Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  His early life — to the disgust of his Father, a poor country squire — was a distressing failure. He missed all examinations, muddled all chances, and finally, with £50 a year of his own, and no one to care much what happened to him, settled in London and took any odd job of a secretarial nature that offered itself. He kept to nothing for long, being easily dissatisfied, and ever on the look out for the “job” that might conceal the kind of adventure he wanted. Once the work of the moment proved barren of this possibility, he wearied of it and sought another. And the search seemed prolonged and hopeless, for the adventure he sought was not a common kind, but something that should provide him with a means of escape from a vulgar and noisy world that bored him very much indeed. He sought an adventure that should announce to him a new heaven and a new earth; something that should confirm, if not actually replace, that inner region of wonder and delight he reveled in as a boy, but which education and conflict with a prosaic age had swept away from his nearer consciousness. He sought, that is, an authoritative adventure of the soul.

  To look at, one could have believed that until the age of twenty-five he had been nameless, and that a committee had then sat upon the subject and selected the sound best suited to describe him: Spinrobin — Robert. For, had he never seen himself, but run into that inner prairie of his and called aloud “Robert Spinrobin,” an individual exactly resembling him would surely have pattered up to claim the name.

  He was slight, graceful, quick on his feet and generally alert; took little steps that were almost hopping, and when he was in a hurry gave him the appearance of “spinning” down the pavement or up the stairs; always wore clothes of some fluffy material, with a low collar and bright red tie; had soft pink cheeks, dancing grey eyes and loosely scattered hair, prematurely thin and unquestionably like feathers. His hands and feet were small and nimble. When he stood in his favorite attitude with hands plunged deep in his pockets, coat-tails slightly spread and flapping, head on one side and hair disordered, talking in that high, twittering, yet very agreeable voice of his, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that here was — well — Spinrobin, Bobby Spinrobin, “on the job.”

  For he took on any “job” that promised adventure of the kind he sought, and the queerer the better. As soon as he found that his present occupation led to nothing, he looked about for something new — chiefly in the newspaper advertisements. Numbers of strange people advertised in the newspapers, he knew, just as numbers of strange people wrote letters to them; and Spinny — so he was called by those who loved him — was a diligent student of the columns known as “Agony” and “Help wanted.” Whereupon it came about that he was aged twenty-eight, and out of a job, when the threads of the following occurrence wove into the pattern of his life, and “led to something” of a kind that may well be cause for question and amazement.

  The advertisement that formed the bait read as follows: —

  “WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale,” — and the address.

  Spinrobin swallowed the bait whole. “Unworldly” put the match, and he flamed up. He possessed, it seemed, the other necessary qualifications; for a thin tenor voice, not unmusical, was his, and also a smattering of Hebrew which he had picked up at Cambridge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language. Courage and imagination he lumped in, so to speak, with the rest, and in the gilt-edged diary he affected he wrote: “Have taken on Skale’s odd advertisement. I like the man’s name. The experience may prove an adventure. While there’s change, there’s hope.” For he was very fond of turning proverbs to his own use by altering them, and the said diary was packed with absurd misquotations of a similar kind.

  II

  A singular correspondence followed, in which the advertiser explained with reserve that he wanted an assistant to aid him in certain experiments in sound, that a particular pitch and quality of voice was necessary (which he could not decide until, of course, he had heard it), and that the successful applicant must have sufficient courage and imagination to follow a philosophical speculation “wheresoever it may lead,” and also be “so far indifferent to worldly success as to consider it of small account compared to spiritual knowledge — especially if such knowledge appeared within reach and involved worldly sacrifices.” He further added that a life of loneliness in the country would have to be faced, and that the man who suited him and worked faithfully should find compensation by inheriting his own “rather considerable property when the time came.” For the rest he asked no references and gave none. In a question of spiritual values references were mere foolishness. Each must judge intuitively for himself.

  Spinrobin, as has been said, bit. The letters, written in a fine scholarly handwriting, excited his interest extraordinarily. He imagined some dreamer-priest possessed by a singular hobby, searching for things of the spirit by those devious ways he had heard about from time to time, a little mad probably into the bargain. The name Skale sounded to him big, yet he somehow pictured to himself an ascetic-faced man of small stature pursuing in solitude some impossible ideal. It all attracted him hugely with its promise of out-of-the-way adventure. In his own phrase it “might lead to something,” and the hints about “experiments in sound” set chords trembling in him that had not vibrated since the days of his boyhood’s belief in names and the significance of names. The salary, besides, was good. He was accordingly thrilled and delighted to receive in reply to his last letter a telegram which read: “Engage you month’s trial both sides. Take single ticket. Skale.”

  “I like that ‘take single ticket,’” he said to himself as he sped westwards into Wales, dressed in his usual fluffy tweed suit and anarchist tie. Upon his knees lay a brand new Hebrew grammar which he studied diligently all the way to Cardiff, and still carried in his hands when he changed into the local train that carried him laboriously into the desolation of the Pontwaun Mountains. “It looks as though he approved of me already. My name apparently hasn’t put him off as it does most people. Perhaps, through it, he divines the real me!”

  He smoothed down his rebellious hair as he neared the station in the dusk; but he was surprised to find only a rickety little cart drawn by a donkey sent to meet him (the house being five miles distant in the hills), and still more surprised when a huge figure of a man, hatless, dressed in knickerbockers, and with a large, floating grey beard, strode down the platform as he gave up his ticket to the station-master and announced himself as Mr. Philip Skale. He had expected the small, foxy-faced individual of his imagination, and the shock momentarily deprived him of speech.

  “Mr. Spinrobin, of course? I am Mr. Skale — Mr. Philip Skale.”

  The voice can only be described as booming, it was so deep and vibrating; but the smile of welcome, where it escaped with difficulty from the network of beard and moustaches, was winning and almost gentle in contradistinction to the volume of that authoritative voice. Spinrobin felt slightly bewildered — caught up into a whirlwind that drove too many impressions through his brain for any particular one to be seized and mastered. He found himself shaking hands — Mr. Skale, rather, shaking his, in a capacious grasp as though it were some small indiarubber ball to be squeezed and flung away. Mr. Skale flung it away, he felt the shock up the whole length of his arm to the shoulder. His first impressions, he declares, he cannot remember — they were too tumultuous — beyond that he liked both smile and voice, the former making him feel at home, the latter filling him to the brim with a peculiar sense of well-being. Never before had he heard his name pronounced in quite the same way; it sounded dignified, even splendid, the way Mr. Skale spoke it. Beyond this general impression, however, he can only say that his thoughts and feelings “whirled.” Something emanated from this giant clergyman that was somewhat enveloping and took him off his feet. The keynote of the man had been struck at once.

  “How do yo
u do, sir? This is the train you mentioned, I think?” Spinrobin heard his own thin voice speaking, by way, as it were, of instinctive apology that he should have put such a man to the trouble of coming to meet him. He said “sir,” it seemed unavoidable; for there was nothing of the clergyman about him — bishop, perhaps, or archbishop, but no suggestion of vicar or parish priest. Somewhere, too, in his presentment he felt dimly, even at the first, there was an element of the incongruous, a meeting of things not usually found together. The vigorous open-air life of the mountaineer spoke in the great muscular body with the broad shoulders and clean, straight limbs; but behind the brusqueness of manner lay the true gentleness of fine breeding.

  And even here, on this platform of the lonely mountain station, Spinrobin detected the atmosphere of the scholar, almost of the recluse, shot through with the strange fires that dropped from the large, lambent, blue eyes. All these things rushed over the thrilled little secretary with an effect, as already described, of a certain bewilderment, that left no single, dominant impression. What remained with him, perhaps, most vividly, he says, was the quality of the big blue eyes, their luminosity, their far-seeing expression, their kindliness. They were the eyes of the true visionary, but in such a personality they proclaimed the mystic who had retained his health of soul and body. Mr. Skale was surely a visionary, but just as surely a wholesome man of action — probably of terrific action. Spinrobin felt irresistibly drawn to him.

  “It is not unpleasant, I trust,” the other was saying in his deep tones, “to find some one to meet you, and,” he added with a genial laugh, “to counteract the first impression of this somewhat melancholy and inhospitable scenery.” His arm swept out to indicate the dreary little station and the bleak and lowering landscape of treeless hills in the dusk.

  The new secretary made some appropriate reply, his sense of loneliness already dissipated in part by the unexpected welcome. And they fell to arrangements about the luggage. “You won’t mind walking,” said Mr. Skale, with a finality that anticipated only agreement. “It’s a short five miles. The donkey-cart will take the portmanteau.” Upon which they started off at a pace that made the little man wonder whether he could possibly keep it up. “We shall get in before dark,” explained the other, striding along with ease, “and Mrs. Mawle, my housekeeper, will have tea ready and waiting for us.” Spinrobin followed, panting, thinking vaguely of the other employers he had known — philanthropists, bankers, ambitious members of Parliament, and all the rest — commonplace individuals to a man; and then of the immense and towering figure striding just ahead, shedding about him this vibrating atmosphere of power and whirlwind, touched so oddly here and there with a vein of gentleness that was almost sweetness. Never before had he known any human being who radiated such vigor, such big and beneficent fatherliness, yet for all the air of kindliness something, too, that touched in him the sense of awe. Mr. Skale, he felt, was a very unusual man.

  They went on in the gathering dusk, talking little but easily. Spinrobin felt “taken care of.” Usually he was shy with a new employer, but this man inspired much too large a sensation in him to include shyness, or any other form of petty self-consciousness. He felt more like a son than a secretary. He remembered the wording of the advertisement, the phrases of the singular correspondence — and wondered. “A remarkable personality,” he thought to himself as he stumbled through the dark after the object of his reflections; “simple — yet tremendous! A giant in all sorts of ways probably—” Then his thought hesitated, floundered. There was something else he divined yet could not name. He felt out of his depth in some entirely new way, in touch with an order of possibilities larger, more vast, more remote than any dreams his imagination even had yet envisaged. All this, and more, the mere presence of this retired clergyman poured into his receptive and eager little soul.

  And very soon it was that these nameless qualities began to assert themselves, completing the rout of Spinrobin’s moderate powers of judgment. No practical word as to the work before them, or the duties of the new secretary, had yet passed between them. They walked along together, chatting as equals, acquaintances, almost two friends might have done. And on the top of the hill, after a four-mile trudge, they rested for the first time, Spinrobin panting and perspiring, trousers tucked up and splashed yellow with mud; Mr. Skale, legs apart, beard flattened by the wind about his throat, and thumbs in the slits of his waistcoat as he looked keenly about him over the darkening landscape. Treeless and desolate hills rose on all sides. A few tumbled-down cottages of grey stone lay scattered upon the lower slopes among patches of shabby and forlorn cultivation. Here and there an outcrop of rock ran skywards into somber and precipitous ridges. The October wind passed to and fro over it all, mournfully singing, and driving loose clouds that seemed to drop weighted shadows among the peaks.

  III

  And it was here that Mr. Skale stopped abruptly, looked about him, and then down at his companion.

  “Bleak and lonely — this great spread of bare mountain and falling cliff,” he observed half to himself, half to the other; “but fine, very, very fine.” He exhaled deeply, then inhaled as though the great draught of air was profoundly satisfying. He turned to catch his companion’s eye. “There’s a savage and desolate beauty here that uplifts. It helps the mind to dwell upon the full sweep of life instead of getting dwarfed and lost among its petty details. Pretty scenery is not good for the soul.” And again he inhaled a prodigious breastful of the mountain air. “This is.”

  “But an element of terror in it, perhaps, sir,” suggested the secretary who, truth to tell, preferred his scenery more smiling, and who, further, had been made suddenly aware that in this somber setting of bleak and elemental nature the great figure of his future employer assumed a certain air of grandeur that was a little too awe-inspiring to be pleasant.

  “In all profound beauty there must be that,” the clergyman was saying; “fine terror, I mean, of course — just enough to bring out the littleness of man by comparison.”

  “Perhaps, yes,” agreed Spinrobin. His own insignificance seemed peculiarly apparent at that moment in contrast to Mr. Skale who had become part and parcel of the rugged landscape. Spinrobin was a lost atom whirling somewhere outside on his own account, whereas the other seemed oddly in touch with it, almost merged and incorporated into it. With those deep breaths the clergyman absorbed something of this latent power about them — then gave it out again. It broke over his companion like a wave. Elemental force of some kind emanated from that massive human figure beside him.

  The wind came tearing up the valley and swept past them with a rush as of mighty wings. Mr. Skale drew attention to it. “And listen to that!” he said. “How it leaps, singing, from the woods in the valley up to those gaunt old cliffs yonder!” He pointed. His beard blew suddenly across his face. With his bare head and shaggy flying hair, his big eyes and bold aquiline nose, he presented an impressive figure. Spinrobin watched him with growing amazement, aware that an enthusiasm scarcely warranted by the wind and scenery had passed into his manner. In his own person, too, he thought he experienced a birth of something similar — a little wild rush of delight he was unable to account for. The voice of his companion, pointing out the house in the valley below, again interrupted his thoughts.

  “How the mountains positively eat it up. It lies in their very jaws,” and the secretary’s eyes, traveling into the depths, made out a cluster of grey stone chimneys and a clearing in the woods that evidently represented lawns. The phrase “courage and imagination” flashed unbidden into his mind as he realized the loneliness of the situation, and for the hundredth time he wondered what in the world could be the experiments with sound that this extraordinary man pursued in this isolated old mansion among the hills.

  “Buried, sir, rather,” he suggested. “I can only just see it—”

  “And inaccessible,” Mr. Skale interrupted him. “Hard to get at. No one comes to disturb; an ideal place for work. In the hollows of these hil
ls a man may indeed seek truth and pursue it, for the world does not enter here.” He paused a moment. “I hope, Mr. Spinrobin,” he added, turning towards him with that gentle smile his shaggy visage sometimes wore, “I hope you will not find it too lonely. We have no visitors, I mean; nothing but our own little household of four.”

  Spinrobin smiled back. Even at this stage he admits he was exceedingly anxious to suit. Mr. Skale, in spite of his marked peculiarities, inspired him with confidence. His personal attraction was growing every minute; that vague awe he roused probably only increased it. He wondered who the “four” might be.

  “There’s nothing like solitude for serious work, sir,” replied the younger man, stifling a passing uneasiness.

  And with that they plunged down the hillside into the valley, Mr. Skale leading the way at a terrific pace, shouting out instructions and warnings from time to time that echoed from the rocks as though voices followed them down from the mountains. The darkness swallowed them, they left the wind behind; the silence that dwells in the folded hills fell about their steps; the air grew less keen; the trees multiplied, gathering them in with fingers of mist and shadow. Only the clatter of their boots on the rocky path, and the heavy bass of the clergyman’s voice shouting instructions from time to time, broke the stillness. Spinrobin followed the big dark outline in front of him as best he could, stumbling frequently. With countless little hopping steps he dodged along from point to point, a certain lucky nimbleness in his twinkling feet saving him from many a tumble.

  “All right behind there?” Mr. Skale would thunder.

  “All right, thanks, Mr. Skale,” he would reply in his thin tenor,

  “I’m coming.”

  “Come along, then!” And on they would go faster than before, till in due course they emerged from the encircling woods and reached the more open ground about the house. Somehow, in the jostling relations of the walk, a freedom of intercourse had been established that no amount of formal talk between four walls could have accomplished. They scraped their dirty boots vigorously on the iron mat.