Algernon Blackwood

“ The visitor glowered with vexation. “Mr. Alexander,” he rebuked the servant in a low tone, as he swung through the door on his toes into the study, where my uncle, or my guardian evidently awaited him. And as I heard the name, in the way he uttered it, a sudden wave of cold anxiety, more of acute distress, broke over me. As that lean, dark, pomaded head flowed round the open door with its extraordinary swiftness, and vanished, I felt afraid. The footman went past me with an expressionless face, but it seemed to me that his face was ghastly white. ”

“ To call him by a wrong name, therefore, was an insult to his actuality, a careless and unpardonable sacrilege that trifled with the essential nature of his personality.
I lived with an uncle, who was also my guardian, and this mystifying double role contributed, no doubt, an element to the birth of Alexander Alexander. Some childhood’s divination dramatised itself perhaps. If so, this earliest creative drama had a prophetic, even a clairvoyant, quality that enabled him to endure until he had fully justified his dark existence. Both Alexander and Alexander persisted through my girlhood. ”

“ An elaborate fabric built most carefully, and standing firm for years, collapsed into ghastly ruins. The footman’s face, I remembered, was always white. My nurse, now dead, had always fallen in with my fancies. My uncle was tall and thin and dark, and had always worn pomaded hair. But it was only when I reached the study door that the final film cleared off, letting in the appalling light. For I suddenly remembered another thing as well: he acknowledged to a buried name. Hidden away among several others, he owned a name he never used. His full name, of course, was Frank Henry Alexander Burton. ”