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 conception 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."
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 the 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.