Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

It was while he was calculating what ought to be the precise weight and nature of this blow—calculating it as much with the contracted muscles of his raised forearm as with his mind, and just as he had reached the conclusion that the blow, for best effect, should be a grazing one—that a reply came which was as witty as it was startling. It was a rendering into a series of sharp taps, sharply rhythmed, of a familiar whistle-call: rat-atat-tat: tat-tat: tat ; with a magnificent emphasis on the last syllable, magnificent and at the same time deliciously interrogative. Instantly, Hamerton became burningly alive again. He flung himself against the wall as if he were positively going to embrace it, and gave, with alternating hands, a double tattoo of the same kind. He even, he said, pressed his face against the cold plaster in his eagerness to be as near as possible to this subtle being. That she was subtle and witty and charming, there could now be no doubt: he could see plainly just what sort of creature she must be. Rather sharp, rather cruel, a good deal of a tease, decidedly a flirt, but also just as obviously a woman of extraordinary charm and depth. She was, in fact, everything that he desired. The whole course of the conversation proved that—with its delicious mixture of advance and retreat, of the candid and the ironic. She was more than a match for him. And the cunning cruelty with which she had pretended that the whole thing was a joke, or an accident, and that she had dropped it—all so beautifully calculated to sharpen their mutual pleasure when the interchange was renewed! This was a stroke of genius.

It was nothing, however, to what was to come. For if the interchange had been delicious up to this point, it now became a thing of transcendent wonder, a thing of poetry and genius all compact. They began conversing, through this extraordinary medium, with a rapidity and (on his side, at least) a virtuosity, which had no parallel in Hamerton’s existence. Stubborn assertions were followed by satirical queries; satirical queries led to gay denials; gay denials gave way to joyous duets of sheer lyricism, the lyricism of the skylark. If the palm of the hand asked a question, the knuckles gave emphatic answer. The fingertips interpolated a sly objection, the elbow truculently insisted, the fingernails etherealized the object and made of it the most delicate of innuendoes. Pauses now and then prolonged themselves until they became agonies, in order that the ensuing dialogue might all the more take to itself the hue of the ecstatic. And with what abandon after such a pause, they threw themselves against the dividing wall! Hamerton was simply beside himself with joy. He said he would not have believed it possible that a human being could display such an inventive genius in the medium of pure rhythm, or in the shadings of the loud and soft: it was the most exquisite music he had ever heard. Without a word spoken, without a whisper, these two creatures exchanged the profoundest secrets of their souls, sounded the deepest and brightest abyss of human knowledge, met angelically, with poised wings, in an ether of pure communion.

It was when she reached, finally, an ultimate perfection of communication, by clawing frantically at the wall, as if in frankest desire to dig her way through, that Hamerton awoke, with a sudden and sharp sense of reality, to the fact that one of his “moments” was before him. What else, indeed? There it was, staring him in the face: the most brilliant moment of his life. Incredible that he should only now have perceived it! But he perceived it; and at once was paralyzed with all it meant. For what did it mean—what could it mean—but that he must now definitely and courageously and unreservedly go forward? To allow the thing merely to end like this would be tantamount to disastrous retreat. It was clearly impossible. Everything—every discoverable sign-post in the whole universe—pointed the other way. Forward into the unknown—forward into the untrodden. For him, as for Faust, there was no alternative.

Hamerton admitted to me that it took courage; but, for once, he had it. There was a bad moment, an instant’s agony of hesitation, when the thing seemed madly reckless, possibly ruinous; his whole career might conceivably be wrecked by it; the shape of the possible catastrophe hung huge before him. To act or not to act: there was the question. But the question was no sooner formulated than decided. He sprang out of bed, slid his feet into his slippers, went to his door, opened it, listened intently for a second or two, and finding the hallway deserted, he stepped forth. He proceeded without further hesitation to the door of the next room. His heart was beating painfully—he was in the most terrible funk he had ever known—but destiny now had him fairly in her grasp. He raised a trembling hand and knocked.

There was no answer; but he heard, within the room, the creak of the bed; and then slow footsteps—footsteps that sounded frightened and reluctant—came toward him, the key was turned in the lock, the door most cautiously opened. And Hamerton faced the most stupendous surprise of his life.

A young man—a German young man, clad in a grotesque old-fashioned night-shirt—stood before him, very obviously shivering with fright. They stared at each other—“goggle-eyed” (as Hamerton put it) with astonishment. And while they stared, caught in this extraordinary predicament, alone together in a hostile and inscrutable world, Hamerton found himself, all of a sudden, feeling very superior and extremely angry.

“Were you knocking on my wall?” he said, belligerently.

“Wie?” said the German.

“I said, were you knocking on my wall?” Hamerton’s voice rose to a higher note, and he gave with his hand in the air a quick knock at an imaginary wall.

The frightened German youth shook his head, his eyes wide open and appalled.

“Ich verstehe nicht,” he said stupidly.

Hamerton stared at him furious. There seemed to be nothing to do or say. Should he slap the fellow’s face, knock him down? He desired to do something like this, something really outrageous; but the suitable action didn’t occur to him. He merely stared, therefore, with concentrated contempt for any such worm; at the same time, in the back of his mind, feeling that the whole thing was extraordinarily funny, but that he wouldn’t for the world admit it. They continued to stare at each other; the grotesque scene protracted itself timelessly. And then, turning on his heel, “Oh, Hell,” he said, and stalked with extravagant dignity back to his room.

And the moment was over.

It was half past ten on a night in May, and the three medical students had just been through their notes in histology for the third time. The windows were open, and a sound of dripping could be heard on the stone window-ledge; the desultory drip, gradually slowing, that succeeds a spring shower. One of the men lay face down on a couch, his face pillowed sideways on his bare arms. His eyes were shut. The other two sat in fumed-oak Morris chairs, with their legs stretched out before them, and smoked cigarettes. Empty glasses stood on the floor beside them. They had taken off their coats.

“Well, what do you say, Bill? How about it?”

“I guess it’s stopped raining.”

“Sure, it ain’t gonna rine no more.… Let’s go.”

Bill, retying his loosened necktie, got up and went to the window. He rested his freckled hands on the sill and leaned out.

“Yes—it’s stopped, all right. And the stars are coming out.…” He turned around, looked down at the man on the couch, and idly dislodged a cushion from the couch-arm, so that it fell on the sleeper’s face. “And, by God! I couldn’t learn another symptom if I was paid a million dollars for it. Wake up, Pete.”