“Now,” resumed the clergyman, lowering his tone unconsciously, “the first part of my discovery lies in this: that I have learned to pronounce the ordinary names of things and people in such a way as to lead me to their true, inner ones—”
“But,” interrupted Spinrobin irrepressibly, “how in the name of—?”
“Hush!” cried Skale quickly. “Never again call upon a mighty name—in vain. It is dangerous. Concentrate your mind upon what I now tell you, and you shall understand a part, at least, of my discovery. As I was saying, I have learned how to find the true name by means of the false; and understand, if you can, that to pronounce a true name correctly means to participate in its very life, to vibrate with its essential nature, to learn the ultimate secret of its inmost being. For our true names are the sounds originally uttered by the ‘Word’ of God when He created us, or ‘called’ us into Being out of the void of infinite silence, and to repeat them correctly means literally—to—speak—with—His—Voice. It is to speak the truth.” The clergyman dropped his tone to an awed whisper. “Words are the veils of Being; to speak them truly is to lift a corner of the veil.”
“What a glory! What a thing!” exclaimed the other under his breath, trying to keep his mind steady, but losing control of language in the attempt. The great sentences seemed to change the little room into a temple where sacred things were about to reveal themselves. Spinrobin now understood in a measure why Mr. Skale’s utterance of his own name and that of Miriam had sounded grand. Behind each he had touched the true name and made it echo.
The clergyman’s voice brought his thoughts back from distances in that inner prairie of his youth where they had lost themselves.
“For all of us,” he was repeating with rapt expression in his shining eyes, “are Sounds in the mighty music the universe sings to God, whose Voice it was that first produced us, and of whose awful resonance we are echoes therefore in harmony or disharmony.” A look of power passed into his great visage. Spinrobin’s imagination, in spite of the efforts that he made, fluttered with broken wings behind the swift words. A flash of the former terror stirred in the depths of him. The man was at the heels of knowledge it is not safe for humanity to seek….
“Yes,” he continued, directing his gaze again upon the other, “that is a part of my discovery, though only a part, mind. By repeating your outer name in a certain way until it disappears in the mind, I can arrive at the real name within. And to utter it is to call upon the secret soul—to summon it from its lair. ‘I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by name.’ You remember the texts? ‘I know thee by name,’ said Jehovah to the great Hebrew magician, ‘and thou art mine.’ By certain rhythms and vibratory modulations of the voice it is possible to produce harmonics of sound which awaken the inner name into life—and then to spell it out. Note well, to spell it,—spell—incantation—the magical use of sound—the meaning of the Word of Power, used with such terrific effect in the old forgotten Hebrew magic. Utter correctly the names of their Forces, or Angels, I am teaching you daily now,” he went on reverently, with glowing eyes and intense conviction; “pronounce them with full vibratory power that awakens all their harmonics, and you awaken also their counterpart in yourself; you summon their strength or characteristic quality to your aid; you introduce their powers actively into your own psychical being. Had Jacob succeeded in discovering the ‘Name’ of that ‘Angel’ with whom he wrestled, he would have become one with its superior power and have thus conquered it. Only, he asked instead of commanded, and he found it not…”
“Magnificent! Splendid!” cried Spinrobin, starting from his chair, seizing with his imagination potently stirred, this possibility of developing character and rousing the forces of the soul.
“We shall yet call upon the Names, and see,” replied Skale, placing a great hand upon his companion’s shoulder, “not aloud necessarily, but by an inner effort of intense will which sets in vibration the finer harmonics heard only by the poet and magician, those harmonics and overtones which embody the psychical element in music. For the methods of poet and magician, I tell you, my dear Spinrobin, are identical, and all the faiths of the world are at the heels of that thought. Provided you have faith you can—move mountains! You can call upon the very gods!”
“A most wonderful idea, Mr. Skale,” faltered the other breathlessly, “quite wonderful!” The huge sentences deafened him a little with their mental thunder.
“And utterly simple,” was the reply, “for all truth is simple.”
He paced the floor like a great caged animal. He went down and leaned against the dark bookcase, with his legs wide apart, and hands in his coat pockets. “To name truly, you see, is to evoke, to create!” he roared from the end of the room. “To utter as it should be uttered any one of the Ten Words, or Creative Powers of the Deity in the old Hebrew system, is to become master of the ‘world’ to which it corresponds. For these names are still in living contact with the realities behind. It means to vibrate with the powers that called the universe into being and—into form.”
A sort of shadowy majesty draped his huge figure, Spinrobin thought, as he stood in semi-darkness at the end of the room and thundered forth these extraordinary sentences with a conviction that, for the moment at least, swept away all doubt in the mind of his listener. Dreadful ideas, huge-footed and threatening, rushed to and fro in the secretary’s mind. He was torn away from all known anchorage, staggered, dizzy and dismayed; yet at the same time, owing to his adventure-loving temperament, a prey to some secret and delightful exaltation of the spirit. He was out of his depth in great waters….
Then, quite suddenly, Mr. Skale came swiftly over to his side and whispered in accents that were soothing in comparison:
“And think for a moment how beautiful, the huge Words by which God called into being the worlds, and sent the perfect, rounded bodies of the spheres spinning and singing, blazing their eternal trails of glory through the void! How sweet the whisper that crystallized in flowers! How tender the note that fashioned the eyes and face, say, of Miriam….”
At the name of Miriam he felt caught up and glorified, in some delightful and inexplicable way that brought with it—peace. The power of all these strange and glowing thoughts poured their full tide into his own rather arid and thirsty world, frightening him with their terrific force. But the mere utterance of that delightful name—in the way Skale uttered it—brought confidence and peace.
“… Could we but hear them!” Skale continued, half to himself, half to his probationer; “for the sad thing is that today the world has ears yet cannot hear. As light is distorted by passing through a gross atmosphere, so sound reaches us but indistinctly now, and few true names can bring their wondrous messages of power correctly. Men, coarsening with the materialism of the ages, have grown thick and gross with the luxury of inventions and the diseases of modern life that develop intellect at the expense of soul. They have lost the old inner hearing of divine sound, and but one here and there can still catch the faint, far-off and ineffable music.”
He lifted his eyes, and his voice became low and even gentle as the glowing words fell from his heart of longing.
“None hear now the morning stars when they sing together to the sun; none know the chanting of the spheres! The ears of the world are stopped with lust, and the old divine science of true-naming seems lost forever amid the crash of engines and the noisy thunder of machinery!… Only among flowers and certain gems are the accurate old true names still to be found!… But we are on the track, my dear Spinrobin, we are on the ancient trail to Power.”
The clergyman closed his eyes and clasped his hands, lifting his face upwards with a rapt expression while he murmured under his breath the description of the Rider on the White Horse from the Book of the Revelations, as though it held some inner meaning that his heart knew yet dared not divulge: “And he had a Name written, that no man knew but he himself. And he was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood: and his Name is called The Word of God
… and he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written,—’King of Kings and Lord of Lords….’”
And for an instant Spinrobin, listening to the rolling sound but not to the actual words, fancied that a faintly colored atmosphere of deep scarlet accompanied the vibrations of his resonant whisper and produced in the depths of his mind this momentary effect of colored audition.
It was all very strange and puzzling. He tried, however, to keep an open mind and struggle as best he might with these big swells that rolled into his little pool of life and threatened to merge it in a vaster tide than he had yet dreamed of. Knowing how limited is the world which the senses report, he saw nothing too inconceivable in the idea that certain persons might possess a peculiar inner structure of the spirit by which supersensuous things can be perceived. And what more likely than that a man of Mr. Skale’s unusual caliber should belong to them? Indeed, that the clergyman possessed certain practical powers of an extraordinary description he was as certain as that the house was not empty as he had at first supposed. Of neither had he proof as yet; but proof was not long in forthcoming.
CHAPTER IV
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I
“Then if there is so much sound about in all objects and forms—if the whole universe, in fact, is sounding,” asked Spinrobin with a naïve impertinence not intended, but due to the reaction of his simple mind from all this vague splendor, “why don’t we hear it more?”
Mr. Skale came upon him like a boomerang from the end of the room. He was smiling. He approved the question.
“With us the question of hearing is merely the question of wavelengths in the air,” he replied; “the lowest audible sound having a wavelength of sixteen feet, the highest less than an inch. Some people can’t hear the squeak of a bat, others the rumble of an earthquake. I merely affirm that in every form sleeps the creative sound that is its life and being. The ear is a miserable organ at best, and the majority are far too gross to know clair-audience. What about sounds, for instance, that have a wavelength of a hundred, a thousand miles on the one hand, or a millionth part of an inch on the other?”
“A thousand miles! A millionth of an inch?” gasped the other, gazing at his interlocutor as though he was some great archangel of sound.
“Sound for most of us lies between, say, thirty and many thousand vibrations per second—the cry of the earthquake and the cricket; it is our limitation that renders the voice of the dewdrop and the voice of the planet alike inaudible. We even mistake a measure of noise—like a continuous millwheel or a river, say—for silence, when in reality there is no such thing as perfect silence. Other life is all the time singing and thundering about us,” he added, holding up a giant finger as though to listen. “To the imperfection of our ears you may ascribe the fact that we do not hear the morning stars shouting together.”
“Thank you, yes, I quite see now,” said the secretary. “To name truly is to hear truly.” The clergyman’s words seemed to hold a lamp to a vast interior map in his mind that was growing light. A new dawn was breaking over the great mental prairie where he wandered as a child. “To find the true name of anything,” he added, “you mean, is to hear its sound, its individual note as it were?” Incredible perspectives swam into his ken, hitherto undreamed of.
“Not ‘as it were,’” boomed the other, “You do hear it. After which the next step is to utter it, and so absorb its force into your own being by synchronous vibration—union mystical and actual. Only, you must be sure you utter it correctly. To pronounce incorrectly is to call it incompletely into life and form—to distort and injure it, and yourself with it. To make it untrue—a lie.”
They were standing in the dusk by the library window, watching the veil of night that slowly covered the hills. The flying horizons of the moors had slipped away into the darkness.
The stars were whispering together their thoughts of flame and speed. At the back of the room sat Miriam among the shadows, like some melody hovering in a musician’s mind till he should call her forth. It was close upon the tea hour. Behind them Mrs. Mawle was busying herself with lamps and fire. Mr. Skale, turning at the sound of the housekeeper, motioned to the secretary to approach, then stooped down and spoke low in his ear:
“With many names I had great difficulty,” he whispered. “With hers, for instance,” indicating the housekeeper behind them. “It took me five years’ continuous research to establish her general voice-outline, and even then I at first only derived a portion of her name. And in uttering it I made such errors of omission and pronunciation that her physical form suffered, and she emerged from the ordeal in disorder. You have, of course, noticed her disabilities…. But, later, though only in stammering fashion, I called upon her all complete, and she has since known a serene blessedness and a sense of her great value in the music of life that she never knew before.” His face lit up as he spoke of it. “For in that moment she found herself. She heard her true name, God’s creative sound, thunder through her being.”
Spinrobin, feeling the clergyman’s forces pouring through him like a tide at such close proximity, bowed his head. His lips were too dry to frame words. He was thinking of the possible effects upon his own soul and body when his name too should be “uttered.” He remembered the withered arm and the deafness. He thought, too, of that slender, ghostly figure that haunted the house with its soft movements and tender singing. Lastly, he remembered his strange conviction that somewhere in the great building, possibly in his own corridor, there were other occupants, other life, Beings of unearthly scale waiting the given moment to appear, summoned by utterance.
“And you will understand now why it is I want a man of high courage to help me,” Skale resumed in a louder tone, standing sharply upright; “a man careless of physical existence, and with a faith wholly beyond the things of this world!”
“I do indeed,” he managed to reply aloud, while in his thoughts he was saying, “I will, I must see it through. I won’t give in!” With all his might he resisted the invading tide of terror. Even if sad results came later, it was something to have been sacrificed in so big a conception.
In his excitement he slipped from the edge of the windowsill, where he was perched, and Mr. Skale, standing close in front of him, caught his two wrists and set him upon his feet. A shock, like a rush of electricity, ran through him. He took his courage boldly in both hands and asked the question ever burning at the back of his mind.
“Then, this great Experiment you—we have in view,” he stammered, “is to do with the correct uttering of the names of some of the great Forces, or Angels, and—and the assimilating of their powers into ourselves—?”
Skale rose up gigantically beside him. “No, sir,” he cried, “it is greater—infinitely greater than that. Names of mere Angels I can call alone without the help of any one; but for the name I wish to utter a whole chord is necessary even to compass the utterance of the opening syllable; as I have told you already, a chord in which you share the incalculable privilege of being the tenor note. But for the completed syllables—the full name—!” He closed his eyes and shrugged his massive shoulders—"I may need the massed orchestras of half the world, the chorused voices of the entire nation—or in their place a still small voice of utter purity crying in the wilderness! In time you shall know fully—know, see and hear. For the present, hold your soul with what patience and courage you may.”
The words thundered about the room, so that Miriam, too, heard them. Spinrobin trembled inwardly, as though a cold air passed him. The suggestion of immense possibilities, vague yet terrible, overwhelmed him again suddenly. Had not the girl at that moment moved up beside him and put her exquisite pale face over his shoulder, with her hand upon his arm, it is probable he would then and there have informed Mr. Skale that he withdrew from the whole affair.
“Whatever happens,” murmured Miriam, gazing into his eyes, “we go on singing and sounding together, you and I.” Then, as Spinrobin bent down and kissed her hair, Mr. Skal
e put an arm round each of them and drew them over to the tea table.
“Come, Mr. Spinrobin,” he said, with his winning smile, “you must not be alarmed, you know. You must not desert me. You are necessary to us all, and when my Experiment is complete we shall all be as gods together. Do not falter. There is nothing in life, remember, but to lose oneself; and I have found a better way of doing so than any one else—by merging ourselves into the Voice of—”
“Mr. Skale’s tea has been standing more than ten minutes,” interrupted the old housekeeper, coming up behind them; “if Mr. Spinrobin will please to let him come—” as though it was Spinrobin’s fault that there had been delay.
Mr. Skale laughed good-humouredly, as the two men, suddenly in the region of teacups and buttered toast, looked one another in the face with a certain confusion. Miriam, sipping her tea, laughed too, curiously. Spinrobin felt restored to some measure of safety and sanity again. Only the strange emotion of a few moments before still moved there unseen among them.
“Listen, and you shall presently hear her name,” the clergyman whispered, glancing up at the other over his teacup, but Spinrobin was crunching his toast too noisily to notice the meaning of the words fully.
II
The Stage Manager who stands behind all the scenes of life, both great and small, had prepared the scene well for what was to follow. The sentences about the world of inaudible sound had dropped the right kind of suggestion into the secretary’s heart. His mind still whirred with a litter of half-digested sentences and ideas, however, and he was vividly haunted by the actuality of truth behind them all. His whole inner being at that moment cried “Hark!” through a hush of expectant wonder.
There they sat at tea, this singular group of human beings: Mr. Skale, bigger than ever in his loose housesuit of black, swallowing his liquid with noisy gulps; Spinrobin, nibbling slippery morsels of hot toast, on the edge of his chair; Miriam, quiet and mysterious, in her corner; and Mrs. Mawle, sedate, respectful in cap and apron, presiding over the teapot, the whole scene cozily lit by lamp and fire—when this remarkable new thing happened. Spinrobin declares always that it came upon him like a drowning wave, frightening him not with any idea of injury to himself, but with a dreadful sense of being lost and shelterless among the immensities of a transcendent new world. Something passed into the room that made his soul shake and flutter at the center.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 50
