: Prose Fancies (Second Series) by Le Gallienne Richard - English essays

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A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN, 1 SPRING BY PARCEL POST, 20 THE GREAT MERRY-GO-ROUND, 27 THE BURIAL OF ROMEO AND JULIET, 39 VARIATIONS UPON WHITEBAIT, 49 THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE, 58 ABOUT THE SECURITIES, 67 THE BOOM IN YELLOW, 79 LETTER TO AN UNSUCCESSFUL LITERARY MAN, 90 A POET IN THE CITY, 98 BROWN ROSES, 108 THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR, 112 ON LOVING ONE'S ENEMIES, 119 THE DRAMATIC ART OF LIFE, 125 THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX, 135 THE FALLACY OF A NATION, 145 THE GREATNESS OF MAN, 154 DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS, 171 A SEAPORT IN THE MOON, 187

A SEVENTH-STORY HEAVEN

It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to nest in the masthead of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things--for its cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.

It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in themselves--a confidence curiously supported by history,--and they never had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then, indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano, with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a glimpse of heaven.

Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern--and 'The Jolly Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised. Often have I sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky from which Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.

From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain recommended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere, as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.

Once upon a time, in that enchanted past where dwell all the dreams we love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon, a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades, stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.

I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo, ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God certainly made it--must have been the comment of any one who caught a glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like an Assumption of Fra Angelico's--that is, any one interested in art and angels.

She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood of commission agents and shipbrokers stood silent together for a moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money, his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks, they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.

'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--

'Ah! what a garden is your hair!-- Such treasure as the kings of old, In coffers of the beaten gold, Laid up on earth--and left it there.'

So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--

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