“All sounds,” he said, half to himself, half to the astonished secretary, “create their own patterns.  Sound builds; sound destroys; and invisible sound-vibrations affect concrete matter.  For all sounds produce forms—­the forms that correspond to them, as you shall now see.  Within every form lies the silent sound that first called it into view—­into visible shape—­into being.  Forms, shapes, bodies are the vibratory activities of sound made visible.”

“My goodness!” exclaimed Spinrobin, who was listening like a man in a dream, but who caught the violence of the clergyman’s idea none the less.

“Forms and bodies are—­solidified Sound,” cried the clergyman in italics.

“You say something extraordinary,” exclaimed the commonplace Spinrobin in his shrill voice.  “Marvelous!” Vaguely he seemed to remember that Schelling had called architecture “frozen music.”

Mr. Skale turned and looked at him as a god might look at an insect—­that he loved.

“Sound, Mr. Spinrobin,” he said, with a sudden and effective lowering of his booming voice, “is the original divine impulsion behind nature—­communicated to language.  It is—­creative!”

Then, leaving the secretary with this nut of condensed knowledge to crack as best he could, the clergyman went to the end of the room in three strides.  He busied himself for a moment with something upon the wall; then he suddenly turned, his great face aglow, his huge form erect, fixing his burning eyes upon his distracted companion.

“In the Beginning,” he boomed solemnly, in tones of profound conviction, “was—­the Word.”  He paused a moment, and then continued, his voice filling the room to the very ceiling.  “At the Word of God—­at the thunder of the Voice of God, worlds leaped into being!” Again he paused.  “Sound,” he went on, the whole force of his great personality in the phrase, “was the primordial, creative energy.  A sound can call a form into existence.  Forms are the Sound-Figures of archetypal forces—­the Word made Flesh.”  He stopped, and moved with great soft strides about the room.

Spinrobin caught the words full in the face.  For a space he could not measure—­considerably less than a second, probably—­the consciousness of something unutterably immense, unutterably flaming, rushed tumultuously through his mind, with wings that bore his imagination to a place where light was—­dazzling, white beyond words.  He felt himself tossed up to Heaven on the waves of a great sea, as the body of strange belief behind the clergyman’s words poured through him....  For somewhere, behind the incoherence of the passionate language, burned the blaze of a true thought at white heat—­could he but grasp it through the stammering utterance.