“But” — and he looked down upon his listeners with a dreadful and impressive gravity that yet only just concealed the bursting exultation the thought caused him to feel— “remember that once you have uttered your note, you will have sucked out from the Letter a portion of its own terrific life and force, which will immediately pass into yourself. You will instantly absorb this, for you will have called upon a mighty name — the mightiest — and your prayer will have been answered.” He stooped and whispered as in an act of earnest prayer, “We shall be as Gods!”
Something of cold splendor, terribly possessing, came close to them as he spoke the words; for this was no empty phrase. Behind it lay the great drive of a relentless reality. And it struck at the very root of the fear that grew every moment more insistent in the hearts of the two lovers. They did not want to become as gods. They desired to remain quietly human and to love!
But before either of them could utter speech, even had they dared, the awful clergyman continued; and nothing brought home to them more vividly the horrible responsibility of the experiment, and the results of possible failure, than the few words with which he concluded.
“And to mispronounce, to utter falsely, to call inaccurately, will mean to summon into life upon the world — and into the heart of the utterer — that which is incomplete, that which is not God — Devils! — devils of that subtle Alteration which is destruction — the devils of a Lie.”
* * * * *
And so for hours at a time they rehearsed the sounds of the chord, but very softly, lest the sound should rise and reach the four rooms and invite the escape of the waiting Letters prematurely.
Mrs. Mawle, holding the bit of paper on which her instructions were clearly written, was as eager almost as her master, and as the note she had to utter was practically the only one left in the register of her voice, her deafness provided little difficulty.
“Though when the letters awake into life and cry aloud,” said Skale, beaming upon her dear old apple-skinned face, “it will be in tones that even the deaf shall hear. For they will spell a measure of redemption that shall destroy in a second of time all physical disabilities whatsoever….”
It was at this moment Spinrobin asked a question that for days had been hovering about his lips. He asked it gravely, hesitatingly, even solemnly, while Miriam hung upon the answer with an anxiety as great as his own.
“And if any one of us fails,” he said, “and pronounces falsely, will the result affect all of us, or only the utterer?”
“The utterer only,” replied the clergyman. “For it is his own spirit that must absorb the forces and powers invoked by the sound he utters.”
He took the question lightly, it seemed. The possibility of failure was too remote to be practical.
Chapter XIII
I
But Spinrobin was hardly prepared for the suddenness of the denouement. He had looked for a longer period of preparation, with the paraphernalia of a considerable, even an august ceremony. Instead, the announcement came with an abrupt simplicity that caught him with a horrid shock of surprise. He was taken wholly unawares.
“The only thing I fear,” Mr. Skale had confided to them, “is that the vibrations of our chord may have already risen to the rooms and cause a premature escape. But, even so, we shall have ample warning. For the deaf, being protected from the coarser sounds of earth, are swift to hear the lightest whispers from Heaven. Mrs. Mawle will know. Mrs. Mawle will instantly warn us….”
And this, apparently, was what happened, though not precisely as Mr. Skale had intended, nor with the margin for preparation he had hoped. It was all so swift and brief and shattering, that to hear Spinrobin tell it makes one think of a mass of fireworks that some stray spark has sent with blazing explosion into the air, to the complete loss of the calculated effect had they gone off seriatim as intended.
And in the awful stress of excitement there can be no question that Spinny acted out of that subconscious region of the mind which considers and weighs deeds before passing them on to the surface mind, translating them into physical expression and thinking itself responsible for the whole operation. The course he adopted was thus instinctive, and, since he had no time to judge, blameless.
Neither he nor Miriam had any idea really that their minds, subconsciously, were already made up. Yet only that morning he had been talking with her, skirting round the subject as they always did, ashamed of his doubts about success, and trying to persuade her, and, therefore, himself, that the path of duty lay in following their leader blindly to the very end.
He had seen her on the stairs ahead of him, and had overtaken her quickly. He drew her down beside him, and they sat like two children perched on the soft-carpeted steps.
“It’s coming, you know,” he said abruptly, “the moment’s getting very close.”
He felt the light shudder that passed through her into himself. She turned her face to him and he saw the flush of excitement painted in the center of the usually pale cheeks. He thought of some rare flower, delicately exotic, that had sprung suddenly into blossom from the heart of the bleak December day, out of the very boards whereon they sat.
“We shall then be as gods,” he added, “filled with the huge power of those terrific Letters. And that is only the beginning.” In himself he was striving to coax a fading enthusiasm, and to pour it into her. Her little hand stole into his. “We shall be a sort of angel together, I suppose. Just think of it…!” His voice was not as thrilling as it ought to have been, for very human notes vibrated down below in the part he tried to keep back. He saw the flush fade from her cheeks, and the pallor spread. “You and I, Miriam — something tremendous together, greater than any other man and woman in the whole world. Think of it, dear baby; just think of it…!”
A tiny frown gathered upon her forehead, darkening the grey eyes with shadows.
“But — lose our Winky!” she said, nestling against his coat, her voice singularly soft, her fingers scratching gently the palm of his hand where they lay.
“Hush, hush!” he answered, kissing her into silence. “We must have more faith. I think everything will be all right. And there is no reason why we should lose our Winky,” he added, very tenderly, smothering the doubt as best he could, “although we may find his name changed. Like the rest of us, he will get a ‘new name’ I suppose.”
“Then he won’t be our Winky any longer,” she objected, with a touch of obstinacy that was very seductive. “We shall all be different. Perhaps we shall be too wonderful to need each other any more…. Oh, Spinny, you precious thing my life needs, think of that! We may be too wonderful even to care!”
Spinrobin turned and faced her. He tried to speak with authority and conviction, but he was a bad actor always. He met her soft grey eyes, already moist and shining with a tenderness of love beyond belief, and gazed into them with what degree of sternness he could.
“Miriam,” he said solemnly, “is it possible that you do not want us to be as gods?”
Her answer came this time without hesitation. His pretended severity only made her happy, for nothing could intimidate by a hair’s breadth this exquisite first love of her awakening soul.
“Some day, perhaps, oh, my sweet Master,” she whispered with trembling lips, “but not now. I want to be on earth first with you — and with our Winky.”
To hear that precious little voice call him “sweet Master” was almost more than he could bear. He made an effort, however, to insist upon this fancied idea of “duty” to Skale; though everything, of course, betrayed him — eyes, voice, gestures.
“But we owe it to Mr. Skale to become as gods,” he faltered, trying to make the volume of his voice atone for its lack of conviction.
And it was then she uttered the simple phrase that utterly confounded him, and showed him the new heaven and new earth wherein he and she and Winky already lived.
“I am as God now,” she said simply, the whole passion of a clean, strong little soul behind the wo
rds. “You have made me so! You love me!”
II
The same moment, before they could speak or act, Skale was upon them from behind with a roar.
“Practicing your splendid notes together!” he cried, thundering down the steps past them, three at a time, clothed for the first time in the flowing scarlet robe he usually wore only in the particular room where his own “note” lived. “That’s capital! Sing it together in your hearts and in your souls and in your minds; and the more the better!”
He swept by them like a storm, vanishing through the hall below like some living flame of fire. They both understood that he wore that robe for protection, and that throughout the house the heralds of the approaching powers of the imprisoned Letters were therefore already astir. His steps echoed below them in the depths of the building as he descended to the cellar, intent upon some detail of the appalling consummation that drew every minute nearer.
They turned and faced one another, breathless a little. Tenderness and terror shone plainly in their eyes, but Spinrobin, ever an ineffectual little man, and with nothing of the “Master” really in his composition anywhere, found no word to speak. That sudden irruption of the terrific clergyman into their intimate world had come with an effect of dramatic and incalculable authority. Like a blast of air that drives the furnace to new heat and turns the metal white, his mind now suddenly saw clear and sure. The effect of the incident was too explosive, however, for him to find expression. Action he found in a measure, but no words. He took Miriam passionately into his arms as they stood there in the gathering dusk upon the staircase of that haunted and terrible building, and Miriam it was who found the words upon which they separated and went quietly away to the solitude each needed for the soul.
“We’ll leave the gods alone,” she said with gentle decision, yet making it seem as though she appealed to his greater strength and wisdom to decide; “I want nothing but you — you and Winky. And all you really want is me.”
But in his room he heard the vibrations of the clergyman’s voice rising up through the floor and walls as he practiced in the cellar the sounds with which the ancient Hebrews concealed the Tetragrammaton: YOD — HE — VAU — HE: JEHOVAH — JAHVE — of which the approaching great experiment, however, concerned itself only with the opening vibrations of the first letter — YOD….
And, as he listened, he hesitated again … wondering after all whether
Miriam was right.
III
It was towards the end of their short silent dinner that very night — the silence due to the fact that everybody was intently listening — when Spinrobin caught the whisper of a singular faint sound that he took first to be the rising of wind. The wind sometimes came down that way with curious gulps from the terraces of the surrounding moors. Yet in this sound was none of that rush and sigh that the hills breed. It did not drop across the curves of the world; it rose from the center.
He looked up sharply, then at once realized that the sound was not outside at all, but inside — inside the very room where he sat facing Skale and Miriam. Then something in his soul recognized it. It was the first wave in an immense vibration.
Something stretched within him as foam stretches on the elastic side of a heaped Atlantic roller, retreated, then came on again with a second gigantic crest. The rhythm of the huge sound had caught him. The life in him expanded awfully, rose to far summits, dropped to utter depths. A sense of glowing exaltation swept through him as though wings of power lifted his heart with enormous ascendancy. The biggest passions of his soul stirred — the sweetest dreams, yearnings, aspirations he had ever known were blown to fever heat. Above all, his passion for Miriam waxed tumultuous and possessed him.
Mr. Skale dropped his fruit knife and uttered a cry, but a cry of so peculiar a character that Spinrobin thought for a moment he was about to burst into song. At the same instant he stood up, and his chair fell backwards with a crash upon the floor. Spinrobin stood up too. He asserts always that he was lifted up. He recognized no conscious effort of his own. It was at this point, moreover, that Miriam, pale as linen, yet uttering no sound and fully mistress of herself, left her side of the table and ran round swiftly to the protection of her lover.
She came close up. “Spinny,” she said, “it’s come!”
Thus all three were standing round that dinner table on the verge of some very vigorous action not yet disclosed, as people, vigilant and alert, stand up at a cry of fire, when the door from the passage opened noisily and in rushed Mrs. Mawle, surrounded by an atmosphere of light such as might come from a furnace door suddenly thrown wide in some dark foundry. Only the light was not steady; it was whirling.
She ran across the floor as though dancing — the dancing of a child — propelled, it seemed, by an irresistible drive of force behind; while with her through the opened door came a roaring volume of sound that was terrible as Niagara let loose, yet at the same time exquisitely sweet, as birds or children singing. Upon these two incongruous qualities Spinrobin always insists.
“The deaf shall hear — !” came sharply from the clergyman’s lips, the sentence uncompleted, for the housekeeper cut him short.
“They’re out!” she cried with a loud, half-frightened jubilance; “Mr. Skale’s prisoners are bursting their way about the house. And one of them,” she added with a scream of joy and terror mingled, “is in my throat…!”
If the odd phrase she made use of stuck vividly in Spinrobin’s memory, the appearance she presented impressed him even more. For her face was shining and alight, radiant as when Skale had called her true name weeks before. Flashes of flame-like beauty ran about the eyes and mouth; and she looked eighteen — eternally eighteen — with a youth that was permanent and unchanging. Moreover, not only was hearing restored to her, but her left arm, withered for years, was in the act of pointing to the ceiling, instinct with vigorous muscular life. Her whole presentment was splendid, intense — redeemed.
“The deaf hear!” repeated Skale in a shout, and was across the room with the impetus of a released projectile. “The Letters are out and alive! To your appointed places! The syllable has caught us! Quick, quick! If you love your soul and truth … fly!”
Deafening thunders rushed and crashed and blew about the room, interpenetrated everywhere at the same time by that searching strain of sweetness Spinrobin had first noticed. The sense of life, running free and abundant, was very remarkable. The same moment he found his hand clasped, and felt himself torn along by the side of the rushing clergyman into the hall. Behind them “danced” Mrs. Mawle, her cap awry, her apron flying, her elastic-side boots taking the light, dancing step of youth. With quick, gliding tread Miriam, still silent, was at his heels. He remembers her delicate, strange perfume reaching him faintly through all the incredible turmoil of that impetuous exit.
In the hall the roar increased terrifically about his ears. Skale, in his biggest booming voice, was uttering the names of Hebrew “angels” — invoking forces, that is, to his help; and behind him Mrs. Mawle was singing — singing fragments apparently of the “note” she had to utter, as well as fragments of her own “true name” thus magically recovered. Her restored arm gyrated furiously, her tripping youth spelt witchery. Yet the whole madness of the scene came to Spinrobin with a freezing wind of terror; for about it was a lawless, audacious blasphemy, that must surely win for itself a quite appalling punishment….
Yet nothing happened at once — nothing destructive, at least. Skale and the housekeeper, he saw, were hurriedly robing themselves in the red and yellow surplices that hung from nails in the hall, and the instinct to laugh at the sight was utterly overwhelmed when he remembered that these were the colors which were used for safety in their respective “rooms.” … It was a scene of wild confusion and bewilderment which the memory refuses to reproduce coherently. In his own throat already began a passionate rising of sound that he knew was the “note” he had to utter attempting to escape, summoned forth automatically by these terrible
vibrating Letters in the air. A cataract of sound seemed to fill the building and made it shake to its very foundations.
But the hall, he saw, was not only alive with “music,” it was ablaze with light — a white and brilliant glory that at first dazzled him to the point of temporary blindness.
The same second Mr. Skale’s voice, storming its way somehow above the tumult, made itself heard:
“To the rooms upstairs, Spinrobin! To the corridor with Miriam! And when you hear my voice from the cellar — utter! We may yet be in time to unite the Letters…!”
He released the secretary’s hand, flinging it from him, and was off with a bounding, leaping motion like an escaped animal towards the stone passage that led to the cellar steps; and Spinrobin, turning about himself like a top in a perfect frenzy of bewilderment, heard his great voice as he disappeared round the corner:
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 55