A few minutes later, they became engaged.
144
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 145
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 admis-sion 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 146
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, 147
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 148
them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles clank-ing 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 149
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, indol-ently, 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 150
