The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

THE MOMENT

My friend Ward Hamerton and old Miss Thingumabob (he always referred to her thus) had been sent to Italy by some museum or other to examine and catalogue and describe and photograph certain Etruscan ruins and relics. I don’t know exactly where these things were, or what they were, or whether they were worth the trouble. All I do know is that Hamerton found it a great trial. He did the photography—Miss Thingumabob did the rest. They traveled furiously from one part of Italy to another, riding all day in trains, trying to keep down their expenses, putting up at cheap and obscure hotels. Hamerton was bored to death. He hated it. He disliked photography—God knows how he happened to have got so singular a job. And Miss Thingumabob was by no means an ideal companion. She was about twice his age—white-haired, distinguished-looking, ultra-refined, horribly intellectual. After a hard day’s work of travel and photography, running from museum to museum and ruin to ruin, she would be prepared, and eager, at dinner, to discuss the descent of Van Gogh from Cimabue, or the moral implications in the later novels of Henry James. Hamerton would reply in monosyllables, drinking the wine of the country in great quantity. She was awfully nice—he kept saying to me—awfully nice; but she was a holy terror. And the worst of it was that he couldn’t, in decency, abandon her. He couldn’t run off by himself and have a good time; he had to be a gentleman. If Hamerton had been more dashing, more adventurous—but then there would have been no point to this humble story. Hamerton was nothing of the sort. He was shy, finicky, something of a highbrow; and if he nourished in his bosom a secret desire to be something of a Don Juan, he kept it a very dark secret. At any rate, from Miss Thingumabob.

He did nourish such an ambition—but alas, the whirlwind of official duties and the constant and zealous companionship of his aged Egeria made it hopeless. He encountered a charming creature in a train coming from Rome to Naples—perfectly ravishing. But although he did manage to engage her in talk, what could it possibly amount to, under the bright maternal eye of Miss Thingumabob? She too had taken part in the conversation: and of course that had been the end of it. The talk had at once taken an official and “tourist” turn. The subtle something-or-other, which had been on the point of being born, had been slain outright. The ravishing creature had withdrawn to her Baedeker again. And Hamerton cursed.

That was only one of several such incidents. After a series of them, he positively hated the sight of ravishing creatures: an obvious enough case of sour grapes. If a lovely young thing asked him the way to the Coliseum, or the baths of Caracalla, he was downright rude to her; and at the discovery of a bevy of beautiful girls who were dining at the next table to his and Miss Thingumabob’s in the hotel, he would become as morose as a hypochondriac. He would listen in torment to the delicious voices, the charming and fatuous conversation, the amusing attempts to speak Italian with the bored old waiter, who vastly preferred to conduct the meal in English; and then, when the agony became no longer endurable, he would plead a headache to old Miss Thingumabob and retire to his room. His trip to Italy was being ruined. Absolutely ruined.

He bore it, nevertheless, with fortitude; and he was careful (he insisted) to remain scrupulously polite to his extraordinary companion. What else, indeed, could he do? Duty was duty, the work had to be done, but he was not the sort that sulks. He was unhappy, but he behaved like a perfect gentleman. Day after day, therefore, they rushed from place to place, cataloguing and photographing; and he simply tried to forget that this was, after all, Italy, attempting to see it as simply a corner of his blessed museum. And he comforted himself with the thought that some day, at last, it would come to an end.

It did: but not before it had culminated, for Hamerton, in what he termed a “moment.” He had a singular theory about moments—he believed that one’s life consisted of at most half a dozen moments of supreme experience, or perhaps not even as many as that. There might be nothing to show for these moments—they might be simply an instant of acute awareness, or of misery, or of exaltation. You never knew when they were coming, or whether you would have the courage to seize them by the tail as they flew. A great deal depended on this matter of courage. Hamerton said that it was a source of perpetual anxiety to him that he was rather timid about these things. Several such crises had come and gone, and he had remained supine before them—paralyzed, hypnotized, fascinated, but unable to act or to feel with sufficient speed and self-forgetfulness. The chief requisite was a complete and glorious recklessness, a sublime willingness to risk one’s whole life, one’s sanity, one’s everything; and all for the very dubious pleasure of being able to say, afterward, that you had so jeopardized yourself. He told me of one such moment which had occurred when he had just reached the ripe age of ten. He was enthralled, at that time, by the sea and by ships. He used to haunt the wharves of the New England seaport town in which he lived, keeping, in a notebook, a list of the names of all the ships he encountered. One day he talked with the captain of a coal barge, and asked whether small boys like himself ever got a chance to go to sea. The captain surprised him by saying that if he would bring with him half a dozen books and fifteen or twenty old magazines (the captain seems to have been something of a reader) he could come aboard and sail to Norfolk, Virginia. Hamerton was electrified. He spent the night in a fever, selected six books, tied up a bundle of old magazines (which he found in the attic), and felt that he was already as good as at sea. But somehow or other he never went near that particular wharf till the barge had gone. And the moment was irretrievably lost.

That was the kind of thing he meant; and his singular trip to Italy was destined, for all its unpromising beginning, to provide him with a really first-rate example—a brilliant and unique specimen. It happened in Rome. He and Miss Thingumabob used Rome as a kind of “support”—they would dash away from it to some obscure hilltown, where they had heard rumors of some priceless item hidden away in a church crypt, and then, having tracked down this phoenix of Etruscan beauty, or discovered it to be a myth, they would dash back again. They always stayed at the same hotel, a small one in the Piazza Barberini, which had the great advantage of being cheap. They had been to it a half dozen times, in all; and on the eve of their final departure from Italy they returned to it once more. On this particular occasion they had come from Assisi, and the return journey had been brightened and blighted for Hamerton, in about equal proportions, by the fact that the train was filled, simply filled, with beautiful English girls. There were about fifteen of them, and they were all entrancing—very free-and-easy, smoking cigarettes, sophisticated, charmingly dressed. They literally swarmed over the train, chattering like sparrows. Hamerton had gone to sleep, finally, in sheer self-defense. With old Miss Thingumabob sitting opposite him, bolt upright, mercilessly eager to assimilate every detail of Italian life as revealed in the sliding landscape (and terrifyingly intelligent about it), he couldn’t bear to look at them.

Imagine his delight and horror, therefore, when he discovered, on arriving at the Hotel Concordia, that the fifteen beautiful English girls, every one of them, had preceded him. There they were, swarming around the bewildered old concierge, quarreling with three or four taxi drivers, darting in and out of the portico—they had simply taken possession of the poor old Concordia. It was exactly, he said, as if a flock of Brazilian parakeets, or birds of Paradise, vociferous of tongue and hued like the rainbow, should suddenly take possession of a bare little tree in the Public Gardens of Boston, Massachusetts; just as brilliant, and just as surprising. The Concordia was at once changed for him. It became a place of more than tropic beauty and luxury—it glowed, it sang, it vibrated, it positively rocked, with color and light. The bare corridors, with their coconut-fiber mats and potted palm trees, had formerly seemed dreary to him; but now they were full of mystery and wonder; overtones hummed in them, perfumes raced through them; and he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if the gray walls had suddenly blossomed. The hotel had acquired a soul.

For the first time since the arrival in Italy, he was ridiculously happy. He sang as he washed in the little washbowl which was all that his room afforded; it was the same room that he had once before, but now he felt an outburst of deep affection for it. He looked out into the dark courtyard at the back, surrounded by tenements with high balconies, and saw the camellia tree standing there in the moonlight. There it was, in bloom, and there, as usual, were the innumerable cats who used its shadow for their nocturnal assignations. How he had hated those cats! But now, he almost loved them. An indefinable magic, emanating from the fifteen English girls, had touched and altered everything. He put on a clean shirt and the most splendid of his neckties, and sauntered down to the dining room, feeling exalted and powerful, like Jason approaching the golden fleece.

But alas, everything went wrong. Miss Thingumabob had forestalled him; she had already arrived, and she had already taken a table; she was sitting there, dressed in decent black, like the Sibyl herself; and worst of all, the Brazilian parakeets had been assigned to the long table at the extreme opposite end of the long room. There was absolutely nothing to be done about it—he groaned to himself and sat down; and for once he allowed his feelings to overcome his manners. He was unable to say a word. Miss Thingumabob tried one topic after another, with her usual unconquerable brightness, but to all of them he was wearily unreceptive. The Coliseum by moonlight, she suggested? No, he was too tired. A concert at the Augusteo? Heaven forbid; he was sick of these Italian audiences, and their childish habit of booing and hissing and jumping up on their seats. He never wanted to see another Italian as long as he lived. A café in the Piazza di Venezia, with perhaps a cassata ala Siciliana? Miss Thingumabob obviously played what she thought was a trump card in this, for she knew his passion for cassatas; but even to this he turned a deaf ear. He wanted his parakeets—he wanted to sit near them and see them, he wanted to listen to their delicious gossiping chatter, to see them come and go in the lounge, reading guidebooks and magazines, pulling the bright silk scarfs over their shoulders, smoking their English cigarettes, and glancing eagerly about them with their beautiful English-blue eyes. That was all he wanted—and he wanted to be able to do it alone. He wanted to be rid of Miss Thingumabob. He urged her, therefore, to go along to the Augusteo—she could take a cab, and it would be quite simple and quite safe. Perfectly. He found himself becoming really oratorical on the subject, in the hope of making it obvious to Miss Thingumabob that he wanted, for once, to be by himself. Perhaps, if she realized this, she would be offended, and go to her room. But he had no luck. She merely sighed and smiled and gave him up; realized, with excessive reasonableness and good nature, that he must, after so hard a day, be very tired; it would indeed be better for both of them to spend a quiet evening in the library, talking things over.

And they did so. They marched unswervingly through the lounge—where the parakeets were already chattering and preening and splashing their bright colors about them—and settled grimly in the deserted library. Poor Hamerton had never been I so miserable in his life: he wanted to die. Miss Thingumabob got out her notebook and went over all the details of the work at Assisi, pitilessly. Items were checked off, accounts were balanced, the expense list was verified for the fifth time, with emendations and queries (Miss Thingumabob had a terrific sense of honor with regard to the expense account), and when ten o’clock came Hamerton was in a state of suppressed fury. He yawned frankly and said he was going to bed, if she would forgive him. She forgave him sweetly, and off he went. He sneaked into the lounge, but alas, the birds had flown. The room was empty, barren, dead. The ashtrays were littered with cigarette-ends, the air smelt faintly of Turkish tobacco, but otherwise as if the stale room had never known any such seraphic visitation. Defeated, Hamerton crept off to bed. A last despairing hope that he might at least encounter one or two of the parakeets on his way upstairs, or passing through the winding corridors which led to his room, was frustrated. He didn’t meet a soul, or hear a sound. He paused outside his door, with his hand on the knob, as if waiting for some blinding apocalypse, but no apocalypse was vouchsafed. The Hotel Concordia had resumed its natural deadness.

He undressed slowly, with many excursions to the open window to survey the camellia tree and the Roman cats—looked longingly at the Roman moon, resting his hands on the stone sill—listened resignedly to the fragments of Italian conversation which came to him from the adjacent balconies. But now, the subtle flavor of these things was again lost. The magic had departed. The cats were cats; the courtyard was a smelly dank hole, none too clean; the loud conversations of the Italians were a nuisance. He crawled into bed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

Almost at once, it seemed, he was awakened. He was wide awake, but at first could discover no reason for it. Something had happened, he knew, but he was not aware what it was. Was it a knock on his door?… Had someone called his name or spoken to him?… Or was it merely the usual crying of cats?… He lay and listened, with his head raised from the pillow, and then the sound was repeated: it was a distinct knock on the wall beside his bed. It sounded startlingly near; and then he remembered that when he had occupied this room before he had noticed this peculiarity. The wall which partitioned this room from the next was extremely thin, and the bed in the next room rested against the wall at exactly the same point as his own. He had been able to hear the nocturnal twistings and turnings of his fellow-sleeper with extraordinary distinctness, a distinctness which at the time he had thought distressing. But now, a sudden and deliriously exciting idea burst into blossom in his mind with something of the beautiful violence of that mythical aloe which blooms only once in a hundred years, and then with a clap of thunder. Suppose this should be one of the fifteen? Good heavens. He went over in his mind as many of the other guests as he could recall—but there was practically nobody else in the hotel. Nobody. The chances were at least ten to one in his favor. At the mere thought, he broke into a miraculous perspiration and began to tremble. The knock had not sounded like an accident: not in the least. But perhaps it would be as well to make certain. He lay there, propped up on one elbow, scarcely breathing, and waited to see if it would be repeated. And almost at once, it was. There was a tap, and then a pause, and then another tap. And then the midnight silence was resumed, a silence only broken up by the distant wail of a cat.

Immediately, Hamerton became a being transformed. His lethargy was gone, his wits were sharpened to a point almost excruciatingly incandescent, a divine fury of excitement possessed him. His heart began beating so violently that it shook the bed. He nerved himself, listened a moment, as if indeed he expected to hear the breathing of his mysterious tête-à-tête, who lay so near to him and who was nevertheless unknown—and then, lifting his hand, gave an answering knock—just one deliberate knock, neither too soft nor too loud: a knock that might be an accident (in case it should turn out that he had been mistaken in his assumption) but that would, on the other hand, be considered an unmistakable reply, if his assumption should turn out to have been correct.

The assumption was correct. The reply came without hesitation—three knocks this time—and Hamerton, exulting, knocked three times in answer. There could now no longer be the slightest question, on either side, of the fact that a deliberate, and marvelous, and profoundly exciting conversation was in progress. Confessedly, they had become Pyramus and Thisbe. Hamerton moved as close to the wall as he could get: he was determined to miss nothing. He wanted to hear every sound—every rustle, every whisper—even, if possible, the creature’s breathing. If she should murmur something, for instance, or give a little cough—? It would be horrible to ignore an overture of that sort. He pressed himself against the wall, therefore, with a zeal that was almost amorous, as if the wall itself were the body of his beloved, and then lay perfectly still, in an agony of suspense. Would she continue this extraordinary conversation? Or would she drop it at this point, having already sufficiently amused herself with it? Perhaps she was merely teasing him, merely pulling his leg. On the other hand, it was just as possible that she had been overcome by timidity, at this point—on discovering that her vis-à-vis was, if anything, too eagerly responsive. And then again, it was possible that she now felt that the initiative, for a moment, should pass to him. It was perhaps his turn to commit himself.…

He waited another moment, accordingly, during which a church clock struck one, and it seemed as if all the cats in Rome yowled in despondent unison; and then, trembling, he raised his hand, poised it, and gave one loud thump on the wall with his knuckles. There was a perceptible pause and then the answer came: this time the knock was rather a gentle one, rather remote; as if the lady had decided that she might have appeared a little too forward, and had wished to be more modest. As if, indeed, she were saying “Oh, well,—perhaps, after all—” or “This is really rather silly of us, don’t you think?—and we’d far better be going to sleep.” Hamerton was immediately aware of all these implications. He concluded that he must himself, at this point, mitigate his eagerness. He controlled himself, counted fifty, and then gave a tap even more fugitive and half-hearted than hers had been—a tap in which he contrived to say: “I too am a modest violet. Did you think I would wish to be a nuisance to you? Heaven forbid!”

He had no doubt that the reply to this would be instantly and urgently reassuring: but in this he was mistaken. His beloved proved herself more femininely subtle, at this juncture, than he had given her credit for being. She made him wait. A minute went by—two minutes—three—and then four. An appalling chasm of silence opened in the night. There wasn’t a sound, not a ghost of a sound. Hamerton felt himself growing old, white-haired, tottering to the grave. Should he repeat his summons? Did she mean by this that he ought to assume a masculine role, be importunate, confess frankly and uncontrolledly his passionate eagerness? Was she going to sleep—or had she already, bored, fallen asleep?… His thoughts raced in a panic, and he resolved to be really bold. He smote the wall three times with gusto, and then held his breath. No answer. He began to sweat with mortification: a feeling of genuine and profound embarrassment came over him. He had been a fool—an idiot—a blithering idiot. Good Lord. How she must be laughing at him. She had been leading him on, all this while, and now she was going to ignore him, hard-heartedly and implacably. It was even possible—wasn’t it?—that he had imagined the whole thing. Her first knock had been an accident. It was only upon hearing his serious reply to it that she had taken the thing up, and then only with the idea of humiliating him. He relaxed a little and very gingerly allowed himself to fall away from his tense position against the wall. He too would pretend that his participation in the exchange had been accidental. He would give a casual and meaningless thump or two, as if it were merely the natural collision of one who was restless in his sleep, and then withdraw entirely.…

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.