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-calclass="underline" 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.