The Human Chord | Page 2

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. 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