Orlando: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

Thus, in a very few years, Orlando had worn the nap off his velvet, and spent the half of his fortune;

There she was, flopping about among the chairs; he saw her waddling ungracefully across the galleries. Now, she perched, top-heavy upon a fire screen. When he chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke it.

Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through.

That he, who was English root and fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama,

An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed he would receive visits from secretaries and other high officials carrying, one after another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key. Within were papers of the highest importance, of which only fragments, here a flourish, there a seal firmly attached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain.

Orlando was kept busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to be diversely attached, his engrossing of tides and making of flourishes round capital letters,

Here it was only permissible to compare Constantinople as a place of residence with London; and the Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constantinople, and his hosts naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London.

In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host deploring their badness, the Ambassador extolling their goodness.

The ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drinking of a glass of coffee; but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would have sunk beneath the surfeit. For, no sooner had the Ambassador despatched one such visit, than another had to be undertaken.

Then he would mingle with the crowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll through the bazaars; or throw aside his shoes and join the worshippers in the Mosques.

Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing songs about the English Lord “who dropped his emeralds in the well,” which undoubtedly refer to Orlando, who once it seems tore his jewels from him in a moment of rage or intoxication and flung them in a fountain; whence they were fished by a page boy.

It was at the end of the great fast of Ramadan that the Order of the Bath and the patent of nobility arrived in a frigate commanded by Sir Adrian Scrope; and Orlando made this the occasion for an entertainment more splendid than any that has been known before or since in Constantinople. The night was fine; the crowd immense, and the windows of the Embassy brilliantly illuminated.

Brigge soon climbed into a Judas tree,

Orlando took the golden circlet of strawberry leaves and placed it, with a gesture which none that saw it ever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this point that the first disturbance began.

Bells began ringing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard above the shouts of the people; many Turks fell flat to the ground and touched the earth with their foreheads.

as might have been expected, the gentlemen of the British Embassy preferred to die in defence of their red boxes, or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunches of keys rather than let them fall into the hands of the Infidel.

whose brows are bound with fillets of the whitest lamb’s wool;

This done, she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the litter of waste paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax, etc., and so entered the courtyard.

Often she had looked at those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking.

The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret communication before the revolution, seem to have looked upon her as one of themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay)

Towns have been sacked for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield an inch upon any of the points here debated.

disconsolately

Suddenly, a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared on the bald mountain-side opposite.

Then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same?

“still—they fall from the mast-head—” Here she gave a great yawn and fell asleep.

she cried, and was about to run into the extreme folly—than which none is more distressing in woman or man either—of being proud of her sex,

And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man.

“Permit me, Madam,” a man’s hand raised her to her feet; and the fingers of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the middle finger pointed to the horizon.

“To refuse and to yield,” she murmured, “how delightful; to pursue and to conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how sublime.”

Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragon-flies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable.

Here, where yellow icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken wretches on top, floated a covey of swans, orgulous, undulant, superb.

she saw the high mountains above Broussa,

Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.

silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

For to him, said the Archduke Harry, she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex. The three p’s would have been more persuasive if they had not been interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind. “If this is love,” said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of the fender, and now from the woman’s point of view, “there is something highly ridiculous about it.”

As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.

That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was.

a game called Fly Loo, at which great sums of money can be lost with very little expense of spirit,

She played the trick twenty times on him and he paid her over £17,250 (which is about £40,885:6:8 of our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he could be deceived no longer.

something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid the scab.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it—the poets and the novelists—can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma—a mirage.

Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.

It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things,

They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes.

He looked like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead.

A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades.

If the reader will here refer to the Rape of the Lock, to the Spectator, to Gulliver’s Travels, he will understand precisely what these mysterious words may mean.

Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among them;

He turned to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain famous line in the “Characters of Women.”