DOI article:
Le Gallienne, Richard: A seventh-story heaven
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27806#0017
By Richard Le Gallienne 13
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 sailors’ 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 and ship- brokers, a chill unoccupied region,
in which every small office-door 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 trans-
lation it was into a gracious world of books and flowers and the
peace they always bring.
Once
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 sailors’ 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 and ship- brokers, a chill unoccupied region,
in which every small office-door 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 trans-
lation it was into a gracious world of books and flowers and the
peace they always bring.
Once