The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood
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Algernon Blackwood >> The Human Chord
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14 THE HUMAN CHORD
BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
1910
_To those who hear._
Chapter I
I
As a boy he constructed so vividly in imagination that he came to believe
in the living reality of his creations: for everybody and everything he
found names--real names. Inside him somewhere stretched immense
playgrounds, compared to which the hay-fields and lawns of his father's
estate seemed trivial: plains without horizon, seas deep enough to float
the planets like corks, and "such tremendous forests" with "trees like
tall pointed hilltops." He had only to close his eyes, drop his thoughts
inwards, sink after them himself, call aloud and--see.
His imagination conceived and bore--worlds; but nothing in these worlds
became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name was
the breath of life; and, sooner or later, he invariably found it.
Once, having terrified his sister by affirming that a little man he had
created would come through her window at night and weave a peaked cap for
himself by pulling out all her hairs "that hadn't gone to sleep with the
rest of her body," he took characteristic measures to protect her from
the said depredations. He sat up the entire night on the lawn beneath
her window to watch, believing firmly that what his imagination had made
alive would come to pass.
She did not know this. On the contrary, he told her that the little man
had died suddenly; only, he sat up to make sure. And, for a boy of eight,
those cold and haunted hours must have seemed endless from ten o'clock to
four in the morning, when he crept back to his own corner of the night
nursery. He possessed, you see, courage as well as faith and imagination.
Yet the name of the little man was nothing more formidable than "Winky!"
"You might have known he wouldn't hurt you, Teresa," he said. "Any one
with that name would be light as a fly and awf'ly gentle--a regular dicky
sort of chap!"
"But he'd have pincers," she protested, "or he couldn't pull the hairs
out. Like an earwig he'd be. Ugh!"
"Not Winky! Never!" he explained scornfully, jealous of his offspring's
reputation. "He'd do it with his rummy little fingers."
"Then his fingers would have claws at the ends!" she insisted; for no
amount of explanation could persuade her that a person named Winky could
be nice and gentle, even though he were "quicker than a second." She
added that his death rejoiced her.
"But I can easily make another--such a nippy little beggar, and twice as
hoppy as the first. Only I won't do it," he added magnanimously, "because
it frightens you."
For to name with him was to create. He had only to run out some distance
into his big mental prairie, call aloud a name in a certain commanding
way, and instantly its owner would run up to claim it. Names described
souls. To learn the name of a thing or person was to know all about them
and make them subservient to his will; and "Winky" could only have been a
very soft and furry little person, swift as a shadow, nimble as a
mouse--just the sort of fellow who _would_ make a conical cap out of a
girl's fluffy hair ... and love the mischief of doing it.
And so with all things: names were vital and important. To address beings
by their intimate first names, beings of the opposite sex especially, was
a miniature sacrament; and the story of that premature audacity of Elsa
with Lohengrin never failed to touch his sense of awe. "What's in a
name?" for him, was a significant question--a question of life or death.
For to mispronounce a name was a bad blunder, but to name it wrongly was
to miss it altogether. Such a thing had no real life, or at best a
vitality that would soon fade. Adam knew that! And he pondered much in
his childhood over the difficulty Adam must have had "discovering" the
correct appellations for some of the queerer animals....
As he grew older, of course, all this faded a good deal, but he never
quite lost the sense of reality in names--the significance of a true
name, the absurdity of a false one, the cruelty of mispronunciation. One
day in the far future, he knew, some wonderful girl would come into his
life, singing her own true name like music, her whole personality
expressing it just as her lips framed the consonants and vowels--and he
would love her. His own name, ridiculous and hateful though it was, would
sing in reply. They would be in harmony together in the literal sense, as
necessary to one another as two notes in the same chord....
So he also possessed the mystical vision of the poet. What he
lacked--such temperaments always do--was the sense of proportion and the
careful balance that adjusts cause and effect. And this it is, no doubt,
that makes his adventures such "hard sayings." It becomes difficult to
disentangle what actually did happen from what conceivably might have
happened; what he thinks he saw from what positively _was_.
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 L50 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 you 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 hills
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.
"Tired?" asked the clergyman, kindly.
"Winded, Mr. Skale, thank you--nothing more," was the reply. He looked up
at the square mass of the house looming dark against the sky, and the
noise his companion made opening the door--the actual rattle of the iron
knob did it--suddenly brought to him a clear realization of two things:
First, he understood that the whole way from the station Mr. Skale had
been watching him closely, weighing, testing, proving him, though by ways
and methods so subtle that they had escaped his observation at the time;
secondly, that he was already so caught in the network of this
personality, vaster and more powerful than his own, that escape if he
desired it would be exceedingly difficult. Like a man in a boat upon the
upper Niagara river, he already felt the tug and suction of the current
below--the lust of a great adventure drawing him forward. Mr. Skale's
hand upon his shoulder as they entered the house was the symbol of
_that_. The noise of the door closing behind him was the passing of the
last bit of quiet water across which a landing to the bank might still
have been possible.
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