On the Roof

So run the lines of an ancient Chinese poet, in the version of Giles of Cambridge; and I often think of them when I undo my door and step out on the ridgepole of the sleeping city underneath the moon.

From my dooryard atop of the tallest apartment building I look down on a glittering plain of light. It is as though giant Roman candles had spilled white and yellow balls of incandescence like carnival blossoms along every thoroughfare. The starry heavens pale by comparison. The City Hall tower lifts its glittering tiara to mock the Corona Borealis. The planets are outgloried by carbon points and tungsten filaments. A ferry boat on the river is a galaxy of roving fires that dims the Pleiades.

Up and down the streets crawl the trolley cars, their retrorse antennae hissing crescendo and decrescendo, their fender-jaws forever hungry, their Cyclopean dragon-eyes ablaze, —Fafners submissive to the rails, and to sharp voices that forever cry, ‘Step lively!’ Even up here one is poignantly aware of them, for at the intersection of the cross-lines, they seem to squat on their truck-haunches for the balky fraction of a second, and then, in two crashes, they and their eight wheels are over, and they go roaring on their rigid steel pathway where once the Indian moccasins slid noiselessly along the mossy runnels of the forest glades. How would Beowulf’s or St. George’s dragon have felt, to depend on a distant power-house for a soul? Verily ‘ A groove is akin to a grave’; behemoth and leviathan themselves could not survive the indignity of harnessed servitude to a rapid-transit system.

The glimmer of the dusk veils the squares and streets with a suffusion of amethystine light, like the purple of cold snow in the lap of the hills late on a winter afternoon. Then it is that grim utilitarian office-buildings are suddenly transformed, as at the touch of a necromancer’s wand, into palaces of fairy-land, magnificent with fire, each window a plate of beaten gold, shining like the back of a Stradivarius violin. It is hard to tell which window holds the reflex of the sundown, and which a lighted lamp.

A little yellow bird came flying to my window the other night, sentient of the flowers within and the radiance and the warmth, furious because it could not pierce the glass like water. I felt as though I were the keeper of a lighthouse in a storm, against whose lantern sea-birds beat and scream and die; but my bird winged away ere I could bring my mind and hand to the window to let that mad, fleet whirring come in out of the night. I thought of the ancient explanation Caedmon gave of the soul of a man, when he said to the king that it was as if, as they sat at meat with the thanes and the aldermen, a white bird entered the room, flying from the dark and out into the dark again. Then of the passage in Pater’s Marius, where the lad’s mother tells him that his soul is a little white bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded market-place. But my soul went away from me that night, it would seem, and has not come back to me again.

By day I can see the hats and muffs, — but not the faces, — the perambulators and the nursemaids of coddled children in the square below. The stone walks among the leafless trees are picked out with errant blurs of color, a peripatetic flower-garden, as though geraniums should whimsically walk away from their own leaves. Here an old man crawls at a snail’s pace, — to feed a squirrel, perhaps, which I cannot see, — and there, direct and forcible as a steamengine, goes a woman in whose hammering, get-there gait is revealed a claimant of the suffrage. But generally persons are seen only as the shreds and flying tassels of a crowd; and the talk of voices is replaced by the talk of the town.

That talk of the town is a wonderful thing. It may fall away to a restless, fitful murmur in the middle of the night, but it goes on unceasingly. The honk of the motor-car is its punctuationmark, and in its indistinguishable vast uproar blend the accents of nearly two million human beings, to say nothing of the wild laughters and tribulations of lesser animals, with an eye or a tongue to the moon that rules more tides than those of the sea.

I love particularly the other-worldliness my station in space sometimes assumes, when a thick fog or a cloudstratum leaves me pendant like Mahomet’s coffin, even though I know there is a telephone in my closet and I can throw a verbal anchor down to the earth if I please. Miracles, near and far, are wrought by great black striations that shoot in like Zeppelins; sometimes these phantasmagoria are colored light green, like the under side of ‘ little leaves new-born,’ and sometimes they are black as a fox’s fur can be, and thicker still. When a storm comes, I am all wrapped up in clouds and singing winds, and then it is best of all, and I wonder why most people care to live so near the ground. It is nice to know that here and there folk who cast far into the future are painting across roof-tops horizontal advertisements, that they may be aeroplanely read; and I have seen a grand stand built on an office-building’s top to witness the horrendous feats of an aviator. Before long we of the housetop will, like the skylark, spurn the ground altogether, and using the skylights for our front doors, will find the Attic philosopher come into his kingdom at last. All the trees will be roof-trees, and all the gardens, roof-gardens. As I look round me now on other roofs, I can see awnings, and even children’s sand-piles, and steamer-chairs, and hammocks, and various canvased arrangements for outdoor sleep.

Even the cats have a roof-garden in a refuge whereof I am aware, and schools have netted enclosures for basket-ball playing as well as for mittened and tippeted recitation. How good is all this migration roofward, while space is at a premium on the ground! We revert to the archaic wisdom of Babylon, the current history of Tibet and the Himalayan peasants, the practice of our western Indians upon their mesas, the Chinese on their terraces, who use their housetops underfoot as well as overhead. One does not realize what a vast unpopulated, unutilized area lies but a few feet above the teeming metropolis, till one looks down upon one hundred and thirty square miles of housetops from above. Then one thinks better than ever of the civil engineering of Semiramis, who, pining for green turf and plashing fountains in place of the sun-baked clay, built a secondary heaven that was some consolation for the grand ruin of Babel.