Orlando. A Biography / Орландо. Вирджиния ВулфЧитать онлайн книгу.
Others sat still and silent, staring blindly before them. One group of young sailors were shouting tavern songs. An old nobleman went down not far from where Orlando stood. Many drowned holding some silver pot or other treasure tightly; and some poor ones drowned because they jumped from the bank into the river as they saw valuable possessions of all sorts being carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights was a cat with its kitten; a table laid for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed.
Astonished, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch the waters flow as they went past him. At last, he spurred his horse and galloped along the river bank in the direction of the sea. He reached that place where – not even two days ago – the ships of the Ambassadors had stood frozen. Quickly, he counted them all: the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turkish. All were still there, except for the Russian ship. For a moment, Orlando thought that it must have sunk; but then, raising his eyes, he saw the shape of a ship on the horizon, with the black eagles flying from the mast.
The ship of the Muscovite Embassy was going out to sea.
2
In the summer that followed that terrible winter which saw the frost, the flood, the deaths of many people, and which ruined Orlando's hopes, as he was banned from Court, he went to his great house in the country and lived there in solitude.
One June morning – it was Saturday the 18th – Orlando did not get up at his usual hour, and when his servants went to call him, he was found asleep and could not be awakened. He lay as if in a trance, almost without breathing. The dogs were barking under his window; drums were beaten in his room; his feet were covered with mustard – still he did not wake up, take food, or show any sign of life for seven whole days.
On the seventh day, he woke at his usual time – a quarter before eight – and sent everyone out of his room, which was natural enough. Strangely enough, he was not aware of any trance, but simply dressed himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a usual night's sleep. Yet some change – as it was suspected – must have taken place in his brain, because though he was perfectly rational and even gloomier than before, he seemed to have forgotten some events of his past life. He would listen when people spoke of the great frost, or the skating, or the carnival, but he never gave any sign that he had witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six months were discussed, he seemed puzzled, as if he was listening to stories which some other person had already told him. If Russia was mentioned, or Princesses, or ships, he would become gloomy and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him. But the doctors only told him to lie in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, and left him to himself. In their opinion, all the strangeness was due to the fact that he had been asleep for a week.
But if it was sleep, then what was its nature? Was it a cure? Was it the finger of death? Are people made so that they have to take death in small doses daily or they could not go on with their life? Had Orlando died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life?
Now Orlando led a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace at Court and his grief were partly the reason of it. He seldom invited anyone to visit him, though he still had many friends. To be alone, in the great house of his fathers, suited him well. Solitude was his choice. Nobody quite knew how he spent his time. In the dark of the evening, the servants, whose business was to dust empty rooms and to tidy the beds that were never slept in, watched a light passing along the galleries and the banqueting-halls, up the stairs, into the bedrooms, and knew that it was their master taking a walk through the house, alone. None of them dared follow him, of course, because the house was haunted by a great variety of ghosts.
When the light disappeared, Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, that she hoped his Lordship had not had any bad accident. Mr. Dupper would answer that his Lordship was probably on his knees, among the tombs of his ancestors, in the Chapel, half a mile away on the south side. They agreed that it was such a pity to see a fine nobleman moping about the house when he might be hunting the fox and deer. In short, all his serving men and women thought that his Lordship was a handsome and pleasant gentleman; they respected him and cursed the foreign Princess.
Indeed, Mr. Dupper was right. Orlando now enjoyed the thoughts of death, and, after walking along galleries and ballrooms with a candle in his hand, looking at picture after picture, he would come into the family chapel and sit for hours watching the tapestries stir in the moonlight. Even this was not enough for him, so he would go down into the sepulcher where his ancestors lay, coffin upon coffin, for ten generations together. The place was so seldom visited that the rats made holes in the coffins, and a bone or a skull would catch at his cloak or roll under his foot as he passed. It was a grim sepulcher, dug deep beneath the house as if the first Lord of the family had wished to show how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh: how people that dance and sing above must then lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring loses its ruby and the eye shines no more.
'Nothing is left of all these Princes, except the dates,' Orlando would say, taking a skeleton hand in his, bending it this way and that, then putting it back with the other bones. 'Whose hand was it? The right or the left? The hand of man or woman, of old or young? Had it held a rose or cold steel?'
So, taking his candle, he returned to that curious, moody walking down the galleries, looking for something among the pictures. Soon it was interrupted by a spasm of sobbing when he saw a snow landscape painting by an unknown artist. Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting the bones of his ancestors, he stood there, shaking with sobs, desiring a treacherous woman in Russian trousers. She had gone. She had left him. He would never see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he went back to his room. And Mrs.
Grimsditch, seeing the light in the window, thanked God his Lordship was safe again.
Back in his room, Orlando sat at the table and opened the works of Sir Thomas Browne[26].
Strangely, Orlando had many moods: melancholy, laziness, passion, love of solitude. But the mood for books was an early one. As a child, he was sometimes found at midnight still reading. When servants took his candle away, he used glow-worms. When they took the glow-worms away, he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it simply, he was a nobleman infected with a love of literature. Many people of his time, especially of his rank, did not have the infection and thus were free to run or ride or make love. But some were early infected by this disease, the nature of which was to substitute an illusion for reality. So when Orlando opened a book, everything around him turned to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house, one hundred and fifty servants, his eighty horses, countless carpets, sofas, and china – all disappeared.
So Orlando would sit by himself, reading in solitude. He would often read six hours into the night; and when the servants came to him for orders, he would put away his book and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This broke the hearts of Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, and of all the others. A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the sick or the dying.
But worse was yet to come[27]. Orlando fell in love with writing. It is a disaster for any man, and especially for a rich one. He would give every penny he had to write one little book and become famous; yet no gold would buy him the treasure of a well-written line.
Happily, Orlando was strong enough, and the disease never broke him down as it had broken many others. Yet when he had read for an hour or so, and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night[28] and all were asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key out of his pocket, and unlocked a great cabinet which stood in the corner. Inside there were about fifty drawers, and in each drawer lay a thick document, all written in Orlando's hand. He paused, thinking which one to open.
The truth was that Orlando had been afflicted with this disease for many years. Never had any boy asked for sweets or apples as Orlando asked for paper and ink. He would hide behind curtains, or in the cupboard behind his mother's bedroom, with an inkpot in one hand, a pen in another, and a roll of paper on his knee. Thus he had
Томас Браун (1605–1682) – британский медик, один из крупнейших мастеров английской прозы эпохи барокко, автор произведений на оккультнорелигиозные и естественно-научные темы.
Но это было ещё полбеды.
была глухая/глубокая/тёмная ночь