Orlando: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Inside, Orlando stares at her inkpot. Her pen sits beside it, along with her manuscript. Just before the butler and the maid had interrupted her, she was about to say that “nothing changes,” but “in the space of three seconds and a half, everything changed.” She broke her ankle, fell in love, and married Shel. She even has the ring to prove it. With “superstitious reverence,” Orlando spins the ring on her finger. “The wedding ring has to be put on the second finger of the left hand for it to be of any use at all,” Orlando says, “like a child cautiously repeating its lesson.”

Since her marriage to Shel, Orlando’s finger hasn’t tingled once, but she still has her “doubts” about her marriage. “If one’s husband is always sailing round the Cape Horn, is it marriage?” she wonders. “If one likes him, is it marriage? If one likes other people, is it marriage? And finally, if one still wishes, more than anything else in the whole world, to write poetry, is it marriage?” Orlando isn’t so sure. She takes her pen in hand. “Do I dare?” she thinks. “Hang it all!” Orlando yells out loud. “Here goes!”

Orlando begins to write about “grass” and “fritillaries” and “Egyptian girls,” and then she stops and reads her work. “Grass,” she thinks, “is all right,” but “fritillaries” may be “a thought strong from a lady’s pen, perhaps, but Wordsworth, no doubt, sanctions it.” Orlando comes to the “Egyptian girls.” “Are girls necessary?” she wonders. After all, she does have a husband at the Cape. “Ah, well, that’ll do,” Orlando thinks. Looking over her words, Orlando is overall pleased. She knows that she can write, so write she does.

“Done!” Orlando yells as she backs away from her manuscript sometime later. “And if I were dead, it would be just the same!” Looking down at the poem, Orlando knows that “it must be read.” If not, it will surely “die in her bosom,” so she sends at once for a carriage to take her to London. A servant tells her there is still time “to catch the eleven forty-five,” and Orlando is reminded of the modern invention of the steam engine. In London, Orlando passes her old city house, which has been sold, “part to the Salvation Army, part to an umbrella factory.” She passes Lady R.’s and thinks of the “wit” inside. “Oh! but Mr. Pope is dead,” Orlando thinks sadly.

Orlando walks the streets for hours, until she begins to feel hungry. She looks around and sees only the outline of an “elderly gentleman” in the distance. His shape looks “vaguely familiar,” and Orlando is shocked to see “her very old friend, Nick Greene,” walking slowly toward her. “The Lady Orlando!” he yells pleasantly. “Sir Nicholas!” she replies. It has been so long since they have seen each other, Orlando says, that he must, by now, be “a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine things.”

Nick Greene laughs. Indeed, he is “a Knight,” and “a Litt.D.” and “Professor.” He has written “a score of volumes.” Plainly put, Nick Greene is “the most influential critic of the Victorian age.” He takes Orlando to a “superb restaurant,” and, placing his gloves on the table, he cries: “Ah! My dear lady, the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison—those were the heroes. All, all are dead now. And whom have they left us?” he asks. “Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!” All the young writers, Nick says, “are in the pay of booksellers.”

“No, my dear lady,” Nick Greene says to Orlando, “the great days are over.” He says they live in “degenerate times” and that they must “cherish the past; honour those writers—there are still a few left of ‘em—who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but—” Orlando interrupts. “Glawr!” she yells. Orlando smiles. Nick Greene “hasn’t changed, for all his Knighthood,” and Orlando is “unaccountably disappointed.” For all these years, she had thought literature “something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning,” now, however, Orlando knows that literature is nothing more than “an elderly gentleman in a grey suit.”

Suddenly, the bosom of Orlando’s dress bursts open, and “The Oak Tree” falls to the table. “A manuscript!” Nick Greene exclaims. “Permit me to look at it.” Orlando allows Greene to read her work, but this time, his assessment is much different. It reminds him, he says, “of Addison’s Cato,” and it has “no trace,” he is “thankful to say, of the modern spirit.” He claims it must “be published instantly.” He talks of “royalties,” “publishers,” and “reviews,” then leaves Orlando in a rush. With her poem gone, Orlando feels “a bare place in her breast.” She has nothing to do but whatever she wants. “What then, is Life?” she asks.

Orlando goes immediately to the nearest telegraph office and wires to Shel a cyphered message. They’ve invented a “language” that can relay messages of the “utmost complexity” with only a few words. “My God Shel,” the message reads, “life literature Greene today—” and the last words, “Rattigan Glumphoboo,” sum up the message “precisely.” She knows she will not receive an answer for several hours, so she goes walking in the street.

Orlando comes across a book seller and goes inside. She has “known manuscripts” her entire life. She has held the “rough brown sheets” of Spenser and has seen both Shakespeare and Milton’s “scripts.” She owns many “quartos” and “folios,” but books are something else entirely. The “innumerable little volumes” are stacked throughout the store. One can buy all of Shakespeare’s works for only “half a crown,” and she finds books written by Sir Nicolas as well. Orlando tells the bookseller to “send her everything of any importance,” and walks out the door after buying a pile of books.

With a stack of “critical journals,” Orlando makes her way to the park. She reads an article by Sir Nicolas about John Donne, but the hustle and bustle of the park distracts her. “Life? Literature? One to be made into the other?” Orlando thinks. “But how monstrously difficult!” As Orlando reads Sir Nicolas, she begins to sense “an extremely uncomfortable feeling,” that “one must never say what one thinks.” As she continues to read, Orlando discovers that each of the critics make “one feel […] that one must always, always write like someone else.” Orlando slams the journal shut. She can never be “as spiteful as all that,” she says. “So how can I be a critic and write the best English prose of my time?” Orlando asks. “Damn it all!” she yells.

Suddenly, Orlando cries out: “Ecstasy! Ecstasy! Where’s the post office?” She must wire Shel immediately and tell him of her discovery. She has learned that “it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne” that matter; it is “something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple, a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths,”  Orlando says passing a flower bed. 

As Orlando walks in the front door of her house, she finds the entire foyer littered with packages. The bookseller has delivered her books, and “the whole of Victorian literature” is tied up neatly in grey packages. Being “accustomed to the little literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,” she is “appalled by the consequences of her order.” Victorian literature means not “merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass” of writers and books.

“There are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature,” the narrator writes, “one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines the length of this one.” The “conclusion” Orlando comes to is that it is “very odd” that there are no dedications to noblemen at all, and that many of the writers have “family trees half as high as her own.” She finds “that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea.”

Suddenly, Orlando comes to a final conclusion about Victorian literature, which is “of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit of six lines,” the narrator writes, “we must omit.”

After coming to her conclusion, Orlando looks out the window for a long time. “For when anybody comes to a conclusion it is as if they have tossed the ball over the net and must wait for the unseen antagonist to return it,” the narrator says. We can “only wish that” the biographer will “wrap up what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no!” Suddenly, it is March the 2nd. “Do you recognize the Green and in the middle the steeple?” the narrator asks. “Oh yes, it is Kew!” And then it is “March the 20th, at three o’clock in the morning,” and the midwife hands Orlando a baby. “It’s a very fine boy, M’Lady,” she says.

Once again, Orlando stands at the window. “But let the reader take courage,” the narrator says, “nothing of the same sort is going to happen today, which is not, by any means, the same day.” As Orlando looks out the window, she notes that the weather is changing. Even the sky seems to change, for King Edward has succeeded Queen Victoria. Looking at the houses, Orlando watches as people light entire rooms with the flip of a switch. Water is “hot in two seconds,” and the people are much happier. The ivy drops from houses and families are smaller.

Orlando can hear the clock ticking “louder and louder,” until it strikes 10 a.m. on October 11th, 1928. It is the “present moment,” the narrator says. Orlando turns “pale” and presses “her hand to her heart.” There cannot be a more “terrifying revelation,” the narrator says, “than that it is the present moment.” Plus, Orlando is “terribly late,” so she jumps in her “motor car” and starts it up. She drives to Marshall & Snelgrove’s and goes inside. She looks at her shopping list: “boy’s boots, bath salts, sardines.” She looks around and gets into the elevator. “The fabric of life now,” Orlando thinks as the elevator goes up, “is magic. […] So my belief in magic returns.”

Orlando looks again to her shopping list and sees for the first time an additional item: “sheets for a double bed.” She gets off the elevator and walks to a counter. “Sheets for a double bed,” she says to the man behind the counter. The housekeeper informed her just the other day of the hole “in the bottom sheet in the royal bed.” Many royals have slept there, Orlando thinks, “no wonder it had a hole in it.” She repeats to the man behind the counter that she is in search of sheets, and he returns with “the best Irish linen.”

“Faithless!” Orlando cries as the man disappears and the shop begins to “pitch and toss.” Suddenly, there is “yellow water” and she can see a Russian ship in the distance. “Oh, Sasha!” Orlando yells to the “fat” and “lethargic” woman her love has become. “Any napkins, towels, dusters to-day, Ma’am?” the man behind the counter asks again. Orlando looks to her shopping list and is “able to reply with every appearance of composure.” No, she says, only “bath salts,” and that is on another floor.

Orlando again gets on the elevator and rides to another floor. She steps out and is lost among the handbags. She stands “hesitating,” trying to “collect” herself. “Time has passed over me,” she says finally, “This is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice.” She turns and walks out in the direction of her car.

“It cannot be denied,” the narrator writes, “that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.” It is easy to say that one only lives the years “allotted them on a tombstone,” but the dead walk among us, and those not yet born “go through the forms of life.” Some are hundreds of years old but consider themselves 36. “The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say,” the narrator claims, “is always a matter of dispute.”  

“Confound it all!” Orlando says as she drives down the street. “Look where you’re going!” She drives down old Kent Road on “Thursday, the eleventh of October, 1928,” among the shopping women and playing children. She soon comes upon “a cottage, a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.” She parks the car and gets out, calling “hesitantly,” suspecting that the person she is looking for isn’t there. “Orlando?” Orlando calls out. “Orlando?” she calls again, but no one answers.

“All right then,” Orlando says. She has “a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person my have as many thousand,” the narrator says. Orlando can call on herself as a boy, or when she handed Queen Elizabeth the rose water. She can call on herself from the “gipsies,” or the Orlando who married Shel. Perhaps it is “the one she needs most kept aloof, for she is, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drives,” the narrator claims.

“The conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self,” the narrator argues. “This is what some people call the true self.” As Orlando drives, she is looking for this specific self. “What then? Who then?” Orlando asks. “A woman. Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? […] Greedy, luxurious, vicious? Am I? […] Spoilt? Perhaps.” She watches the passing trees. “Trees,” she says, “I love trees,” and “sheep dogs.” Orlando continues. “And the night. But people? […] Peasants I like. I understand crops.”

“Fame!” Orlando says and laughs. “Fame! Seven editions. A prize.” (Here, the narrator says, Orlando alludes to “The Oak Tree,” which she had won a prize for. The narrator also takes a moment to acknowledge “how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination and peroration should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this,” but when writing “of a woman, everything is out of place.”) Orlando claims she is “a poet” and “a charlatan, both every morning as regularly as the post comes in.”

Orlando begins to hum and “another self comes in.” She stops and stares at the hood of the car. He was in the servants’ dining room, she remembers of the shabby man, “with a dirty ruff on…Was it old Mr. Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh—p—re?” When speaking the names of those we “deeply” revere, the narrator says, “we never speak them whole.” Now, just as Orlando stops calling “Orlando,” the Orlando that she has been trying to call comes “of its own accord.” It is her “real self,” and she falls quiet.

Orlando drives up the winding road between the trees and deer appear from the woods. She feels “the greatest satisfaction” and is soon driving up to the house where she has spent “so may hundred years.” Alone, Orlando goes to her room and swaps her skirt for “a pair of whipcord breeches, and leather jacket” in “less than three minutes.” She walks past the dining room and sees “her old friends” Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Addison. “Here’s the prize winner!” they say. She makes herself a sandwich and drinks a glass of wine and walks to the drawing rooms. 

Orlando calls to “her troop of dogs” and walks to the gallery. There, rows of chairs of faded velvet line the walls, and Orlando feels “gloomy” as she sits in the Queen’s chair. The house is “no longer hers entirely” but belongs “to time now; to history.” The whole house is bare. “Chairs and beds are empty; tankards or silver and gold are locked in glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down” the halls. Orlando thinks of the past and the rooms full of laughing people, and like “thunder,” a clock strikes four.

All at once, the gallery “falls to powder,” and “an explosion of gunpowder” lights Orlando’s face. She sees everything with “extreme distinctness,” but unlike when the clock struck in London, she has “complete composure.” She calls her dogs and goes down to the garden, where the “intricacy” of the flowers and trees are all around her. Orlando walks “briskly” out of the garden and into the park, where she stops to watch the gardener “fashion a cart wheel.” As she watches, she notices that the thumb of the man’s right hand is missing a nail, and she is “repulsed.”

Orlando follows a path, which leads “higher and higher to the oak tree” at the top. The oak tree is “bigger, sturdier, and more knotted” than when “she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588. She throws herself at the ground beneath the tree, and her poem, “The Oak Tree,” flies from the breast of her jacket. “I should have brought a trowel,” Orlando says. It is shallow over the roots, she notices, and she won’t be able to bury the book here. Instead, she places the “unburied and disheveled” book on the ground beneath the tree and turns to leave.

The ground shakes and “heaps itself,” and the mountains of Turkey appear. “What is your antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with all this?” Orlando hears Rustum ask. Suddenly, the clock strikes and the Turkish landscape “collapses and falls.” Orlando isn’t sure of the time, but it is night. “Ecstasy!” Orlando cries, “ecstasy!” The wind stops and she sees “waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.” She begins to cry. “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!” she yells, and the name “falls out of the sky” like a “feather.”

Shel is coming, Orlando thinks, he always comes when the water is calm. The first stroke of midnight sounds, and “the cold breeze of the present” blows across Orlando’s face. She looks to the sky, seeing an airplane above, and she knows Shel is onboard. “Here! Shel, here!” Orlando yells “baring her breast to the moon.” Just then, Shel jumps from the airplane, and springing up over his head is “a single wild bird.” “It is the goose!” Orlando yells. “The wild goose...” and then “the twelfth stroke of midnight” sounds, on “Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.”