The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

Again they looked long into one another’s eyes.

  “I’m game,” murmured Spinrobin almost inaudibly; “I’m game, Mr. Skale.” But, as he said it, something in his round head turned dizzy, while his thoughts flew to Miriam and to the clergyman’s significant phrase of a few minutes ago—"we must be careful, we must be absolutely wise.”

  IV

  And the preparation the clergyman insisted upon—detailed, thorough and scrupulous—certainly did not lessen in Spinrobin’s eyes the gravity of the approaching ordeal. They spent two days and nights in the very precise and punctilious study, and utterance, of the Hebrew names of the “angels"—that is, forces—whose qualities were essential to their safety.

  Also, at the same time, they fasted.

  But when the time came for the formal visit to those closed rooms, of which the locked doors were like veils in a temple, Spinrobin declares it made him think of some solemn procession down ancient passageways of crypt or pyramid to the hidden places where inscrutable secrets lay. It was certainly thrilling and impressive. Skale went first, moving slowly with big strides, grave as death, and so profoundly convinced of the momentous nature of their errand that an air of dignity, and of dark adventure almost majestic, hung about his figure. The long corridor, that dreary December morning, stretched into a world of shadows, and about half-way down it he halted in front of a door next but one to Spinrobin’s room and turned towards his companion.

  Spinrobin, in a mood to see anything, yet striving to hide behind one of those “bushes,” as it were, kept his distance a little, but Mr. Skale took him by the arm and drew him forward to his side. Slowly he stooped, till the great bearded lips were level with his ear, and whispered solemnly:

  “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see—and hear God.”

  Then he turned the key and led the way inside.

  But apparently there were double doors, for they found themselves at first in a cupboard-like space that formed a tiny vestibule to the room itself; and here there was light enough to see that the clergyman was taking from nails on the wall two long garments like surplices, colored, so far as Spinrobin could make out, a deep red and a deep violet.

  “For our protection,” whispered Skale, enveloping himself in the red one, while he handed the other to his companion and helped him into it. “Wear it closely about your body until we come out.” And while the secretary struggled among the folds of this cassock-like garment, that was several feet too long for his diminutive stature, the clergyman added, still with a gravity and earnestness that impressed the imagination beyond all reach of the ludicrous:

  “For sound and color are intimately associated, and there are combinations of the two that can throw the spiritual body into a condition of safe receptivity, without which we should be deaf and blind even in the great Presences themselves.”

  Trivial details, presenting themselves in really dramatic moments, may impress the mind with extraordinary aptness. At this very moment Spinrobin’s eyes noticed in the corner of wall and door a tiny spider’s web, with the spider itself hanging in the center of its little net—shaking. And he has never forgotten it. It expressed pictorially exactly what he felt himself. He, too, felt that he was shaking in midair—as in the center of a web whose strands hung suspended from the very stars.

  And the words, spoken in that slow deep whisper, filled the little space in which the two men stood, and somehow completed for Spinrobin the sense of stupendous things adequately approached.

  Then Mr. Skale closed the outer door, shutting out the last feeble glimmer of day, at the same moment turning the handle of the portal beyond. And as they entered the darkness, Spinrobin, holding up his violet robe with one hand to prevent tripping, with the other caught hold of the tail of the flowing garment in front of him. For a second or two he stopped breathing altogether.

  V

  On the very threshold a soft murmur of beauty met them; and, as plainly as though the darkness had lifted into a blaze of light, the secretary at once realized that he stood in the presence of something greater than all he had hitherto known in this world. He had managed to find the clergyman’s big hand, and he held it tightly through a twisted corner of his voluminous robe. The inner door next closed behind them. Skale, he was aware, had again stooped in the darkness to the level of his ear.

  “I’ll give you the sound—the note,” he heard him whisper. “Utter it inwardly—in your thoughts only. Its vibrations correspond to the color, and will protect us.”

  “Protect us?” gasped Spinrobin with dry lips.

  “From being shattered and destroyed—owing to the intense activity of the vibrations conveyed to our ultimate physical atoms,” was the whispered reply, as the clergyman proceeded to give him under his breath a one-syllable sound that was unlike any word he knew, and that for the life of him he has never been able to reproduce since.

  Mr. Skale straightened himself up again and Spinrobin pictured him standing there twice his natural size, a huge and impressive figure as he had once before seen him, clothed now with the double dignity of his strange knowledge. Then, advancing slowly to the center of the room, they stood still, each uttering silently in his thoughts the syllable that attuned their inner beings to safety.

  Almost immediately, as the seconds passed, the secretary became aware that the room was beginning to shake with a powerful but regular movement. All about him had become alive. Vitality, like the vitality of youth upon mountain tops, pulsed and whirled about them, pouring into them the currents of a rushing glorious life, undiluted, straight from the source. In his little person he felt both the keenness of sharp steel and the vast momentum of a whole ocean. Thus he describes it. And the more clearly he uttered in his thoughts the sound given to him by his leader, the greater seemed the influx of strength and glory into his heart.

  The darkness, meanwhile, began to lift. It moved upwards in spirals that, as they rose, hummed and sang. A soft blaze of violet like the color of the robe he wore became faintly visible in the air. The chamber, he perceived, was about the same size as his own bedroom, and empty of all furniture, while walls, floor, and ceiling were draped in the same shade of violet that covered his shoulders; and the sound he uttered, and thought, called forth the color and made it swim into visibility. The walls and ceiling sheeted with wax opened, so to speak, their giant lips.

  Mr. Skale made a movement and drew him closer. He raised one arm into the air, and Spinrobin, following the motion, saw what at first he imagined to be vast round faces glimmering overhead, outlined darkly against the violet atmosphere. Mr. Skale, with what seemed a horrible audacity, was reaching up to touch them, and as he did so there issued a low, soft, metallic sound, humming and melodious, that dropped sweetly about his ears. Then the secretary saw that they were discs of metal—immense gongs swinging in midair, suspended in some way from the ceiling, and each one as Skale touched it emitted its beautiful note till all combined together at length into a single chord.

  And this chord, though Spinrobin talks whole pages in describing it, apparently brought in its train the swell and thunder of something beyond,—the far sweetness of exquisite harmonics, thousands upon thousands, inwoven with the strands of deeper notes that boomed with colossal vibrations about them. And, in some fashion that musical people will understand, its gentler notes caught up the sound that Spinrobin was uttering in his mind, and took possession of it. They merged. An extraordinary volume, suggesting a huge aggregation of sound behind it—in the same way that a murmur of wind may suggest the roar of tempests—rose and fell through the room, lifted them up, bore them away, sang majestically over their heads, under their feet, and through their very minds. The vibrations of their own physical atoms fell into pace with these other spiritual activities by a kind of sympathetic resonance.

  The combination of power and simplicity was what impressed him most, it seems, for it resembled—resembled only—the great spiritual simplicity in Beethoven that rouses and at the same time satisfies th
e profoundest yearnings of the soul. It swept him into utter bliss, into something for once complete. And Spinrobin, at the center of his glorified yet quaking little heart, understood vaguely that the sound he uttered, and the sound he heard, were directly connected with the presence of some august and awful Name….

  VI

  Suddenly Mr. Skale, he was aware, became rigid beside him. Spinrobin pressed closer, seeking the protective warmth of his body, and realizing from the gesture that something new was about to happen. And something did happen, though not precisely in the sense that things happen in the streets and in the markets of men. In the sphere of his mind, perhaps, it happened, but was none the less real for that.

  For the Presence he had been aware of in the room from the moment of entrance became then suddenly almost concrete. It came closer—sheeted in wonder inscrutable. The form and body of the sounds that filled the air pressed forward into partial visibility. Spinrobin’s powers of interior sight, he dimly realized, increased at the same time. Vast as a mountain, as a whole range of mountains; beautiful as a star, as a whole heaven of stars; yet simple as a flower of the field; and singing this little song of pure glory and joy that he felt was the inmost message of the chord—this Presence in the room sought to push forward into objective reality. And behind it, he knew, lay the stupendous urgency and drive of some power that held the entire universe in its pulses as easily as the ocean holds a shoal of minnows….

  But the limits of realization for him were almost reached. Spinrobin wanted to close his eyes, yet could not. He was driven along with the wave of sound thus awakened and forced to see what was to be seen. This time there was no bush behind which he could screen himself. And there, dimly sketched out of the rhythmical vibrations of the seething violet obscurity, rose that looming Outline of wonder and majesty that clothed itself about them with a garment as of visible sound. The Unknown, suggesting incredible dimensions, stood at his elbow, tremendously draped in these dim, voluminous folds of music and color—very fearful, very seductive, yet so supremely simple at the same time that a little child could have understood without fear.

  But only partially there, only partially revealed. The ineffable glory was never quite told. Spinrobin, amid all the torrent of words in which he sought later to describe the experience, could only falter out a single comprehensible sentence: “I felt like stammering in intoxication over the first letter of a name I loved—loved to the point of ecstasy—to the point even of giving up my life for it.”

  And meanwhile, breathless and shaking, he clung to Skale, still murmuring in his heart the magic syllable, but swept into some region of glory where pain and joy both ceased, where terror and delight merged into some perfectly simple form of love, and where he became in an instant of time an entirely new and emancipated Spinrobin, driving at full speed towards the ultimate sound and secret of the universe—God.

  * * * * *

  He never remembered exactly how he got out of the room, but it always seemed as though he dropped with a crash from some enormous height. The sounds ceased; the gongs died into silence; the violet faded; the quivering wax lay still…. Mr. Skale was moving beside him, and the next minute they were in the narrow vestibule between the doors, hanging up ordinary colored surplices upon ordinary iron nails.

  Spinrobin stumbled. Skale caught him. They were in the corridor again—cold, cheerless, full of December murk and shadows—and the secretary was leaning against the clergyman’s shoulder breathless and trembling as though he had run a mile.

  CHAPTER XI

  ..................

  I

  “And the color of my sound is a pale green,” he heard behind him in tones as sweet as a muted violin string, “while the form of my note fits into yours just like a glove. Dear Spinny, don’t tremble so. We shall always be together, remember, you and I….”

  And when, turning, he saw Miriam at his side, radiant with her shining little smile of welcome, the relief was so great that he took her in his arms and would not let her go. She drew him tenderly away downstairs, for the clergyman, it seemed, was still busy with something in the room, and had left them….

  “I know, I know,” she said softly, making him sit down beside her on the sofa, “I know the rush of pain and happiness it brings. It shifts the whole key of your life, doesn’t it? When I first went into my ‘room’ and learned the letter I was to utter in the Name, I felt as if I could never come back to ordinary things again, or—”

  “What name?” interrupted Spinrobin, drawing sharply away from her, and the same second amazed at the recklessness that had prompted the one question he dreaded.

  The inevitable reaction had come. He realized for the first time that there was an alternative. All the passion of battle was upon him. The terrific splendors of Skale’s possible achievement dazzled the very windows of his soul, but at the same time the sweet uses of normal human life called searchingly to him from within. He had been circling about this fight for days; at last it was unexpectedly upon him. He might climb to Skale’s impossible Heaven, Skale’s outrageous Heaven … on the wings of this portentous experience, or—he might sink back into the stream of wholesome and commonplace life, with a delicious little human love to companion him across the years, the unsoiled love of an embryonic soul that he could train practically from birth. Miriam was beside him, soft and yielding, ready, doubtless, to be molded for either path.

  “What name?” he repeated, holding his breath once the words were out.

  “The name, of course,” she answered gently, smiling up into his eyes. “The name I have lived to know and that you came here to learn, so that when our voices sing and utter it together in the chord we shall both become—”

  Spinrobin set his mouth against her own to stop her speech. She yielded to him with her whole little body. Her eyes smiled the great human welcome as she stared so closely into his.

  “Shall become—what we are not now,” he cried fiercely, drawing his face back, but holding her body yet more closely to him. “Lose each other, don’t you see? Don’t you realize that?”

  “No, no,” she said faintly, “find each other—you mean—”

  “Yes—if all goes well!” He spoke the words very low. For perhaps thirty seconds they stared most searchingly into each other’s eyes, drawing slightly apart. Very slowly her face, then, went exceedingly pale.

  “If—all goes well“ she repeated, horrified. Then, after a pause, she added: “You mean—that he might make a mistake—or—?”

  And Spinrobin, drinking in the sweet breath that bore the words so softly from her lips, answered, measuring his words with ponderous gravity as though each conveyed a sentence of life or death, “If—all—goes—well.”

  She watched him with something of that utter clinging mother-love in her eyes that claims any degree of suffering gladly rather than the loss of her own—passionately welcoming misery in preference to loss. She, too, had divined the alternative.

  Then, kissing his cheeks and eyes and lips, she untied his arms from about her neck and ran, blushing furiously, from the room. And with her went doubt, for the first time—doubt as to the success of the great experiment—doubt as to their Leader’s power.

  II

  And while Spinrobin still sat there, trembling with the two passions that tore his soul in twain—the passion to climb forbidden skies with Skale, and the passion to know sweet human love with Miriam—there came thundering into the room no less a personage than the giant clergyman, straight from those haunted rooms. Pallor hung about his face, but there was a light radiating through it—a high, luminous whiteness—that made the secretary think of his childhood’s pictures of the Hebrew prophet descending from Mount Sinai, the glory of internal spheres still reflected upon the skin and eyes. Skale, like a flame and a wind, came pouring into the room. The thing he had remained upstairs to complete had clearly proved successful. The experiment had moved another stage—almost the final one—nearer accomplishment.

  The
reaction was genuinely terrific. Spinrobin felt himself swept away beyond all power of redemption. Miriam and the delicious human life faded into insignificance again. What, in the name of the eternal fires, were a girl’s lips and love compared to the possibilities of Olympian achievement promised by Skale’s golden audacities? Earth faded before the lights of heaven. The whole tide of human emotion was nothing compared to a drop of this terrible salt brine from seas in unknown stars…. As usual Skale’s personality caught him up into some seventh heaven of the soaring imagination.

  “Spinrobin, my glorious companion in adventure,” thundered the clergyman, “your note suits perfectly the chord! I am delighted beyond all words. You chime with amazing precision and accuracy into the complex Master-Tone I need for the proper pronunciation of the Name! Your coming has been an inspiration permitted of Him who owns it.” His excitement was profoundly moving. The man was in earnest if ever man was. “We shall succeed!” And he caught him in his arms. “For the Name manifests the essential attributes of the Being it describes, and in uttering it we shall know mystical union with it…. We shall be as Gods!”

  “Splendid! Splendid!” exclaimed Spinrobin, utterly carried away by this spiritual enthusiasm. “I will follow you to the end—”

  III

  The words were scarcely out of his mouth when framed in the doorway, delicate and seductive as a witch, again stood Miriam, then moved softly forward into the room. Her face was pale as the grave. Her little, delicate mouth was set with resolution. Clearly she had overheard, but clearly also she had used the interval for serious reflection.

  “We cannot possibly—fail, can we?” she asked, gliding up like a frightened fawn to the clergyman’s side.

  He turned upon her, stern, even terrible. So relentless was his swift appearance, so implacable in purpose, that Spinrobin felt the sudden impulse to fly to her assistance. But instantly his great visage broke into a smile like the smile of thunderous clouds when unexpectedly the sun breaks through, then quickly hides itself again.