Jimbo was lying at home on his bed in the night-nursery, and his mother was bending over him. At the foot of the bed stood the doctor in black. The nurse held a lamp, only half shaded by her hand, as she approached the bedside.
This lamp was the moon of his delirium—only he had quite forgotten now that there had ever been any moon at all.
The little thermometer, thrust into his teeth among the stars, was still in his mouth. A hot-water bottle made his feet glow and burn. And from the walls of the sick-room came as it were the echoes of recently-uttered sentences: “Take his temperature! Give him the medicine the moment he wakes! Put the hot bottle to his feet.... Fetch the ice-bag.... Quick!”
“Where am I, mother?” he asked in a whisper.
“You’re in bed, darling, and must keep quite quiet. You’ll soon be all right again. It was the old black cow that tossed you. The gardener found you by the swinging gate and carried you in.... You’ve been unconscious!”
“How long have I been uncon——?” Jimbo could not manage the whole word.
“About three hours, darling.”
Then he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when he woke long after it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something—some dim memory—that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of deep sleep.
But the old nurse, watching every movement, waiting upon the child’s very breath, had caught the question, and she answered soothingly in a whisper—
“Oh, Miss Lake died a few days after she left here,” she said in a very low voice. “But don’t think about her any more, dearie! She’ll never frighten children again with her silly stories.”
“DIED!“
Jimbo sat up in bed and stared into the shadows behind her, as though his eyes saw something she could not see. But his voice seemed almost to belong to some one else.
“She was really dead all the time, then,” he said below his breath.
Then the child fell back without another word, and dropped off into the sleep which was the first step to final recovery.
THE HUMAN CHORD
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CHAPTER I
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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 £50 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. H
e 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, dom
inant 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.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 44
