Orlando. A Biography / Орландо. Вирджиния ВулфЧитать онлайн книгу.
Now the skater came closer. Legs and hands were a boy's, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had such deep blue eyes.
Finally, the unknown skater stopped. She was a woman.
Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold. The stranger's name, he found, was the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she had come with the Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father, to attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent, drinking some black liquid. None spoke English, and French was then little known at the Court.
It was by accident that Orlando and the Princess became acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table under a huge awning. The Princess was placed between two young Lords – one was Lord Francis Vere, and the other the young Earl of Moray. Both were fine lads in their way, but they had no knowledge of the French language. When at the beginning of dinner the Princess complimented the Queen's hairstyle in French, both Lord Francis and the Earl showed embarrassment. One put a sauce on her plate; the other called his dog and gave it a bone. The Princess laughed, and Orlando, catching her eyes, laughed too.
He laughed, but then the laugh froze on his lips. Whom had he loved? What had he loved until now? An old woman. Red-cheeked women of the beer gardens. A nun. A cruel dancer. Too much lace and ceremony. Love had meant nothing to him. The joys of it had a bland taste. As he looked at the Princess, his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; he saw the spring coming.
Then the Princess asked him, 'Would you pass me the salt?'
He blushed deeply. 'With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,' he replied, speaking French perfectly because his mother's maid had taught him.
The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat beside her? What was the strange food on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the men in England? Was that funny figure at the end of the table with her hair put up really the Queen? And did the King always drool like that? Though these questions embarrassed Orlando at first, they made him laugh; and he saw from the blank faces of the company that nobody understood a word. So he answered her as freely as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of the Court.
Soon it was obvious that Orlando paid the Muscovite much more attention than it was necessary. He was always by her side, and their conversation was all blushes and laughter. Then, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary. In one night he had been freed of his boyish clumsiness. Nobody had ever seen him so happy before; but a cloud hung over it all. The old men shrugged their shoulders. The young laughed. All knew that Orlando was engaged to another. The Lady Margaret O'Brien O'Dare O'Reilly Tyrconnel – that was the real name of Euphrosyne who wore Orlando's splendid sapphire ring on her finger – had the supreme right to his attention. Yet when she skated, which she did rather clumsily, no one was at her side, and, if she fell, which she did rather heavily, no one pulled her to her feet. Although she was naturally phlegmatic and did not believe that a foreigner could take her Orlando away, at last even the Lady Margaret herself started to suspect that there was something going on.
Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando tried to hide his feelings less and less. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company. Next moment it would be noticed that the Muscovite was missing too. But what bothered the Court most was that the couple was often seen disappearing among the crowd of common people in the public part of the river.
'Take me away. I hate your English Court,' the Princess would say to Orlando. She could not stand it. It was full of old women, she said, who stared in her face, and of young men who stepped on her toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles wide on which one could gallop six horses all day long without meeting a soul. Besides, she wanted to see the Tower[16], the Beefeaters[17], the Heads on Temple Bar[18], and the jewelers' shops in the city.
So Orlando took her into the city, showed her the Beefeaters and the rebels' heads, and bought her whatever she liked. But this was not enough. Each needed the other's company more and more. Instead of taking the road to London, they would turn the other way and would soon reach the frozen parts of the Thames[19] where not a living soul ever came their way.
Thus, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short and because it was the name of a white Russian fox[20] he had had as a boy – a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so violently that his father had it killed – had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love, they would fall to the ground. Wrapped in a great fur cloak, Orlando would take her in his arms and for the first time murmur the words of love. Then, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been nothing. And laughing at him, she would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat. Then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man's beard and that woman's skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the green tapestries that were always stirred by the wind in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for them; nothing was too great.
Then, suddenly, Orlando would fall into one of his melancholic moods. He would lie face down on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. 'All ends in death,' Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice, his face clouded with gloom. 'All ends in death.' But Sasha – who had no English blood in her, who was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns slower, and sentences often left unfinished – Sasha stared at him, perhaps laughed at him because he must have seemed childish to her, and said nothing. When the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, she pulled him to his feet, and he forgot the frozen waters, or the night coming, or the old woman, or whatever it was. He tried to tell her what she was like – with the passion of a poet whose poetry is squeezed out of him by pain. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, gold? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill – like nothing he had seen or known in England. Words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another language. English was too simple for Sasha. In all she said, there was something hidden; in all she did, there was some secret, like the green flame hidden in the emerald.
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had finished telling her that she was a fox, an olive tree, or a green hilltop, and had given her the whole history of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; he paused and asked her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had she brothers? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she answered, an awkwardness came between them. At first he suspected that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of her own people; so he did not press her. But he felt that her silence could not be for that reason, because she dressed in velvet and pearls, and her manners were exquisite.
What, then, was she hiding from him?
Skating farther than usual that day, they reached the part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen in the middle of it. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy with its double-headed black eagle on the main mast. Sasha had left some of her clothing on board, and, thinking the ship was empty, they climbed on deck and went looking for it. They had not gone too far when a fine young man appeared out of nowhere and, saying something in Russian, probably offered to help the Princess to find what she wanted because he then lit a candle and disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, waiting for her, thought only of the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of ways of making her his own. There were difficulties to overcome. She wanted to live in Russia where there were frozen rivers and wild horses. It was true that a landscape of pine and snow did not excite him. Nor was he ready to ruin his career. Still, he would do anything for her. As for his marriage to the
Лондонский Тауэр – крепость на берегу Темзы, один из символов Великобритании.
Бифитеры – церемониальные стражи лондонского Тауэра.
Главные городские ворота Темпл-Бар, где на кольях выставлялись головы предателей.
Темза – река, на которой стоит Лондон.
песец