He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the
fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in
the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the
rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less
the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or
two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s
father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the
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 through the
attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, 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 would 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 to his attic
room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his
blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on
the floor and he had to string it up again.....