The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  Half an hour later he was dressed and on his way downstairs, conscious only of an overwhelming desire to see Mr. Skale, but to see him in his normal and fatherly aspect again. For a strain of worship mingled oddly with his devouring curiosity, and he was thirsty now for the rest of the adventure, for the complete revelation of the Discovery in all its bearings. And the moment he saw the clergyman in the hall he ran towards him, scarcely realizing what it was he meant to say or do. Mr. Skale stretched out both hands to meet him. His face was alight with pleasure.

  But, before they could meet and touch, a door opened and in slipped

  Miriam between them; she, too, was radiant, and her hands outstretched.

  “Me first, please! Me first!” she cried with happy laughter, and before

  Spinrobin realized what was happening, she had flung her arms about his

  neck and kissed him. “You were splendid!” she whispered in his ear, “and

  I am proud of you—ever so proud!”

  The next minute Skale had him by the hands.

  “Well done! well done!” his voice boomed, while he gazed down into his face with enthusiastic and unqualified approval. “It was all magnificent. My dear little fellow, you’ve got the heart of a god, and, by Heavens, you shall become as a god too! For you are worthy!” He shook him violently by both hands, while Miriam looked eagerly on with admiration in her wide grey eyes.

  “I’m so glad, so awfully glad—” stammered the secretary, remembering with shame his moments of vivid terror. He hardly knew what he said at the moment.

  “The properties of things,” thundered the clergyman, “as you have now learned, are merely the ‘muffled utterances of the Sounds that made them.’ The thing itself is its name.”

  He spoke rapidly, with intense ardor and with reverence. “You have seen with your own eyes a scientific proof of my Discovery on its humblest level—how the physical properties of objects can be manipulated by the vibratory utterance of their true names—can be extended, reduced, glorified. Next you shall learn that spiritual qualities—the attributes of higher states of being—can be similarly dealt with and harnessed—exalted, intensified, invoked—and that the correct utterance of mighty Names can seduce their specific qualities into your own soul to make you mighty and eternal as themselves, and that to call upon the Great Names is no idle phrase…. When the time comes, Spinrobin, you shall not shrink, you shall not shrink….” He flung his arms out with a great gesture of delight.

  “No,” repeated Spinrobin, yet aware that he felt mentally battered at the prospect, “I shall not shrink. I think—now—I can manage—anything!”

  And then, watching Miriam with lingering glance as she vanished laughing up the staircase, he followed Mr. Skale into the library, his thoughts tearing wildly to and fro, swelling with delight and pride, thrilling with the wonder of what was yet to come. There, with fewest possible sentences, the clergyman announced that he now accepted him and would, therefore, carry out the promise with regard to the bequeathal of his property to him in the event of any untoward circumstances arising later. He also handed to him in cash the salary for the “trial month,” together with a check for the first quarter in advance. He was beaming with the satisfaction he felt at having found at last a really qualified helper. Spinrobin looked into his face as they shook hands over the bargain. He was thinking of other aspects he had seen of this amazing being but a few hours before—the minute, the colossal, the changing-between-the-two Skales….

  “I’m game, Mr. Skale,” he said simply, forgetting all his recent doubts and terrors.

  “I know you are,” the clergyman replied. “I knew it all along.”

  CHAPTER X

  ..................

  I

  The first thing Spinrobin knew when he ran upstairs to lock away the money in his desk was that his whole being, without his directing it, asked a question of momentous import. He did not himself ask it deliberately. He surprised his sub-consciousness asking it:

  “WHAT IS THIS NAME THAT PHILIP SKALE FOREVER SEEKS?”

  It was no longer mere curiosity that asked it, but that sense of responsibility which in all men of principle and character lies at the root of action and of life. And Spinrobin, for all his little weaknesses, was a man of character and principle. There came a point when he could no longer follow blindly where others led, even though the leader were so grand an individual as Philip Skale. This point is reached at varying degrees of the moral thermometer, and but for the love that Miriam had wakened in his heart, it might have taken much longer to send the mercury of his will so high in so short a time. He now felt responsibility for two, and in the depths of his queer, confused, little mind stirred the thought that possibly after all the great adventure he sought was only the supreme adventure of a very wonderful Love.

  He records these two questions at this point, and it is only just to himself, therefore, to set them down here. To neither was the answer yet forthcoming.

  For some days the routine of this singular household followed its normal course, the only change being that while the secretary practiced his Hebrew names and studied the relations between sound, color, form and the rest, he kept himself a little better in hand, for Love is a mighty humanizer and holds down the nose upon the grindstone of the wholesome and practical values of existence. He turned, so to speak, and tried to face the matter squarely; to see the adventure as a whole; to get all round it and judge. It seems, however, that he was too much in the thick of it to get that bird’s-eye view which reduces details to the right proportion. Skale’s personality was too close, and flooded him too violently. Spinrobin remained confused and bewildered; but also unbelievably happy.

  “Coming out all right,” he wrote shakily in that gilt-edged diary. “Beginning to understand why I’m in the world. Am just as important as anybody else—really. Impossible explain more.” His entries were very like telegrams, in which a man attempts to express in a lucid shorthand all manner of things that the actual words hardly compass. And life itself is not unlike some mighty telegram that seeks vainly to express, between the extremes of silence and excess, all that the soul would say….

  “Skale is going too far,” perhaps best expresses the daily burden of his accumulating apprehension. “He is leading up to something that makes me shrink—something not quite legitimate. Playing with an Olympian fire that may consume us both.” And there his telegram stopped; for how in the world could he put into mere language the pain and distress involved in the thought that it might at the same time consume Miriam? It all touched appalling depths of awe in his soul. It made his heart shake. The girl had become a part of his very self.

  Vivid reactions he suffered, alternating with equally vivid enthusiasms. He realized how visionary the clergyman’s poetical talk was, but the next minute the practical results staggered him again, as it were, back into a state of conviction. For the poetry obscured his judgment and fired his imagination so that he could not follow calmly. The feeling that it was not only illogical but insane troubled him; yet the physical effects stared him in the face, and to argue with physical results is waste of time. One must act.

  Yet how “act?” The only way that offered he accepted: he fell back upon the habits of his boyhood, read his Bible, and at night dropped humbly upon his knees and prayed.

  “Keep me straight and pure and simple, and bless … Miriam. Grant that I may love and strengthen her … and that my love may bring her peace … and joy …and guide me through all this terror, I beseech Thee, into Truth….”

  For, in the beauty of his selfless love, he dared not even admit that it was love; feeling only the highest, he could not quite correlate his sweet and elevated passion with the common standards of what the World called love. The humility of a great love is ever amazing.

  And then followed in his prayers the more cowardly cry for ordinary protection from the possible results of Skale’s audacity. The Love of God he could understand, but the Wrath of God was a c
onception he was still unemancipated enough to dread; and a dark, portentous terror that Skale might incur it, and that he might be dragged at its heels into some hideous catastrophe, chased him through the days and nights. It all seemed so unlawful, impious, blasphemous….

  “… And preserve us from vain presumptions of the heart and brain, I pray Thee, lest we be consumed…. Please, O God, forgive the insolence of our wills … and the ignorant daring of our spirit…. Permit not the innocent to suffer for the guilty … and especially bless … Miriam….”

  Yet through it all ran that exquisite memory of the calling of his true name in the spaces of his soul. The beauty of far-off unattainable things hovered like a star above his head, so that he went about the house with an insatiable yearning in his heart, a perpetual smile of wonder upon his face, and in his eyes a gleam that was sometimes terror, sometimes delight.

  It was almost as if some great voice called to him from the mountaintops, and the little chap was forever answering in his heart, “I’m coming! I’m coming!” and then losing his way purposely, or hiding behind bushes on the way for fear of meeting the great invisible Caller face to face.

  II

  And, meanwhile, the house became for him a kind of Sound-Temple as it were, protected from desecration by the hills and desolate spaces that surrounded it. From dawn to darkness its halls and corridors echoed with the singing violin, Skale’s booming voice, Miriam’s gentle tones, and his own plaintive yet excited note, while outside the old grey walls the air was ever alive with the sighing of the winds and the ceaseless murmur of falling water. Even at night the place was not silent. He understood at last what the clergyman had told him—that perfect silence does not exist. The universe, down to its smallest detail, sings through every second of time.

  The sounds of nature especially haunted him. He never heard the wind now without thinking of lost whispers from the voice of God that had strayed down upon the world to sweeten and bewilder the hearts of men—whispers a-search for listeners simple enough to understand. And when their walks took them as far as the sea, the dirge of the waves troubled his soul with a kind of distressing exaltation that afflicted the very deeps of his being. It was with a new comprehension he understood his employer’s dictum that the keynote of external nature was middle F—this employer who himself possessed that psychic sense of absolute pitch—and that the roar of a city, wind in forest trees, the cry of trains, the rushing of rivers and falling water, Niagara itself, all produced this single utterance; and he loved to sing it on the moors, Miriam laughing by his side, and to realize that the world, literally, sang with them.

  Behind all sounds he divined for the first time a majesty that appalled; his imagination, glorified by Skale, instantly fell to constructing the forms they bodied forth. Out of doors the flutes of Pan cried to him to dance: indoors the echoes of yet greater music whispered in the penetralia of his spirit that he should cry. In this extraordinary new world of Philip Skale’s revelation he fairly spun.

  It was one thing when the protective presence of the clergyman was about him, or when he was sustained by the excitement of enthusiasm, but when he was alone, at his normal level, timid, yet adventurous, the too vivid sense of these new things made him tremble. The terrifying beauty of Skale’s ideas; the realization in cold blood that all forms in the world about him were silently a-singing, and might any moment vanish and release their huge bodies into primal sounds; that the stones in the road, the peaked hills, the very earth herself might alter in shape before his eyes: on the other hand, that the viewless forces of life and death might leap into visibility and form with the calling of their names; that himself, and Skale, and Mrs. Mawle, and that pale fairy girl-figure were all enmeshed in the same scheme with plants, insects, animals and planets; and that God’s voice was everywhere too sublimely close—all this, when he was alone, oppressed him with a sense of things that were too intimate and too mighty for daily life.

  In these moments—so frequent now as to be almost continuous—he preferred the safety of his ordinary and normal existence, dull though it might be; the limited personality he had been so anxious to escape from seemed wondrous sweet and comforting. The Terror of the approaching Experiment with this mighty name appalled him.

  The forces, thus battling within his soul, became more and more contradictory and confused. The outcome for himself seemed to be the result of the least little pressure this way or that—possibly at the very last moment, too. Which way the waiting Climax might draw him was a question impossible to decide.

  III

  And then, suddenly, the whole portentous business moved a sharp stage nearer that hidden climax, when one afternoon Mr. Skale came up unexpectedly behind him and laid a great hand upon his shoulder in a way that made him positively jump.

  “Spinrobin,” he said, in those masterful, resonant tones that shamed his timidity and cowardice, “are you ready?”

  “For anything and everything,” was the immediate reply, given almost automatically as he felt the clergyman’s forces flood into his soul and lift him.

  “The time is at hand, then,” continued the other, leading his companion by the arm to a deep leather sofa, “for you to know certain things that for your own safety and ours, I was obliged to keep hidden till now—first among which is the fact that this house is not, as you supposed, empty.”

  Prepared as he was for some surprising announcement, Spinrobin nevertheless started. It was so abrupt.

  “Not empty!” he repeated, eager to hear more, yet quaking. He had never forgotten the nightly sounds and steps in his own passage.

  “The rooms beyond your own,” said Skale, with a solemnity that amounted to reverence, “are occupied—”

  “By—” gasped the secretary.

  “Captured Sounds—gigantic,” was the reply, uttered almost below the breath.

  The two men looked steadily at one another for the space of several seconds, Spinrobin charged to the brim with anxious questions pressing somehow upon the fringe of life and death, Skale obviously calculating how much he might reveal or how little.

  “Mr. Spinrobin,” he said presently, holding him firmly with his eyes, “you are aware by this time that what I seek is the correct pronunciation of certain names—of a certain name, let us say, and that so complex is the nature of this name that no single voice can utter it. I need a chord, a human chord of four voices.”

  Spinrobin bowed.

  “After years of research and experiment,” resumed the clergyman, “I have found the first three notes, and now, in your own person, has come my supreme happiness in the discovery of the fourth. What I now wish you to know, though I cannot expect you to understand it all at first, is that the name I seek is broken up into four great divisions of sound, and that to each of these separate divisions the four notes of our chord form introductory channels. When the time comes to utter it, each one of us will call the syllable or sound that awakens the mighty response in one of these immense and terrific divisions, so that the whole name will vibrate as a single chord sung perfectly in tune.”

  Mr. Skale paused and drew deep breaths. This approach to his great experiment, even in speech, seemed to exhaust him so that he was obliged to call upon reserves of force that lay beneath. His whole manner betrayed the gravity, the reverence, the mingled respect and excitement of—death.

  And the simple truth is that at the moment Spinrobin could not find in himself sufficient courage to ask what this fearful and prodigious name might be. Even to put ordinary questions about the four rooms was a little beyond him, for his heart beat like a hammer against his ribs, and he heard its ominous drum sounding through both his temples.

  “And in each of the rooms in your corridor, ready to leap forth when called, lie the sounds or voices I have captured and imprisoned, these separate chambers being sheeted and prepared—huge wax receptacles, in fact, akin to the cylinders of the phonograph. Together with the form or pattern belonging to them, and the color, there they lie
at present in silence and invisibility, just as the universe lay in silence and invisibility before the word of God called it into objective being. But—know them and they are mine.”

  “All these weeks—so close to me,” whispered Spinrobin, too low for Skale to notice.

  Then the clergyman leaned over towards him. “These captured sounds are as yet by no means complete,” he said through his beard, as though afraid to admit it; “for all I have of them really is their initial letters, of their forms the merest faint outlines, and of their colors but a first suggestion. And we must be careful, we must be absolutely wise. To utter them correctly will mean to transfer to us the qualities of Gods, whereas to utter falsely may mean to release upon the surface of the world forces that—” He shrugged his great shoulders and an ashen pallor spread downwards over the face to the very lips. The sentence remained unfinished; and its very incompleteness left Spinrobin with the most grievous agony of apprehension he had yet experienced.

  “So that, if you are ready, our next step shall be to show you the room in which your own particular sound lies,” added Mr. Skale after a long pause; “the sound in the chord it will be your privilege to utter when the time comes. For each of us will utter his or her particular letter, the four together making up the first syllable in the name I seek.”

  Mr. Skale looked steadily down into the wide blue eyes of his companion, and for some minutes neither of them spoke.

  “The letter I am to utter,” repeated the secretary at length; “the letter in some great name?”

  Mr. Skale smiled upon him with the mighty triumph of the Promethean idea in his eyes.

  “The room,” he muttered deeply and softly, “in which it lies waiting for you to claim it at the appointed time … the room where you shall learn its color, become attuned to its great vibratory activity, see its form, and know its power in your own person.”