠不清又让人困惑的刺痛变成了曼妙的旋律，直到似乎是天使在用雪白的手指拨弄琴弦，她全身都沉浸在简洁无瑕的和谐之中。
然而，谁能是她的依靠呢?她向瑟瑟秋风提出了这个问题。因为已是十月，天气依然阴雨连绵。这个人不会是大公，他早已娶了一位贵妇，在罗马尼亚猎兔好多年了。也不会是m先生，他皈依了天主教；不会是c侯爵，他正在博坦尼湾(澳大利亚地名，19世纪英国流放犯人的地方。)缝麻袋；也不会是o勋爵，他早就葬身鱼腹。反正，她的所有密友都不在了；而德鲁瑞巷的奈尔和基蒂们，虽然颇得她的欢心，只怕很难靠得住。
“我能依靠谁呢?”她问，仰望天空中翻卷的流云。她跪在窗台上，轻拍双手，一幅楚楚可怜的女儿家形象。她说话不由自主，拍手不由自主，恰似她的笔写起来完全不听她的使唤。因此说话的不是奥兰多，而是时代精神。不过无论是谁，反正没有人回答这个问题。秃鼻鸦在秋日里紫色的云彩间上下翻飞。雨终于停了，空中现出一道彩虹，诱得奥兰多在晚餐前戴上那顶簪了羽毛的帽子，穿一双系带的小巧鞋子，来到了屋外。
“除了我，一切都是成双成对，”她想，闷闷不乐地穿过庭院。天上飞着的秃鼻鸦，甚至连卡努特和皮平，那个傍晚似乎也都有一个伴儿，尽管它们的结盟很短暂。 “而我，这一切的女主人，”奥兰多想，“却是孤零零一人，形单影只。”经过大厅时，她瞥了几眼那数不清的窗子上的彩色镶嵌画。
此前，她从未有过这类想法。如今，它们已把她彻底击败。她没有砰地推开大门，而是用戴了手套的手轻叩，请看门人替她把门打开。人必须有人可依靠，即便是看门人也好，她想，几乎希望留下来，帮她在一桶红红的热炭上烤肉排。但她又不好意思讲出来，只好独自漫步到庭园。开始她有些畏缩，恐怕让偷猎者、猎场看守人，甚至听差的小厮看了笑话，奇怪一位贵妇怎么会独自四处行走。
她每走一步，都要神经质地四处张望，惟恐有男人隐在荆豆树后，或有只野牛低头向她拱来，用角挑起她抛向天空。其实，此间只有天空中翻飞的秃鼻鸦。一根铁青色的翎毛，从秃鼻鸦身上飘下，落到欧石南丛中。奥兰多喜欢野禽的翎毛，打从小时候就常常收集。现在她拾起这根翎毛，插到帽子上。四周的空气多少让她的精神一振。秃鼻鸦在她头顶盘旋、滑翔，翎毛一根接一根落下，在紫色的空气中闪烁着光芒。她尾随它们，来到沼泽地，又上了山，长长的斗篷拖在身后。她有很多年没有走这么长的路了。她从草地上捡起了六根翎毛，用指尖夹着，贴在嘴唇上，体味它们平滑的质感。就在这时，她看到山坡边有一汪水塘，闪着神秘的银光，恰似贝迪威尔爵士(贝迪威尔爵士，传说中亚瑟王的圆桌骑士之一。)抛人亚瑟王之剑的那个湖。空中一根翎毛飘飘摇摇，落入水塘中央。奥兰多全身在此刻感到一种奇特的狂喜。她痴迷地觉得，自己跟着这些秃鼻鸦来到了海角天涯，扑到湿软的草皮上，狂饮忘却之酒，而秃鼻鸦沙哑的笑声在她头顶上回旋。她加快脚步，跑了起来，却被欧石南粗硬的树根绊了一下，跌倒在地，跌断了脚踝骨，爬不起来。但她心满意足地躺在那里，耳边响着秃鼻鸦沙哑的笑声，睡菜和绣线菊的香气扑鼻。“我找到了自己的伴侣，”她喃喃自语。“那就是沼泽。我是大自然的新娘，”她低语道，欣喜若狂地接受草地冰冷的拥抱。她裹着斗篷躺在水塘边的洼地里。“我将长眠于此，”(一根翎毛落在她的额上。)“我找到了碧绿的桂冠，碧绿甚于海湾，我的前额将永远清凉。这些野禽的翎毛——猫头鹰的、欧夜莺的。我的梦将是荒蛮之梦。我的手将不戴结婚戒指，”她边说边从手指上褪下戒指。“草根将环绕它们。啊!”她叹了口气，头舒坦地靠在洼地湿软的枕头上。“我多年寻觅幸福，没有结果。我与声名擦肩而过；我从未有过爱情；生活——也罢，还是死了好。我认识众多男女，”她接着想；“但未有一人我真正明白。若能安息于此，惟有苍天在上，岂不更好——就像多年前吉卜赛人告诉我的那样。那是在土耳其。”她两眼直瞪瞪望向天空，云朵翻滚，堆积成奇特的金色泡沫，转瞬之间，她看到其中有条小路，一行骆驼，穿过红色沙尘笼罩的戈壁。驼队过后，只留下危岩林立的高山峻岭，她想象自己听到山口响起山羊脖子上叮当的铃声，漫山遍野的鸢尾和黄龙胆。于是，天空变了，她的视线慢慢下移，直至触到雨水浸润而颜色变暗的大地，看到南丘(英格兰南部的丘陵地带。)那大片山冈，沿海岸逶迤起伏；陆地分开的地方是大海，不时有船只驶过；她想象听到远处海上的炮声，开始以为“是西班牙无敌舰队，”又一想，“不对，是纳尔逊 (纳尔逊(1758—1805)，英国海军统帅，1805年在科拉法尔加角海战中大败法国一西班牙联合舰队。)，”随后才记起那些战争早巳结束，这些是忙碌的商船；弯弯曲曲的河面上漂着扬帆的游船。她还看到黝暗的田野中星星点点散布的羊群和牛群，她看到农舍的窗间透出点点灯火，畜群中有灯笼漂移，是牧羊人和牧牛人在巡夜；然后，灯火熄灭，群星升起，密布夜空。她脸上盖着沾水的羽毛，耳朵贴着大地，睡意朦胧之间，听到地心深处，有锤子敲击铁砧的声音，抑或是心跳的声音?答、答、答，是锤子敲击铁砧，还是地心在跳，直到她觉得它变成了马蹄声；一、二、三、四，她数着，听到它绊了一下；然后愈来愈近，她可以听到细树枝折断和马蹄陷入湿沼泽的声音。那马几乎踩到了她。她坐了起来。朦胧的天光依稀映衬出一个高大的黑影，她看到一个男人骑在马上，凤头麦鸡在他四周扑扇着翅膀，惊起落下。他吓了一跳，勒住马。
“夫人，”那男子惊叫，跳下马，“你受伤了!”
“我死了，先生!”她答道。
几分钟后，两人订了婚。
第二天早上，两人坐在一起吃早饭，他告诉她，他名叫马默杜克·邦斯洛普·谢尔默丁，是一位士绅。
“我知道这名字!”她说，因为他身上有某种浪漫、侠义、热情、忧郁，但坚定不移的气质，与这一怪诞、(仿佛深色翎毛般)华贵的名字很相配。这名字让她联想起秃鼻鸦双翼的铁青色光芒、它们沙哑的笑声、它们蛇一般打着旋儿落人银色池塘的翎毛，还有其他千百种我们即将描述的东西。
“我叫奥兰多，”她说。他已经猜到了。他解释说，这是因为，倘若你看到一条洒满阳光的船，高张风帆，大摇大摆地从南太平洋驶来，穿过地中海，你立即会说，“这是奥兰多。”
事实上，尽管相识的时间很短，但最多只有两秒钟，他们就已勘破对方的本相，就像恋人间一向发生的情形。现在只剩下一些无关紧要的细节需要填充，譬如叫什么名字，家住何处，是乞丐还是富豪。他告诉她，他在赫布里底群岛有座古堡，现已破败，宴会厅成了塘鹅饱餐的地方。他曾是军人和水手，还到过东方探险，眼下正在去菲尔茅斯的途中。他要去那里与他的双桅帆船会合，但是风停了，非得刮西南风，他才能出海。奥兰多赶忙看看窗外风向标上的镀金豹。幸好豹尾一动不动地指向正东。“啊!谢尔，别离开我!”她喊道。“我疯狂地爱上了你，”她说。话刚出口，两人心中就同时产生了一丝可怕的疑虑。
“你是女人，谢尔!”她喊道。
“你是男人，奥兰多!”他喊道。
其后出现的是开天辟地从未发生过的一通责难和辩白。待这一切结束后，他们再次坐下来，奥兰多问他这西南风是怎么回事?他要去向何方?
“合恩角(智利南部合恩岛的南角，南美洲的最南端。)，”他简短地说，脸红了。(因为男人也像女人一样脸红，惟脸红的原因大不相同罢了。)只是凭着她这一方的逼问，再加上直觉，她才猜出他一生都在用性命博取辉煌，即顶风绕合恩角航行。桅杆被掀翻，船帆撕成碎片(让他承认这些，她费了九牛二虎之力)。有时，船沉没了，他是惟一的幸存者，漂一只木筏，身边只剩一块饼干。
“现如今男人大概也只剩这一件事可做了，”他怯怯地说，自己舀了一大勺草莓酱吃起来。她眼前现出这么一幅景象：桅杆折断了，发出咔嚓咔嚓的声响，天旋地转，这个男孩(因为他不过是个男孩)一边吸吮自己酷爱的薄荷，一边大吼大叫，干脆地命令割断这个，把那个扔下海去。这情景让她眼里溢满了泪水，她注意到，这是甜蜜的泪水，胜过她以往流过的任何眼泪。“我是女人了，”她想，“我终于是一个真正的女人了。”她衷心感激邦斯洛普给了她这鲜有的、出乎意料的愉悦。若不是左脚瘸了，她本会坐到他膝上去。
“谢尔，亲爱的，”她又开始说，“告诉我……”于是他们谈了两个多小时，话题可能是合恩角，也可能不是。写下他们的叙谈，着实没有什么意义，因为他们相互之间是如此默契，以至到了无话不谈的地步，其实等于什么也没说，或者是说些愚蠢、乏味的事情，譬如怎样炒鸡蛋，在伦敦何处能买到上乘的靴子等等，这些事情离开了背景即光彩全无，而它们又确实有其惊人的内在之美。因为似乎根据自然那睿智的节约法则，我们的现代精神几乎可以省去语言；既然一切表达都不得体，那么最日常的表达就是得体的；而最普通的谈话往往是最有诗意的谈话，而最有诗意的谈话又恰恰是不可以写下来的。为此原因，我们在这里留下一大片空白，而我们又必须当这空白是填得满满的。
他们又如此这般地叙谈了几天。
“奥兰多，最亲爱的，”谢尔刚说到这里，外面出现一阵混乱，男总管巴斯克特进来通报，楼下来了两位警察，呈送女王的令状。
“带他们上来，”谢尔默丁很干脆地说，仿佛是在自己的甲板上。他本能地背剪双手，站在壁炉前。两位身穿深绿色制服、后腰挂警棍的警官走了进来，立正站好。行过礼节之后，他们遵命将一份法律文件递到奥兰多手里。从那一大堆封蜡、缎带、宣誓和签字判断，这文件绝对是至高无上地重要。
奥兰多迅速浏览一遍，然后用右手食指点着，念出与这件事有密切关系的下列事实。
“ 官司有结果了，”她大声说，“有些对我有利，譬如……有些对我不利。在土耳其的婚姻被宣布无效(“我那时是驻君士坦丁堡大使，谢尔，”她解释说)。子女属私生(他们说我与一位叫皮佩塔的西班牙舞女生有三子)，因此他们没有继承权，这很不错……性别?啊!关于性别怎么说?我的性别，”她庄严地宣布， “被无可争辩、毫无疑问地宣布为女性(刚才我怎么告诉你的，谢尔?)。现在永久归还我的财产，世代相传，限为我的男嗣继承，或在未婚的情况下”——此处她变得对这一法律措辞很不耐烦，说，“不会有未婚的情况，也不会有无嗣的情况，因此后面就不用念了。”于是她在帕尔默斯顿勋爵的签名下签了自己的名字。从那一刻起，她可以不受打扰地拥有她的头衔、宅邸和财产，但由于诉讼费用惊人，她的财产锐减，以至现在虽又重为贵族，却也因此家道中落。
这场官司的结果公布后(传闻行走之快，远远超过现在取而代之的电报)，全镇喜气洋洋，一片沸腾景象。
【人们套上各式四轮大马车，在大街上来回奔跑，马车中并没有载人。名为公牛和牡鹿的酒吧里都有人在演讲和辩论。小镇灯火通明。玻璃箱子中封着金盒子，石头底下压着钱币，成立了医院，老鼠和麻雀俱乐部也开了张。市场上焚毁了成打的土耳其女人模拟像，还有许多土里土气的小伙子，纸条从嘴上悬挂下来，上面写着“我是卑鄙的觊觎王位者”。不久，女王的米黄色小马一路小跑而来，带来女王要奥兰多当晚去温莎堡赴宴和过夜的邀请。奥兰多的桌上又像往常一样，堆满请帖。r伯爵夫人、q夫人、帕尔默斯顿夫人、p侯爵夫人、w．e．格莱斯顿太太等人，纷纷恳请她光临，并提醒她，她们的家族与她的家族之间累世通好。】凡此种种，都如上文的做法，适于放在一个方括号中，原因在于它不过是一段插曲，在奥兰多的生活中无足轻重。她跳过它，继续生活。当篝火在市场上燃烧时，她正单独与谢尔默丁一起呆在黝暗的树林里。天气好极了，林木的枝杈在他们头顶上伸展开来，纹丝不动，若有一片树叶飘下，那金红相间的树叶会忽忽悠悠，在空中飘游半小时，最后终于落下，栖息在奥兰多的脚面。
“马尔，给我讲讲，”她会说(此处必须解释一下，在用他名字的头一个音节来称呼他时，她往往处于一种梦幻般含情脉脉、以心相许的状态，驯服，有点儿倦怠，好似香木在燃烧，而且这是傍晚，但又未到穿礼服的时候，屋外可能在下小雨，树叶因此而闪闪发光，杜鹃花丛中，一只夜莺在啼啭，从远处的农庄，传来三两声狗吠鸡鸣——所有这些，读者都应根据她的声音来想象)——“马尔，给我讲讲合恩角。”她说，于是谢尔默丁就会用树枝和枯树叶，还有一两个空蜗牛壳，在地上搭起一个合恩角的模型。
“这是北，”他说。“那是南。风起于这附近。双桅帆船正向西行驶；我们刚放下顶帆杆上的后桅纵帆；你看，就是在这里，这有点儿草的地方，船碰上了海流，你会看到，这是标出来的，在一我的地图和指南针哪里去了，水手长?——啊，谢谢!这就行，蜗牛壳那里就行。海流吃住了右舷，必须给艏斜帆桁上索具，否则船就要斜到左舷去，就是山毛榉叶落下的地方——因为你得明白，亲爱的——”他会这样不断说下去，而她，字字都听得仔细，并且对它们的意思心领神会。这就是说，无须他作任何说明，她即能看到浪尖上闪烁的磷光，侧支索上叮当作响的冰凌；看到他如何顶着大风爬上桅顶，在那里沉思人的命运；又如何下来，饮一杯威士忌加苏打水，然后上岸，被一黑女人迷住，后来又幡然悔悟，设法摆脱；读帕斯卡尔((1623--1662)，法国数学家、物理学家、哲学家。)的著作；决心写哲思录；买一只猴子；辩论生命的真正意义之所在；决定值得去合恩角，等等，等等。凡此种种，外加他所讲的其他无数事情，她都能领会，因此当他告诉她饼干吃完了，她回答说，是啊，黑女人很能勾引人，对不对?他发现她竟能一点儿不差地领会他的意思，不免又惊又喜。
“你能肯定自己不是男人?”他会迫不及待地问。她则会回声似地反问：
“你竟然不是女人，这可能吗?”然后他们必须立即来验证一下。因为两人都为对方的默契来得如此之快感到惊奇，都觉得这是一个启示，表明女子可宽容、坦率如男子，男子亦可古怪、敏感如女子，对此他们也必须立即加以验证。
于是，他们会继续谈下去，或者说是继续领悟下去。领悟在这个时代，已成为演讲的主要艺术，因为比之思想，言语正变得日益稀少，以至在读毕十遍伯克莱主教(伯克莱主教(1685—1753)，爱尔兰基督教新教主教，唯心主义哲学家。“饼干吃完了”即表示在暗处与一个黑女人亲嘴。(据此推论，只有最深刻的风格大师才能讲述真理。如果遇到一位用词简单的作家，人们可以毫不怀疑地断定，那倒霉蛋一定是在撒谎)的哲学后，他们就这样不断地谈下去，直到奥兰多的脚面覆盖了一层秋叶，厚厚的，金红相间。她站起来，独自走到树林深处，留下邦斯洛普一人坐在蜗牛壳中间，摆弄他的合恩角模型。“邦斯洛普，”她会说，“我走了。”她用他中间的名字“邦斯洛普”来称呼他，这向读者表明，她此时陷于孤寂的心境，觉得两人都是沙漠中的尘粒，只渴望去独自迎接死亡，因为死亡每时每刻都在发生，人们死在饭桌上，或者像这样，死在户外秋天的树林里。尽管篝火在熊熊燃烧，尽管帕尔默斯顿夫人或戴尔比夫人邀请她每晚出去赴宴，对死的渴望依然征服了她。因此，说“邦斯洛普”，她实际上是在说，“我死了。”她像个鬼魂，穿过幽灵般苍白的山毛榉丛林，潜入僻静无人的树林深处，仿佛连那一点点声音和运动都停止了，她现在可以自由自在地出走——这一切，当她说“邦斯洛普”时，读者都应该从她的声音中听出，而且为了更好地解释这四个字，读者还应进一步想到，对他来说，它们也神秘地象征分手、与世隔绝，以及在深不可测的大海上，在他那双桅帆船的甲板上，游魂般地踱步。
经过几小时死一般的枯寂，一只松鸦突然尖叫了一声“谢尔默丁”，她弯下腰，拾起一朵番红花，对有些人来说，这象征着同一个词。她把番红花和松鸦的翎毛一起插在胸前，那翎毛闪着蓝光，打着旋儿，穿过山毛榉林，落了下来。然后，她高声呼喊“谢尔默丁”，这声音在树林里回荡，最后传到他的耳中，他正坐在草地上摆弄蜗牛壳搭成的模型。他看到她、也听到她向他跑来，胸前插着番红花和松鸦的翎毛。他大声喊“奥兰多”，这最初意味着(切记当蓝色和黄色这样鲜艳的色彩在我们眼前混成一片时，我们的头脑中会产生幻象)蕨丛的摇摆起伏、仿佛有什么：东西正在挣脱而出；结果是一条张满风帆的船，好似已缓缓航行了整整一夏天，正摇摇摆摆，高贵、倦怠而梦幻般地向你驶来，一会儿爬上浪尖，一会儿又跌人深谷。就这样，她突然高耸在你面前(你正在一条船的小蛤壳里，仰视着她)，所有船帆都在轻轻抖动，然后，瞧，它们全都落了下来，堆在甲板上，一大堆，就像奥兰多现在倒在他身边的草地上。
八九天就这样过去了，但是到了第十天，即十月二十六日，奥兰多正躺在蕨丛中，听谢尔默丁吟诵雪莱的诗(他能背诵雪莱的全部作品)。这时，一片叶子从树梢上飘落下来，开始还是慢悠悠的，突然疾飞旋转，掠过奥兰多的脚面。紧跟着飞来第二片树叶，然后是第三片。奥兰多打了个寒噤，脸色发白。起风了。谢尔默丁——但这时称他邦斯洛普更合适 ——一跃而起。
“起风了!”他喊道。
他们一起奔跑，穿过树林，风在他们身上贴满树叶。他们跑到大方庭，穿过它，又穿过许多小方庭，仆人们吓得扔下扫把、簸箕，跟在他们身后，来到小教堂。仆人们匆匆点燃零落的灯光，有人踢翻板凳，有人不小心熄灭了小蜡烛。钟声大作，召集人们前来。杜普尔先生终于到了，他一只手抓着自己的白领结，问祈祷书在哪里。人们把玛丽女王的祈祷书塞到他手里，他急忙很快地翻起来，一面说：“马默杜克·邦斯洛普·谢尔默丁、奥兰多小姐，跪下。”他们跪下身来，阳光夹杂着阴影扫过彩色的玻璃窗，照在他们身上，时明时暗。在不断的开门关门声和好像敲铜锅的声响中，风琴响了起来，它发出低沉的轰鸣，时重时轻地交替着。年老的杜普尔先生提高嗓门，想盖过这一片喧嚣，却没有人能听得见他在说些什么。然后，忽然出现了片刻的沉静，一个类似“至死不渝”的词突然清晰地凸显出来，同时，全庄园的仆人不断涌进来，依然手握搂耙和鞭子，有人高声诵唱，有人祈祷，不时还会有只鸟儿撞到窗格上。一声霹雳突然响起，因此谁也未听到“服从”这个词，而且除了金光一闪，谁也未看到交换戒指。一切都在运动和混乱之中。他们站起身，风琴发出低沉的声音，电闪雷鸣，大雨滂沱。奥兰多小姐，手戴戒指，身穿轻薄的长裙，走出教堂，来到院子里。她抓住马镫，因为马已戴好嚼子配好鞍，背上仍然大汗淋漓，只等她丈夫翻身而上，他真的一跃而上，策马奔向前方。奥兰多立在那里，高声喊道：马默杜克·邦斯洛普·谢尔默丁!他答道：奥兰多!这几个字好似一群野鹰在钟楼间俯冲、盘旋，愈来愈高、愈来愈远、愈来愈快，直至撞到钟楼上，撞成碎片，如一阵雨珠坠落在地；她回到屋里。