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The White Room50 Date uncertain It was an artist’s masterpiece. He had wrought it all with his own hands, after his idea, which grew as he wrought. It was not square nor long nor round, nor any regular shape, such as we are used to thinking of rooms; it was wider here and narrower there, and had strange turns and niches, and carvings, and arches; and in all these there were bits of statuary, or tiny fountains, or ›owers, or curious sea-things, gathered from many shores, shells and corals and ocean feathers, picked up years apart. The light came from above, as all light should, and the dazzling beauty of the ceiling was like a broken arc from a cave’s roof, so white and gleaming was it with the strange substance he had made; and the walls had all the wild, fantastic tracery of the frost forests on our winter windows, which God paints—but no man.51 The statues were all white, of un›awed marble ; and the silken curtains, looped back from the small bed, were snow. The ‹sh in the little fountains had silver scales, and in the recess where he had made an aviary were four pure-plumed birds. And all the ›owers and all the curious sea-things were white. The divans were of spotless velvet , and the rugs upon the glistening ›oor, wrought in strange patterns by his own deft ‹ngers, were of white velvet, too. There was a little case of books, bound in blanch covers, and beside it a silver-stringed harp mantled in a strainless [sic: stainless?] sheath. There was one picture, only one. If it had been made for sale! But now there is only I to write of it—I, who saw it once long after all was ‹nished. He was an impressionist , my artist, long before the impressionists began to make a noise in the world. He painted the white light of a day as it lies on sky and water— only a stretch of sky and water—seen of a summer afternoon, when the clouds drift like curled feathers and the boats are sleeping on Canarsie 251 50. See pp. 115–23. Source: Herald of Revolt (London) 3.8 (Sept. 1913): 103. 51. The reference to God as the frost artist is presumably not that of the atheist de Cleyre but rather a ‹ctitious ‹rst-person narrator, whose identity we do not know, who claims to have seen this (‹ctional) painting. Bay.52 That was the last touch to the White Room, except the Easter lilies he placed in the great vase between the tall wax tapers. He had been working ‹fteen years till that day—for her, the Soul of the White Room, herself the whitest thing, his pure-faced Scandinavian girl, with the chiselled face that looked out with saint’s eyes from under its aureole of pale hair, as if the breath of the High One had blown upon her, and no other. So she had seemed to him when he married her, and so, with his steadfast love, she seemed to him now. Fifteen years! And he had said no word to her in all that time of the marvel he was creating for her—all with his own hands, which was the only true art. It had taken very long. And all that time he had wondered and searched and wrought, for her, only for her, she had been living with that beautiful, meek, white patience of hers, in the dirty, narrow city alley, where they had had to live when young and poor, complaining of nothing—only now and then wishing for a little more of his presence, suggesting, perhaps, some little tri›e, which he did not buy, partly to prove her excellence, partly because of the great thing he was making. And when he saw a darker blue of disappointment settle in her eyes, he would say, “My girl shall have something far better some day.” And now it had come to pass. To-morrow he would take her, when the third lily should have opened a little wider. She would see his white dream, of which she was the angel—had been for so many years. She would then understand what she had been to him, who had not wrought for the praise of men, but for one woman only. And, thinking so, he turned into the alley-way, lifting his eyes to the small...

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