n the room sought to push forward into objective
reality. And behind it, he knew, lay the stupendous urgency and drive of
some power that held the entire universe in its pulses as easily as the
ocean holds a shoal of minnows....

But the limits of realization for him were almost reached. Spinrobin
wanted to close his eyes, yet could not. He was driven along with the
wave of sound thus awakened and forced to see what was to be seen. This
time there was no bush behind which he could screen himself. And there,
dimly sketched out of the rhythmical vibrations of the seething violet
obscurity, rose that looming Outline of wonder and majesty that clothed
itself about them with a garment as of visible sound. The Unknown,
suggesting incredible dimensions, stood at his elbow, tremendously draped
in these dim, voluminous folds of music and color--very fearful, very
seductive, yet so supremely simple at the same time that a little child
could have understood without fear.

But only partially there, only partially revealed. The ineffable glory
was never quite told. Spinrobin, amid all the torrent of words in which
he sought later to describe the experience, could only falter out a
single comprehensible sentence: "I felt like stammering in intoxication
over the first letter of a name I loved--loved to the point of
ecstasy--to the point even of giving up my life for it."

And meanwhile, breathless and shaking, he clung to Skale, still murmuring
in his heart the magic syllable, but swept into some region of glory
where pain and joy both ceased, where terror and delight merged into some
perfectly simple form of love, and where he became in an instant of time
an entirely new and emancipated Spinrobin, driving at full speed towards
the ultimate sound and secret of the universe--God.

* * * * *

He never remembered exactly how he got out of the room, but it always
seemed as though he dropped with a crash from some enormous height. The
sounds ceased; the gongs died into silence; the violet faded; the
quivering wax lay still.... Mr. Skale was moving beside him, and the next
minute they were in the narrow vestibule between the doors, hanging up
ordinary colored surplices upon ordinary iron nails.

Spinrobin stumbled. Skale caught him. They were in the corridor
again--cold, cheerless, full of December murk and shadows--and the
secretary was leaning against the clergyman's shoulder breathless and
trembling a