Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  “I hope to lead you little by little to what I have in view,” Mr. Skale went on, “so that at the end of our trial month you will have learned enough to enable you to form a decision, yet not enough to — to use my knowledge should you choose to return to the world.”

  It was very frank, but the secretary did not feel offended. He accepted the explanation as perfectly reasonable. In his mind he knew full well what his choice would be. This was the supreme adventure he had been so long a-seeking. No ordinary obstacle could prevent his accepting it.

  II

  There came a pause of some length, in which Spinrobin found nothing particular to say. The lamp gurgled; the coals fell softly into the fender. Then suddenly Mr. Skale rose and stood with his back to the grate. He gazed down upon the small figure in the chair. He towered there, a kindly giant, enthusiasm burning in his eyes like lamps. His voice was very deep, his manner more solemn than before when he spoke.

  “So far, so good,” he said, “and now, with your permission, Mr. Spinrobin, I should like to go a step further. I should like to take — your note.”

  “My note?” exclaimed the other, thinking he had not heard correctly.

  “Your sound, yes,” repeated the clergyman.

  “My sound!” piped the little man, vastly puzzled, his voice shrill with excitement. He dodged about in the depths of his big leather chair, as though movement might bring explanation.

  Mr. Skale watched him calmly. “I want to get the vibrations of your voice, and then see what pattern they produce in the sand,” he said.

  “Oh, in the sand, yes; quite so,” replied the secretary. He remembered how the vibrations of an elastic membrane can throw dry sand, loosely scattered upon its surface, into various floral and geometrical figures. Chladni’s figures, he seemed to remember, they were called after their discoverer. But Mr. Skale’s purpose in the main, of course, escaped him.

  “You don’t object?”

  “On the contrary, I am greatly interested.” He stood up on the mat beside his employer.

  “I wish to make quite sure,” the clergyman added gravely, “that your voice, your note, is what I think it is — accurately in harmony with mine and Miriam’s and Mrs. Mawle’s. The pattern it makes will help to prove this.”

  The secretary bowed in perplexed silence, while Mr. Skale crossed the room and took a violin from its case. The golden varnish of its ribs and back gleamed in the lamplight, and when the clergyman drew the bow across the strings to tune it, smooth, mellow sounds, soft and resonant as bells, filled the room. Evidently he knew how to handle the instrument. The notes died away in a murmur.

  “A Guarnerius,” he explained, “and a perfect pedigree specimen; it has the most sensitive structure imaginable, and carries vibrations almost like a human nerve. For instance, while I speak,” he added, laying the violin upon his companion’s hand, “you will feel the vibrations of my voice run through the wood into your palm.”

  “I do,” said Spinrobin. It trembled like a living thing.

  “Now,” continued Mr. Skale, after a pause, “what I first want is to receive the vibrations of your own voice in the same way — into my very pulses. Kindly read aloud steadily while I hold it. Stop reading when I make a sign. I’ll nod, so that the vibrations of my voice won’t interfere.” And he handed a notebook to him with quotations entered neatly in his own handwriting, selected evidently with a purpose, and all dealing with sound, music, as organized sound, and names. Spinrobin read aloud; the first quotation from Meredith he recognized, but the others, and the last one, discussing names, were new to him: —

  “But listen in the thought; so may there come

  Conception of a newly-added chord,

  Commanding space beyond where ear has home.

  “Everything that the sun shines upon sings or can be made to sing, and can be heard to sing. Gases, impalpable powders, and woolen stuffs, in common with other non-conductors of sound, give forth notes of different pitches when played upon by an intermittent beam of white light. Colored stuffs will sing in lights of different colors, but refuse to sing in others. The polarization of light being now accomplished, light and sound are known to be alike. Flames have a modulated voice and can be made to sing a definite melody. Wood, stone, metal, skins, fibers, membranes, every rapidly vibrating substance, all have in them the potentialities of musical sound.

  “Radium receives its energy from, and responds to, radiations which traverse all space — as piano strings respond to sounds in unison with their notes. Space is all a-quiver with waves of radiant energy. We vibrate in sympathy with a few strings here and there — with the tiny X-rays, actinic rays, light waves, heat waves, and the huge electromagnetic waves of Hertz and Marconi; but there are great spaces, numberless radiations, to which we are stone deaf. Some day, a thousand years hence, we shall know the full sweep of this magnificent harmony.

  “Everything in nature has its name, and he who has the power to call a thing by its proper name can make it subservient to his will; for its proper name is not the arbitrary name given to it by man, but the expression of the totality of its powers and attributes, because the powers and attributes of each Being are intimately connected with its means of expression, and between both exists the most exact proportion in regard to measure, time, and condition.”

  The meaning of the four quotations, as he read them, plunged down into him and touched inner chords very close to his own beliefs. Something of his own soul, therefore, passed into his voice as he read. He read, that is to say, with authority.

  A nod from Mr. Skale stopped him just as he was beginning a fifth passage. Raising the vibrating instrument to his ear, the clergyman first listened a moment intently. Then he quickly had it under his chin, beard flowing over it like water, and the bow singing across the strings. The note he played — he drew it out with that whipping motion of the bow only possible to a loving expert — was soft and beautiful, long drawn out with a sweet singing quality. He took it on the G string with the second finger — in the “fourth position.” It thrilled through him, Spinrobin declares, most curiously and delightfully. It made him happy to hear it. It was very similar to the singing vibrations he had experienced when Miriam gazed into his eyes and spoke his name.

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Skale, and laid the violin down again. “I’ve got the note. You’re E flat.”

  “E flat!” gasped Spinrobin, not sure whether he was pleased or disappointed.

  “That’s your sound, yes. You’re E flat — just as I thought, just as I hoped. You fit in exactly. It seems too good to be true!” His voice began to boom again, as it always did when he was moved. He was striding about, very alert, very masterful, pushing the furniture out of his way, his eyes more luminous than ever. “It’s magnificent.” He stopped abruptly and looked at the secretary with a gaze so enveloping that Spinrobin for an instant lost his bearings altogether. “It means, my dear Spinrobin,” he said slowly, with a touch of solemnity that woke an involuntary shiver deep in his listener’s being, “that you are destined to play a part, and an important part, in one of the grandest experiments ever dreamed of by the heart of man. For the first time since my researches began twenty years ago I now see the end in sight.”

  “Mr. Skale — that is something — indeed,” was all the little man could find to say.

  There was no reason he could point to why the words should have produced a sense of chill about his heart. It was only that he felt again the huge groundswell of this vast unknown experiment surging against him, lifting him from his feet — as a man might feel the Atlantic swells rise with him towards the stars before they engulfed him forever. It seemed getting a trifle out of hand, this adventure. Yet it was what he had always longed for, and his courage must hold firm. Besides, Miriam was involved in it with him. What could he ask better than to risk his insignificant personality in some gigantic, mad attempt to plumb the Unknown, with that slender, little pale-faced Beauty by his side? The wave of Mr. Skale’s enthus
iasm swept him away deliciously.

  “And now,” he cried, “we’ll get your Pattern too. I no longer have any doubts, but none the less it will be a satisfaction to us both to see it. It must, I’m sure, harmonies with ours; it must!”

  He opened a cupboard drawer and produced a thin sheet of glass, upon which he next poured some finely powdered sand out of a paper bag. It rattled, dry and faint, upon the smooth, hard surface. And while he did this, he talked rapidly, boomingly, with immense enthusiasm.

  “All sounds,” he said, half to himself, half to the astonished secretary, “create their own patterns. Sound builds; sound destroys; and invisible sound-vibrations affect concrete matter. For all sounds produce forms — the forms that correspond to them, as you shall now see. Within every form lies the silent sound that first called it into view — into visible shape — into being. Forms, shapes, bodies are the vibratory activities of sound made visible.”

  “My goodness!” exclaimed Spinrobin, who was listening like a man in a dream, but who caught the violence of the clergyman’s idea none the less.

  “Forms and bodies are — solidified Sound,” cried the clergyman in italics.

  “You say something extraordinary,” exclaimed the commonplace Spinrobin in his shrill voice. “Marvelous!” Vaguely he seemed to remember that Schelling had called architecture “frozen music.”

  Mr. Skale turned and looked at him as a god might look at an insect — that he loved.

  “Sound, Mr. Spinrobin,” he said, with a sudden and effective lowering of his booming voice, “is the original divine impulsion behind nature — communicated to language. It is — creative!”

  Then, leaving the secretary with this nut of condensed knowledge to crack as best he could, the clergyman went to the end of the room in three strides. He busied himself for a moment with something upon the wall; then he suddenly turned, his great face aglow, his huge form erect, fixing his burning eyes upon his distracted companion.

  “In the Beginning,” he boomed solemnly, in tones of profound conviction, “was — the Word.” He paused a moment, and then continued, his voice filling the room to the very ceiling. “At the Word of God — at the thunder of the Voice of God, worlds leaped into being!” Again he paused. “Sound,” he went on, the whole force of his great personality in the phrase, “was the primordial, creative energy. A sound can call a form into existence. Forms are the Sound-Figures of archetypal forces — the Word made Flesh.” He stopped, and moved with great soft strides about the room.

  Spinrobin caught the words full in the face. For a space he could not measure — considerably less than a second, probably — the consciousness of something unutterably immense, unutterably flaming, rushed tumultuously through his mind, with wings that bore his imagination to a place where light was — dazzling, white beyond words. He felt himself tossed up to Heaven on the waves of a great sea, as the body of strange belief behind the clergyman’s words poured through him…. For somewhere, behind the incoherence of the passionate language, burned the blaze of a true thought at white heat — could he but grasp it through the stammering utterance.

  Then, with equal swiftness, it passed. His present surroundings came back. He dropped with a dizzy rush from awful spaces … and was aware that he was merely — standing on the black, woolly mat before the fire watching the movements of his new employer, that his pumps were bright and pointed, his head just level with a dark marble mantelpiece. Dazed, and a trifle breathless he felt; and at the back of his disordered mind stirred a schoolboy’s memory that the Pythagoreans believed the universe to have been called out of chaos by Sound, Number, and Harmony — or something to that effect…. But these huge, fugitive thoughts that tore through him refused to be seized and dealt with. He staggered a little, mentally; then, with a prodigious effort, controlled himself — and watched.

  III

  Mr. Skale, he saw, had fastened the little sheet of glass by its four corners to silken strings hanging from the ceiling. The glass plate hung, motionless and horizontal, in the air with its freight of sand. For several minutes the clergyman played a series of beautiful modulations in double-stopping upon the violin. In these the dominating influence was E flat. Spinrobin was not musical enough to describe it more accurately than this. Only, with greater skill than he knows, he mentions how Skale drew out of that fiddle the peculiarly intimate and searching tones by which strings can reach the spiritual center of a man and make him respond to delicate vibrations of thoughts beyond his normal gamut….

  Spinrobin, listening, understood that he was a greater man than he knew….

  And the sand on the glass sheet, he next became aware, was shifting, moving, dancing. He heard the tiny hissing and rattling of the dry grains. It was uncommonly weird. This visible and practical result made the clergyman’s astonishing words seem true and convincing. That moving sand brought sanity, yet a certain curious terror of the unknown into it all.

  A minute later Mr. Skale stopped playing and beckoned to him.

  “See,” he said quietly, pointing to the arrangement the particles of sand had assumed under the influence of the vibrations. “There’s your pattern — your sound made visible. That’s your utterance — the Note you substantially represent and body forth in terms of matter.”

  The secretary stared. It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small circles round the base.

  “So that’s my note — made visible!” he exclaimed under his breath. “It’s delightful; it’s quite exquisite.”

  “That’s E flat,” returned Mr. Skale in a whisper, so as not to disturb the pattern; “if I altered the note, the pattern would alter too. E natural, for instance, would be different. Only, luckily, you are E flat — just the note we want. And now,” he continued, straightening himself up to his full height, “come over and see mine and Miriam’s and Mrs. Mawle’s, and you’ll understand what I meant when I said that yours would harmonize.” And in a glass case across the room they examined a number of square sheets of glass with sand upon them in various patterns, all rendered permanent by a thin coating of a glue-like transparent substance that held the particles in position.

  “There you see mine and Miriam’s and Mrs. Mawle’s,” he said, stooping to look. “They harmonize most beautifully, you observe, with your own.”

  It was, indeed, a singular and remarkable thing. The patterns, though all different, yet combined in some subtle fashion impossible of analysis to form a complete and well-proportioned Whole — a design — a picture. The patterns of the clergyman and the housekeeper provided the base and foreground, those of Miriam and the secretary the delicate superstructure. The girl’s pattern, he noted with a subtle pleasure, was curiously similar to his own, but far more delicate and waving. Yet, whereas his was floral, hers was stellar in character; that of the housekeeper was spiral, and Mr. Skale’s he could only describe as a miniature whirlwind of very exquisite design rising out of apparently three separate centers of motion.

  “If I could paint over them the color each shade of sound represents,”

  Mr. Skale resumed, “the tint of each timbre, or Klangfarbe, as the

  Germans call it, you would see better still how we are all grouped

  together there into a complete and harmonious whole.”

  Spinrobin looked from the patterns to his companion’s great face bending there beside him. Then he looked back again at the patterns. He could think of nothing quite intelligible to say. He noticed more clearly every minute that these dainty shapes of sand, stellar, spiral, and floral, stood to one another in certain definite proportions, in a rising and calculated ratio of singular beauty.

  “There, before you, lies a true and perfect chord made visible,” the clergyman said in tones thrilling with satisfaction, “ — three notes in harmony with the fundamental sound, myself, and with each other. My dear fellow, I congratulate you, I congratulate you.”

  �
��Thank you very much, indeed,” murmured Spinrobin. “I don’t quite understand it all yet, but it’s — it’s extraordinarily fascinating and wonderful.”

  Mr. Skale said nothing, and Spinrobin drifted back to his big armchair. A deep silence pervaded the room for the space of several minutes. In the heart of that silence lay the mass of direct and vital questions the secretary burned, yet was afraid, to ask. For such was the plain truth; he yearned to know, yet feared to hear. The Discovery and the Experiment of this singular man loomed already somewhat vast and terrible; the adjective that had suggested itself before returned to him— “not permissible.” … Of Mr. Skale himself he had no sort of fear, though a growing and uncommon respect, but of the purpose Mr. Skale had in view he caught himself thinking more and more, yet without obvious reason, with a distinct shrinking almost amounting to dismay. But for the fact that so sweet and gentle a creature as Miriam was traveling the same path with him, this increased sense of caution would have revealed itself plainly for what it was — Fear….

  “I am deeply interested, Mr. Skale,” he said at length, breaking first the silence, “and sympathetic too, I assure you; only — you will forgive me for saying it — I am, as yet, still rather in the dark as to where all this is to lead—” The clergyman’s eyes, fixed straight upon his own, again made it difficult to finish the sentence as he wished.

  “Necessarily so, because I can only lead you to my discovery step by step,” replied the other steadily. “I wish you to be thoroughly prepared for anything that may happen, so that you can deal intelligently with results that might otherwise overwhelm you.”