He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though1
the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in
the act of slicing at the head of an enemy which swung from
the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or4
less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand
or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a coconut. Orlando’s
father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the7
shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon
in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently,
perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through10
the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain
him.
Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel,13
and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they
had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders,
and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would16
Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too
young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal
away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to19
his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with
his blade. (…) His fathers had been noble since they had been
at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on22
their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the
yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun
falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the25
window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body
of a heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill
to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue,28
and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like
symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might
observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and31
the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various
tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window
open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen34
face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who
bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such
a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invokes the help of37
novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from
office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they
reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire.40
Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career.
The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down
on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the43
cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back
over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing
disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was46
dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas,
that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without
mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom49
born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando
standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like
drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have52
brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the
swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank
medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes55
and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize. Directly we glance at
eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables
which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore.58
Virginia Woolf. Orlando – A biography, 1928 (adapted).