Orlando. A Biography / Орландо. Вирджиния ВулфЧитать онлайн книгу.
put it up again. The skull was swinging freely because the house, at the top of which Orlando lived, was so vast that the wind itself seemed to live there, blowing this way and that way, winter and summer, stirring the green tapestries.
Orlando's fathers had been noble. They came out of the northern mists, wearing crowns on their heads.
Now Orlando stood in the center of the yellow body of a heraldic leopard as the sunlight poured in through the stained glass of a massive coat of arms[1] in the window. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was colored red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing. His strong legs, his handsome body and wide shoulders were decorated with different colors of that heraldic light. But Orlando's honest and serious face, as he opened the window, was lit only by the sun.
Orlando was something to look at. His red cheeks were covered with peach down, and the down on the lips was only a little thicker. His teeth were white; he had a short straight nose; the hair was dark, the ears small. But the most spectacular were his forehead and eyes. He had eyes like two large dewy violets; and a forehead like a marble dome.
Sights disturbed Orlando – like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green, walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her. Sights excited him – the birds and the trees. Sights made him in love with death – the evening sky, the ravens. When all these sights, and the garden sounds too, flowed into the brain of the young man and created the confusion of passions and emotions, Orlando sat down at the table.
As he did every day at this hour, he took out a writing book with 'Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts' written on it and dipped an old goose quill in the ink. Soon he had covered more than ten pages with poetry. He was fluent, but abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the characters of his drama; there were Kings and Queens; horrifying plots; noble sentiments. Not a word was said as he himself would have said it, but all of it was just sweetness of the sixteenth century.
At last, however, he stopped. He was describing, as all young poets do, nature, and, to describe the shade of green, he looked at a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, but green in literature is another. The green Orlando now saw spoiled his rhyme and broke his meter. Besides, one look out the window made him drop the pen, take his cloak, and, as he was walking out of the room, almost trip over a chest – because Orlando was a bit clumsy.
He was careful to avoid meeting anyone outside. There was Stubbs, the gardener, walking along the path. Orlando hid behind a tree till he had passed. He went out through a little gate in the garden wall. Unseen, he walked past the stables, the dog kennels, the breweries, the wash-houses – because the house was as big as a town filled with men at work – and took the ferny path leading uphill through the park.
Orlando loved solitude. He naturally loved to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
'I am alone,' he whispered at last after a long silence. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place where a single oak tree grew. The hill was very high – so high that nineteen English counties could be seen from there; and on clear days – thirty; or even forty, if the weather was fine. Sometimes one could see the English Channel[2]. Rivers could be seen with boats on them; and galleons, and armadas, and cannons firing, and forts, and fortresses, and castles. To the east there was London, and the smoke of the city, and Snowdon[3] herself among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood gazing, recognizing. That was his father's house; that his uncle's. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The moorland was theirs and the forest; the pheasant, the fox, the deer, and the butterfly.
He sighed and dropped down onto the earth beneath the oak tree. He loved to feel the earth beneath him. Image followed image – it was the back of a great horse he was riding, or the deck of a ship – or anything. He needed something hard to which he could attach his floating heart that seemed to be filled with spiced winds every evening at this time when he walked out. He tied it to the oak tree as he lay there, and the heart stilled itself[4]. The little leaves hung, the deer stopped, the pale summer clouds floated; his body grew heavy on the ground as he lay so still that summer's evening.
After an hour or so – the sun was setting quickly, the white clouds had turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black – a trumpet sounded. Orlando jumped to his feet. The sound came from the valley. It came from a dark spot down there. It came from the heart of his own great house in the valley, which suddenly lost its darkness and was now filling with lights. Some of them were small lights, as if servants were running along corridors; others were high and bright lights, as if they burnt in empty halls made ready to receive guests; and others fell and rose, as if the serving men were welcoming indoors a great Princess who had got out of her carriage.
The Queen[5] had come.
Orlando looked no more. He ran downhill. He rushed through the gate. He ran up the stairs. He reached his room. He threw his stockings to one side of the room, his jacket to the other. He combed his hair. He washed his hands. He cut his finger nails. He put on crimson breeches, a lace collar, a waistcoat, and shoes. He was ready in less than ten minutes. He was flushed. He was excited. But he was terribly late.
By shortcuts he knew, he walked now through the vast rooms to the banqueting-hall, five acres away, on the other side of the house. But on the way there, in the part of the house where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs. Stewkley's room was open – she was gone, obviously, with all her keys, to help her mistress. But there, sitting at the table with paper in front of him, was a rather fat, shabby-looking man. He was holding a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed to be rolling some thought in his mind. His eyes, clouded like some green stone, were fixed[6]. He did not see Orlando.
Though he was in a hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? 'Tell me', he wanted to say, 'everything in the whole world.' He had the wildest ideas about poets and poetry. But how to speak to a man who does not see you? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his pen in his fingers, this way and that way, and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. At that moment, Orlando, overcome with shyness, ran off.
He reached the banqueting-hall only just in time to drop to his knees and, hanging his head low, to offer a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself. Such was his shyness that he only saw her ringed hand in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long fingers; a nervous, sickly hand; a commanding hand; a hand that had only to be raised for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept. The body that was decorated with gems; the body that held itself very upright even in pain and in fear. The Queen's watchful eyes were light yellow. All this Orlando felt as the great rings flashed in the water and then something touched his hair. This night his mind was filled with opposites – of the darkness and the burning candles, of silent fields and the noisy serving men, of the shabby poet and the great Queen. Yet, he could only see a hand.
The Queen herself could only see a head. But if it is possible to imagine a body by looking at a hand of a great Queen, surely a head can tell as much – especially when it is looked down upon by a lady whose eyes were always wide open. The long, curly hair, the dark head bent so innocently before her, told of a pair of fine legs; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loyalty and charm – all qualities which the old woman loved, yet was losing herself. She was growing old and tired. She always saw the poison and the long knife she feared. She always heard the guns and the cannons she feared. And it was that same night, when Orlando was already asleep, that she made the gift of the great house to Orlando's father.
Orlando slept all night, ignorant. He had been kissed by a queen without knowing it. And perhaps it was his ignorance and how he started when her lips touched him that kept the memory of her young cousin – because they were related – green in her mind. And so, two years of this quiet country life later, when Orlando had already written about twenty
фамильный герб
Английский канал, или Ла-Манш, – пролив между побережьями Франции и Великобритании.
Сноудон – самая высокая гора Великобритании.
сердце успокаивалось
Королева Елизавета I (1533–1603).
были устремлены в одну точку