The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Human Chord, by Algernon Blackwood

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Title: The Human Chord

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Release Date: April 11, 2004 [EBook #11988]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE HUMAN CHORD

BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

1910

_To those who hear._

Chapter I

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 w