—her floating vestA polished buckle clasped—her careless locksIn simple knot were gathered—Trans. byHenry King.He could not recall the verses word for word, but their content was present in his mind; and from his store of knowledge was added the fact that Cleopatra was the name of the young wife of Œneus’ son, Meleager. More probably this had nothing to do with him, but with the Greek poet, Meleager. Thus, under the glowing sun of the Campagna, there was a mythological-literary-historical-archæological juggling in his head.When he had passed the house of Castor and Pollux and that of the Centaur, he stood before the Casa di Meleagro from whose threshold therelooked up at him, still discernible, the inlaid greeting “Ave.” On the wall of the vestibule, Mercury was handing Fortuna a pouch filled with money; that probably indicated, allegorically, the riches and other fortunate circumstances of the former dweller. Behind this opened up the inner court, the centre of which was occupied by a marble table supported by three griffins.Empty and silent, the room lay there, appearing absolutely unfamiliar to the man, as he entered, awaking no memory that he had already been here, yet he then recalled it, for the interior of the house offered a deviation from that of the other excavated buildings of the city. The peristyle adjoined the inner court on the other side of the balcony toward the rear—not in the usual way, but at the left side and on that account was of greater extent and more splendid appearance than any other in Pompeii. It was framed by a colonnade supported by two dozen pillars painted red on the lower, and white on the upper half. These lent solemnity to the great, silent space; here in the centre was a spring with a beautifully wrought enclosure, which served as a fish-pool. Apparently the house must have been the dwelling of an estimable man of culture and artistic sense.Norbert’s gaze passed around, and he listened. Yet nowhere about did anything stir, nor was the slightest sound audible. Amidst this cold stone there was no longer a breath; if Gradiva had gone into Meleager’s house, she had already dissolved again into nothing. At the rear of the peristyle was another room, anœcus, the former dining-room, likewise surrounded on three sides by pillarspainted yellow, which shimmered from a distance in the light, as if they were encrusted with gold. Between them, however, shone a red far more dazzling than that from the walls, with which no brush of antiquity, but young Nature of the present had painted the ground. The former artistic pavement lay completely ruined, fallen to decay and weather worn; it was May which exercised here again its most ancient dominion and covered the wholeœcus, as it did at the time in many houses of the buried city, with red, flowering, wild poppies, whose seeds the winds had carried thither, and these had sprouted in the ashes. It was a wave of densely crowded blossoms, or so it appeared, although, in reality, they stood there motionless, for Atabulus found no way down to them, but only hummed away softly above. Yet the sun cast such flaming, radiant vibrations down upon them that it gave an impression of red ripples in a pond undulating hither and thither. Norbert Hanold’s eyes had passed unheeding over a similar sight in other houses, but here he was strangely thrilled by it. The dream-flower grown at the edge of Lethe filled the space, and Hypnos lay stretched in their midst dispensing sleep, which dulls the senses, with the saps which night has gathered in the red chalices. It seemed to the man who had entered the dining-room through the portico of the peristyle as if he felt his temples touched by the invisible slumber wand of the old vanquisher of gods and men, but not with heavy stupor; only a dreamily sweet loveliness floated about his consciousness. At the same time, however, he still remained in control of his feet and stepped along by the wallof the former dining-room from which gazed old pictures: Paris, awarding the apple; a satyr, carrying in his hand an asp and tormenting a young Bacchante with it.But there again suddenly, unforeseen—only about five paces away from him—in the narrow shadow cast down by a single piece of the upper part of the dining-room portico, which still remained in a state of preservation, sitting on the low steps between two of the yellow pillars was a brightly clad woman who now raised her head. In that way she disclosed to the unnoticed arrival, whose footstep she had apparently just heard, a full view of her face, which produced in him a double feeling, for it appeared to him at the same time unknown and yet also familiar, already seen or imagined; but by his arrested breathing and his heart palpitations, he recognized, unmistakably, to whom it belonged. He had found what he was looking for, what had driven him unconsciously to Pompeii; Gradiva continued her visible existence in the noonday spirit hour and sat here before him, as, in the dream, he had seen her on the steps of the Temple of Apollo. Spread out on her knees lay something white, which he was unable to distinguish clearly; it seemed to be a papyrus sheet, and a red poppy-blossom stood out from it in marked contrast.In her face surprise was expressed; under the lustrous, brown hair and the beautiful, alabaster brow, two rarely bright, starlike eyes looked at him with questioning amazement. It required only a few moments for him to recognize the conformity of her features with those of the profile. They must be thus, viewed from the front, and therefore, atfirst glance, they had not been really unfamiliar to him. Near to, her white dress, by its slight tendency to yellow, heightened still more the warm colour; apparently it consisted of a fine, extremely soft, woollen material, which produced abundant folds, and the scarf around her head was of the same. Below, on the nape of the neck, appeared again the shimmering, brown hair artlessly gathered in a single knot; at her throat, under a dainty chin, a little gold clasp held her gown together.Norbert Hanold dimly perceived that involuntarily he had raised his hand to his soft Panama hat and removed it; and now he said in Greek, “Are you Atalanta, the daughter of Jason, or are you a descendant of the family of the poet, Meleager?”Without giving an answer, the lady addressed looked at him silently with a calmly wise expression in her eyes, and two thoughts passed through his mind; either her resurrected self could not speak, or she was not of Greek descent and was ignorant of the language. He therefore substituted Latin for it and asked: “Was your father a distinguished Pompeiian citizen of Latin origin?”To this she was equally silent, only about her delicately curved lips there was a slight quiver as if she were repressing a burst of laughter. Now a feeling of fright came upon him; apparently she was sitting there before him like a silent image, a phantom to whom speech was denied. Consternation at this discovery was stamped fully and distinctly upon his features.Then, however, her lips could no longer resist the impulse; a real smile played about them andat the same time a voice sounded from between them, “If you wish to speak with me, you must do so in German.”That was really remarkable from the mouth of a Pompeiian woman who had died two centuries before, or would have been so for a person hearing it in a different state of mind. Yet every oddity escaped Norbert because of two waves of emotion which had rushed over him, one because Gradiva possessed the power of speech, and the other was one which had been forced from his inmost being by her voice. It sounded as clear as was her glance; not sharp, but reminiscent of the tones of a bell, her voice passed through the sunny silence over the blooming poppy-field, and the young archæologist suddenly realized that he had already heard it thus in his imagination, and involuntarily he gave audible expression to his feeling, “I knew that your voice sounded like that.”One could read in her countenance that she was seeking comprehension of something, but was not finding it. To his last remark she now responded, “How could you? You have never talked with me.”To him it was not at all remarkable that she spoke German, and, according to present usage, addressed him formally; as she did it, he understood completely that it could not have happened otherwise, and he answered quickly, “No—not talked—but I called to you when you lay down to sleep and stood near you then—your face was as calmly beautiful as if it were of marble. May I beg you—rest it again on the step in that way.”While he was speaking, something peculiar hadoccurred. A golden butterfly, faintly tinged with red on the inner edge of its upper wing, fluttered from the poppies toward the pillars, flitted a few times about Gradiva’s head and then rested on the brown, wavy hair above her brow. At the same time, however, she rose, slender and tall, for she stood up with deliberate haste, curtly and silently directed at Norbert another glance, in which something suggested that she considered him demented; then, thrusting her foot forward, she walked out in her characteristic way along the pillars of the old portico. Only fleetingly visible for a while, she finally seemed to have sunk into the earth.He stood up, breathless, as if stunned; yet with heavy understanding he had grasped what had occurred before his eyes. The noonday ghost hour was over, and in the form of a butterfly, a winged messenger had come up from the asphodel meadows of Hades to admonish the departed one to return. For him something else was associated with this, although in confused indistinctness. He knew that the beautiful butterfly of Mediterranean countries bore the name Cleopatra, and this had also been the name of Caledonian Meleager’s young wife who, in grief over his death, had given herself as sacrifice to those of the lower world.From his mouth issued a call to the girl who was departing, “Are you coming here again to-morrow in the noon hour?” Yet she did not turn around, gave no answer, and disappeared after a few moments in the corner of the dining-room behind the pillar. Now a compelling impulse suddenly incited him to hasten after her, but herbright dress was no longer visible anywhere; glowing with the hot sun’s rays, the Casa di Meleagro lay about him motionless and silent; only Cleopatra hovered on her red, shimmering, golden wings, making slow circles again above the multitude of poppies.When and how he had returned to the “ingresso,” Norbert Hanold could not recall; in his memory he retained only the idea that his appetite had peremptorily demanded to be appeased, though very tardily, at the “Diomed,” and then he had wandered forth aimlessly on the first good street, had arrived at the beach north of Castellamare, where he had seated himself on a lava-block, and the sea-wind had blown around his head until the sun had set about half-way between Monte Sant’ Angelo above Sorrento and Monte Epomeo on Ischia. Yet, in spite of this stay of at least several hours by the water, he had obtained from the fresh air there no mental relief, but was returning to the hotel in the same condition in which he had left it. He found the other guests busily occupied with dinner, had a little bottle of Vesuvio wine brought to him in a corner of the room, viewed the faces of those eating, and listened to their conversations. From the faces of all, as well as from their talk, it appeared to him absolutely certain that in the noon hour none of them had either met or spoken to a dead Pompeiian woman who had returned again briefly to life. Of course, all this had been a foregone conclusion, as they had all been at lunch at that time; why andwherefore, he himself could not state, yet after a while he went over to the competitor of the “Diomed,” “Hotel Suisse,” sat down there also in a corner, and, as he had to order something, likewise before a little bottle of Vesuvio, and here he gave himself over to the same kind of investigations with eye and ear. They led to the same results but also to the further conclusion that he now knew by sight all the temporary, living visitors of Pompeii. To be sure, this effected an increase of his knowledge which he could hardly consider an enrichment, but from it he experienced a certain satisfying feeling that, in the two hostelries, no guest, either male or female, was present with whom, by means of sight and hearing, he had not entered into a personal, even if one-sided, relation. Of course, in no way had the absurd supposition entered his mind that he might possibly meet Gradiva in one of the two hotels, but he could have taken his oath that no one was staying in them who possessed, in the remotest way, any trace of resemblance to her. During his observations, he had occasionally poured wine from his little bottle to his glass, and had drunk from time to time; and when, in this manner, the former had gradually become empty, he rose and went back to the “Diomed.” The heavens were now strewn with countless, flashing, twinkling stars, but not in the traditionally stationary way, for Norbert gathered the impression that Perseus, Cassiopeia and Andromeda with some neighbours, bowing lightly hither and thither, were performing a singing dance, and below, on earth, too, it seemed to him that the dark shadows of the tree-tops andbuildings did not stay in the same place. Of course on the ground of this region—unsteady from ancient times—this could not be exactly surprising, for the subterranean glow lurked everywhere, after an eruption, and let a little of itself rise in the vines and grapes from which was pressed Vesuvio, which was not one of Norbert Hanold’s usual evening drinks. He still remembered, however, even if a little of the circular movement of things might be ascribed to the wine, too, that since noon all objects had displayed an inclination to whirl softly about his head, and therefore he found, in the slight increase, nothing new, but only a continuation of the formerly existing conditions. He went up to his room and stood for a little while at the open window, looking over toward the Vesuvius mound, above which now no cone of smoke spread its top, but rather something like the fluctuations of a dark, purple cloak flowed back and forth around it. Then the young archæologist undressed, without having lighted the light, and sought his couch. Yet, as he stretched himself out upon it, it was not his bed at the “Diomed,” but a red poppy-field whose blossoms closed over him like a soft cushion heated by the sun. His enemy, the common house-fly, constrained by darkness to lethargic stupidity, sat fiftyfold above his head, on the wall, and only one moved, even in its sleepiness, by desire to torture, buzzed about his nose. He recognized it, however, not as the absolute evil, the century-old scourge of humanity, for before his eyes it poised like a red-gold Cleopatra.When, in the morning, the sun, with lively assistance from the flies, awoke him, he could notrecall what, besides strange, Ovid-like metamorphoses, had occurred during the night about his bed. Yet doubtless some mystic being, continuously weaving dream-webs, had been sitting beside him, for he felt his head completely overhung and filled with them, so that all ability to think lay inextricably imprisoned in it and only one thing remained in his consciousness; he must again be in Meleager’s house at exactly noon. In this connection, however, a fear overcame him, for if the gatekeepers at the “ingresso” looked at him, they would not let him in. Anyway it was not advisable that he should expose himself to close observation by human eyes. To escape that, there was, for one well informed about Pompeii, a means which was, to be sure, against the rules, but he was not in a condition to grant to legal regulation a determination of his conduct. So he climbed again, as on the evening of his arrival, along the old city-wall, and upon it walked, in a wide semicircle, around the city of ruins to the solitary, unguarded Porta di Nola. Here it was not difficult to get down into the inside and he went, without burdening his conscience very much over the fact that by his autocratic deed he had deprived the administration of a two-lira entrance fee, which he could, of course, let it have later in some other way.Thus, unseen, he had reached an uninteresting part of the city, never before investigated by any one and still mostly unexcavated; he sat down in a secluded, shady nook and waited, now and then drawing his watch to observe the progress of time. Once his glance fell upon something in the distance gleaming, silvery-white, rising from the ashes, butwith his unreliable vision, he was unable to distinguish what it was. Yet involuntarily he was impelled to go up to it and there it stood, a tall, flowering asphodel-plant with white, bell-like blossoms whose seeds the wind had carried thither from outside. It was the flower of the lower world, significant and, as he felt, destined to grow here for his purpose. He broke the slender stem and returned with it to his seat. Hotter and hotter the May sun burned down as on the day before, and finally approached its noonday position; so now he started out through the long Strada di Nola. This lay deathly still and deserted, as did almost all the others; over there to the west all the morning visitors were already crowding again to the Porta Marina and the soup-plates. Only the air, suffused with heat, stirred, and in the dazzling glare the solitary figure of Norbert Hanold with the asphodel branch appeared like that of Hermes, Psyche’s escort, in modern attire, starting out upon the journey to conduct a departed soul to Hades.Not consciously, yet following an instinctive impulse, he found his way through the Strada della Fortuna farther along to the Strada di Mercurio, and turning to the right arrived at the Casa di Meleagro. Just as lifelessly as yesterday, the vestibule, inner court and peristyle received him, and between the pillars of the latter the poppies of the dining-room flamed across to him. As he entered, however, it was not clear to him whether he had been here yesterday or two thousand years ago to seek from the owner of the house some information of great importance to archæology;what it was, however, he could not state, and besides, it seemed to him, even though in contradiction to the above, that all the science of antiquity was the most purposeless and indifferent thing in the world. He could not understand how a human being could occupy himself with it, for there was only a single thing to which all thinking and investigation must be directed: what is the nature of the physical manifestation of a being like Gradiva, dead and alive at the same time, although the latter was true only in the noon hour of spirits—or had been the day before, perhaps the one time in a century or a thousand years, for it suddenly seemed certain that his return to-day was in vain. He did not meet the girl he was looking for, because she was not allowed to come again until a time when he too would have been dead for many years, and was buried and forgotten. Of course, as he walked now along by the wall below Paris awarding the apple, he perceived Gradiva before him, just as on yesterday, in the same gown, sitting between the same two yellow pillars on the same step. Yet he did not allow himself to be deceived by tricks of imagination, but knew that fancy alone was deceptively depicting before his eyes what he had really seen there the day before. He could not refrain, however, from stopping to indulge in the view of the shadowy apparition created by himself and, without his knowing it, there passed from his lips in a grieved tone the words, “Oh, that you were still alive!”His voice rang out, but, after that, breathless silence again reigned among the ruins of the old dining-room. Yet soon another sounded throughthe vacant stillness, saying, “Won’t you sit down too? You look exhausted.”Norbert Hanold’s heart stood still a moment. His head, however, collected this much reason; a vision could not speak; or was an aural hallucination practising deception upon him? With fixed gaze, he supported himself against the pillar.Then again asked the voice, and it was the one which none other than Gradiva possessed, “Are you bringing me the white flowers?”Dizziness rushed upon him; he felt that his feet no longer supported him, but forced him to be seated; and he slid down opposite her on the step, against the pillar. Her bright eyes were directed toward his face, yet with a different look from the one with which she had gazed at him yesterday when she suddenly rose and went away. In that, something ill-humoured and repellent had spoken; but it had disappeared, as if she had, in the meanwhile, arrived at a different view-point, and an expression of searching inquisitiveness or curiosity had taken its place. Likewise, she spoke with an easy familiarity. As he remained silent, however, to the last question also, she again resumed, “You told me yesterday that you had once called to me when I lay down to sleep and that you had afterwards stood near me; my face was as white as marble. When and where was that? I cannot remember it, and I beg you to explain more exactly.”Norbert had now acquired enough power of speech to answer, “In the night when you sat on the steps of the Temple of Apollo in the Forum and the fall of ashes from Vesuvius covered you.”“So—then. Yes, to be sure—that had not occurred to me, but I might have thought that it would be a case like that. When you said it yesterday, I was not expecting it, and I was utterly unprepared. Yet that happened, if I recall correctly, two thousand years ago. Were you living then? It seems to me you look younger.” She spoke very seriously, but at the end a faint, extremely sweet smile played about her mouth. He hesitated in embarrassment and answered, stuttering slightly, “No, I really don’t believe I was alive in the year 79—it was perhaps—yes, it surely is a psychic condition which is called a dream that transported me into the time of the destruction of Pompeii—but I recognized you again at first glance.”In the expression of the girl sitting opposite him, a few feet away, surprise was apparent, and she repeated in a tone of amazement, “You recognized me again? In the dream? By what?”“At the very first; by your manner of walking.”“Had you noticed that? And have I a special manner of walking?”Her astonishment had grown perceptibly. He replied, “Yes—don’t you realize that? A more graceful one—at least among those now living—does not exist. Yet I recognized you immediately by everything else too, your figure, face, bearing and drapery, for everything agreed most minutely with the bas-relief of you in Rome.”“Ah, really—” she repeated in her former tone—“with the bas-relief of me in Rome. Yes, I hadn’t thought of that either, and at this momentI don’t know exactly—what is it—and you saw it there then?”Now he told her that the sight of it had attracted him so that he had been highly pleased to get a plaster-cast of it in Germany, and that for years it had hung in his room. He observed it daily, and the idea had come to him that it must represent a young Pompeiian girl who was walking on the stepping-stones of a street in her native city; and the dream had confirmed it. Now he knew also that he had been impelled by it to travel here again to see whether he could find some trace of her; and as he had stood yesterday noon at the corner of Strada di Mercurio, she, herself, exactly like her image, had suddenly walked before him across the stepping-stones, as if she were about to go over into the house of Apollo. Then farther along she had recrossed the street and disappeared before the house of Meleager.To this she nodded and said, “Yes, I intended to look up the house of Apollo, but I came here.”He continued, “On that account the Greek poet, Meleager, came to my mind, and I thought that you were one of his descendants and were returning—in the hour which you are allowed—to your ancestral home. When I spoke to you in Greek, however, you did not understand.”“Was that Greek? No, I don’t understand it or I’ve probably forgotten it. Yet as you came again just now, I heard you say something that I could understand. You expressed the wish that some one might still be alive here. Only I did not understand whom you meant by that.”That caused him to reply that, at sight of her,he had believed that it was not really she, but that his imagination was deceptively putting her image before him in the place where he had met her yesterday. At that she smiled and agreed, “It seems that you have reason to be on your guard against an excess of imagination, although, when I have been with you, I never supposed so.” She stopped, however, and added, “What is there peculiar about my way of walking, which you spoke of before?”It was noteworthy that her aroused interest brought her back to that, and he said, “If I may ask——”With that he stopped, for he suddenly remembered with fear that yesterday she had suddenly risen and gone away when he had asked her to lie down to sleep again on that step, as on that of the Temple of Apollo, and, associated darkly with this, there came to him the glance which she had directed upon him in departing. Yet now the calm, friendly expression of her eyes remained, and as he spoke no further, she said, “It was nice that your wish that some one might still be alive concerned me. If you wish to ask anything of me on that account, I will gladly respond.”That overcame his fear, and he replied, “It would make me happy to get a close view of you walking as you do in the bas-relief.”Willingly, without answering, she stood up and walked along between the wall and the pillars. It was the very buoyantly reposeful gait, with the sole raised almost perpendicularly, that was so firmly imprinted on his mind, but for the first time he saw that she wore, below the raised gown, notsandals, but light, sand-coloured shoes of fine leather. When she came back and sat down again silently, he involuntarily started to talk of the difference in her foot-covering from that of the bas-relief. To that she rejoined, “Time, of course, always changes everything, and for the present sandals are not suitable, so I put on shoes, which are a better protection against rain and dust; but why did you ask me to walk before you? What is there peculiar about it?”Her repeated wish to learn this proved her not entirely free from feminine curiosity. He now explained that it was a matter of the peculiarly upright position of the rising foot, as she walked, and he added how for weeks he had tried to observe the gait of modern women on the streets in his native city. Yet it seemed that this beautiful way of walking had been completely lost to them, with the exception, perhaps, of a single one who had given him the impression that she walked in that way. To be sure, he had not been able to establish this fact because of the crowd about her, and he had probably experienced an illusion, for it had seemed to him that her features had resembled somewhat those of Gradiva.“What a shame,” she answered. “For confirmation of the fact would surely have been of great scientific importance, and if you had succeeded, perhaps you would not have needed to take the long journey here; but whom were you just speaking of? Who is Gradiva?”“I have named the bas-relief that, because I didn’t know your real name, and don’t know it yet, either.”This last he added with some hesitancy, and she faltered a moment before replying to the indirect question. “My name is Zoë.”With pained tone the words escaped him: “The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means ‘life.’”“One must adapt himself to the inevitable,” she responded, “and I have long accustomed myself to being dead; but now my time is over for to-day; you have brought the grave-flower with you to conduct me back. So give it to me.”As she rose and stretched forth her slender hand, he gave her the asphodel cluster, but was careful not to touch her fingers. Accepting the flowering branch she said, “I thank you. To those who are more fortunate one gives roses in spring, but for me the flower of oblivion is the right one from your hand. To-morrow I shall be allowed to come here again at this hour. If your way leads you again into the house of Meleager, we can sit together at the edge of the poppies, as we did to-day. On the threshold stands ‘Ave,’ and I say it to you ‘Ave’!”She went out and disappeared, as yesterday, at the turn in the portico, as if she had there sunk into the ground. Everything lay empty and silent again, but, from some distance, there once rang, short and clear, a sound like the merry note of a bird flying over the devastated city. This was stifled immediately, however. Norbert, who had remained behind, looked down at the step where she had just been sitting; there something white shimmered; it seemed to be the papyrus leaf which Gradiva had held on her knees yesterday and hadforgotten to take with her to-day. Yet, as he shyly reached for it, he found it to be a little sketch-book with pencil drawings of the different ruins in several houses of Pompeii. The page next to the last showed a drawing of the griffin-table in the central court of the Casa di Meleagro, and on the last was the beginning of a reproduction of the view across the poppies of the dining-room through the row of pillars of the peristyle. That the departed girl made drawings in a sketch-book of the present mode was as amazing as had been the fact that she expressed her thoughts in German. Yet those were only insignificant prodigies beside the great one of her revivification, and apparently she used the midday hour of freedom to preserve for herself, in their present state, with unusual artistic talent, the surroundings in which she had once lived. The drawings testified to delicately cultivated powers of perception, as each of her words did to a clever intellect; and she had probably often sat by the old griffin-table, so that it was a particularly precious reminder.Mechanically Norbert also went, with the little book, along the portico, and at the place where this turned he noticed in the wall a narrow cleft wide enough to afford, to an unusually slender figure, passage into the adjoining building, and even farther to the Vicolo del Fauno at the other side of the house. Suddenly, however, the idea flashed through his mind that Zoë-Gradiva did not sink into the ground here—that was essentially unreasonable, and he could not understand how he had ever believed it—but went, on this street, back to her tomb. That must be in the Street of Tombs,and rushing forth, he hastened out into the Strada di Mercurio and as far as the gate of Hercules; but when, breathless and reeking with perspiration, he entered this, it was already too late. The broad Strada di Sepolcri stretched out empty and dazzlingly white, only at its extremity, behind the glimmering curtain of radiance, a faint shadow seemed to dissolve uncertainly before the Villa of Diomede.Norbert Hanold passed the second half of the day with a feeling that Pompeii was everywhere, or at least wherever he stopped, veiled in a cloud of mist. It was not grey, gloomy and melancholy as formerly, but rather cheerful and vari-coloured to an extraordinary degree; blue, red and brown, chiefly a light-yellowish white and alabaster white, interwoven with golden threads of sunbeams. This injured neither his power of vision nor that of hearing, only, because of it, thinking was impossible, and that produced a cloud-wall whose effect rivalled the thickest mist. To the young archæologist it seemed almost as if hourly, in an invisible and not otherwise noticeable way, there was brought to him a little bottle of Vesuvio wine, which produced a continuous whirling in his head. From this he instinctively sought to free himself by the use of correctives, on the one hand drinking water frequently, and on the other hand moving about as much and as far as possible. His knowledge of medicine was not comprehensive, but it helped him to the diagnosis that this strange condition must arise from excessive congestion of blood in hishead, perhaps associated with accelerated action of the heart; for he felt the latter—something formerly quite unknown to him—occasionally beating fast against his chest. Otherwise, his thoughts, which could not penetrate into the outer world, were not in the least inactive within, or more exactly, there was only one thought there, which had come into sole possession and carried on a restless, though vain activity. It continually turned about the question of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva might possess, whether during her stay in the house of Meleager she was a corporeal being or only an illusory representation of what she had formerly been. For the former, physical, physiological and anatomical facts seemed to argue that she had at her disposal organs of speech, and could hold a pencil with her fingers. Yet Norbert was overwhelmed with the idea that if he should touch her, even lightly place his hand on hers, he would then encounter only empty air. A peculiar impulse urged him to make sure of this, but an equally great timidity hindered him from even thinking of doing it. For he felt that the confirmation of either of the two possibilities must bring with it something inspiring fear. The corporeal existence of the hand would thrill him with horror, and its lack of substance would cause him deep pain.Occupied vainly with this problem, which was impossible to solve scientifically without experiment, he arrived, in the course of his extensive wanderings that afternoon, at the foothills of the big mountain group of Monte Sant’ Angelo, rising south from Pompeii, and here he unexpectedly came upon an elderly man, already grey-bearded,who, from his equipment with all sorts of implements, seemed to be a zoologist or botanist, and appeared to be making a search on a hot, sunny slope. He turned his head as Norbert came close to him, looked at the latter in surprise for a moment and then said, “Are you interested inFaraglionensis? I should hardly have supposed it, but it seems thoroughly probable that they are found, not only in theFaraglioniof Capri, but also dwell permanently on the mainland. The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is really good; I have already used it often with the best of success. Please remain quite still——”The speaker stopped, stepped carefully forward a few paces and, stretched out motionless on the ground, held a little snare, made of a long grass-blade, before a narrow crevice in the rock, from which the blue, chatoyant little head of a lizard peeped. Thus the man remained without the slightest movement, and Norbert Hanold turned about noiselessly behind him and returned by the way he had come. It seemed to him dimly that he had already seen the face of the lizard-hunter once, probably in one of the two hotels; to this fact the latter’s manner pointed. It was hardly credible what foolishly remarkable purposes could cause people to make the long trip to Pompeii; happy that he had succeeded in so quickly ridding himself of the snare-layer, and being again able to direct his thoughts to the problem of corporeal reality or unreality, he started on the return. Yet a side street misled him once to a wrong turn and took him, instead of to the west boundary, to the east end of the extensive old city-wall; buriedin thought, he did not notice the mistake until he had come right up to a building which was neither the “Diomed” nor the “Hotel Suisse.” In spite of this it bore the sign of an hotel; near by he recognized the ruins of the large Pompeiian amphitheatre, and the memory came to him that near this latter there was another hotel, the “Albergo del Sole,” which, on account of its remoteness from the station, was sought out by only a few guests, and had remained unknown to even him. The walk had made him hot; besides, the cloudy whirling in his head had not diminished; so he stepped in through the open door and ordered the remedy deemed useful by him for blood congestion, a bottle of lime-water. The room stood empty except, of course, for the fly-visitors gathered in full numbers, and the unoccupied host availed himself of the opportunity to recommend highly his house and the excavated treasures it contained. He pointed suggestively to the fact that there were, near Pompeii, people at whose places there was not a single genuine piece among the many objects offered for sale, but that all were imitations, while he, satisfying himself with a smaller number, offered his guests only things undoubtedly genuine. For he acquired no articles which he himself had not seen brought to the light of day, and, in the course of his eloquence, he revealed that he had also been present when they had found near the Forum the young lovers who had clasped each other in firm embrace when they realized their inevitable destruction, and had thus awaited death. Norbert had already heard of this discovery, but had shrugged his shoulders about it as a fabulous invention ofsome especially imaginative narrator, and he did so now, too, when the host brought in to him, as authentic proof, a metal brooch encrusted with green patina, which, in his presence, had been gathered with the remains of the girl from the ashes. When the arrival at the “Sun Hotel” took it in his own hand, however, the power of imagination exercised such ascendency over him that suddenly, without further critical consideration, he paid for it the price asked from English people, and, with his acquisition, hastily left the “Albergo del Sole,” in which, after another turn, he saw in an open window, nodding down, an asphodel branch covered with white blossoms, which had been placed in a water-glass; and without needing any logical connection, it rushed through his mind, at the sight of the grave-flower, that it was an attestation of the genuineness of his new possession.This he viewed with mingled feelings of excitement and shyness, keeping now to the way along the city-wall to Porta Marina. Then it was no fairy tale that a couple of young lovers had been excavated near the Forum in such an embrace, and there at the Apollo temple he had seen Gradiva lie down to sleep, but only in a dream; that he knew now quite definitely; in reality she might have gone on still farther from the Forum, met some one and died with him.From the green brooch between his fingers a feeling passed through him that it had belonged to Zoë-Gradiva, and had held her dress closed at the throat. Then she was the beloved fiancée, perhaps the young wife of him with whom she had wished to die.It occurred to Norbert Hanold to hurl the brooch away. It burned his fingers as if it had become glowing, or more exactly, it caused him the pain such as he had felt at the idea that he might put his hand on that of Gradiva and encounter only empty air.Reason, nevertheless, asserted the upper hand; he did not allow himself to be controlled by imagination against his will. However probable it might be, there was still lacking invincible proof that the brooch had belonged to her and that it had been she who had been discovered in the young man’s arms. This judgment made it possible for him to breathe freely, and when at the dawn of twilight he reached the “Diomed,” his long wandering had brought to his sound constitution need of physical refreshment. Not without appetite did he devour the rather Spartan evening meal which the “Diomed,” in spite of its Argive origin, had adopted, and he then noticed two guests newly-arrived in the course of the afternoon. By appearance and language they marked themselves as Germans, a man and a woman; they both had youthful, attractive features endowed with intellectual expressions; their relation to each other could not be determined, yet, because of a certain resemblance, Norbert decided that they were brother and sister. To be sure the young man’s fair hair differed in colour from her light-brown tresses. In her gown she wore a red Sorrento rose, the sight of which, as he looked across from his corner, stirred something in his memory without his being able to think what it was. The couple were the first people he had met on his journey who seemed possibly congenial.They talked with one another, over a little bottle, in not too plainly audible tones, nor in cautious whisperings, apparently sometimes about serious things and sometimes about gay things, for at times there passed over her face a half-laughing expression which was very becoming to her, and aroused the desire to participate in their conversation, or perhaps might have awakened it in Norbert, if he had met them two days before in the room otherwise populated only by Anglo-Americans. Yet he felt that what was passing through his mind stood in too strong contrast to the happy naïveté of the couple about whom there undeniably lay not the slightest cloud, for they doubtless were not meditating profoundly over the essential nature of a girl who had died two thousand years ago, but, without any weariness, were taking pleasure in an enigmatical problem of their life of the present. His condition did not harmonize with that; on the one hand he seemed superfluous to them, and on the other, he recoiled from an attempt to start an acquaintance with them, for he had a dark feeling that their bright, merry eyes might look through his forehead into his thoughts and thereby assume an expression as if they did not consider him quite in his right mind. Therefore he went up to his room, stood, as yesterday, at the window, looking over to the purple night-mantle of Vesuvius, and then he lay down to rest. Exhausted, he soon fell asleep and dreamed, but remarkably nonsensically. Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a trap out of a blade of grass in order to catch a lizard, and she said, “Please stay quite still—my colleague is right; the method is reallygood, and she has used it with the greatest success.”Norbert Hanold became conscious in his dream that it was actually the most utter madness, and he cast about to free himself from it. He succeeded in this by the aid of an invisible bird, who seemingly uttered a short, merry call, and carried the lizard away in its beak; afterwards everything disappeared.On awakening he remembered that in the night a voice had said that in the spring one gave roses, or rather this was recalled to him through his eyes, for his gaze, passing down from the window, came upon a bright bush of red flowers. They were of the same kind as those which the young lady had worn in her bosom, and when he went down he involuntarily plucked a couple and smelled of them. In fact, there must be something peculiar about Sorrento roses, for their fragrance seemed to him not only wonderful, but quite new and unfamiliar, and at the same time he felt that they had a somewhat liberating effect upon his mind. At least they freed him from yesterday’s timidity before the gatekeepers, for he went, according to directions, in through the “ingresso” to Pompeii, paid double the amount of admission fee, and quickly struck out upon streets which took him from the vicinity of other visitors. The little sketch-book from the house of Meleager he carried along with the green brooch and the red roses, but the fragrance of the latter had made him forget to eat breakfast, and his thoughts were not in the present, but were directed exclusively to the noonhour, which was still far off; he had to pass the remaining interval, and for this purpose he entered now one house, now another, as a result of which activity the idea probably occurred to him that Gradiva had also walked there often before or even now sought these places out sometimes—his supposition that she was able to do it only at noon was tottering. Perhaps she was at liberty to do it in other hours of the day, possibly even at night in the moonlight. The roses strengthened this supposition strangely for him, when he inhaled, as he held them to his nose; and his deliberations, complaisant, and open to conviction, made advances to this new idea, for he could bear witness that he did not cling to preconceived opinions at all, but rather gave free rein to every reasonable objection, and such there was here without any doubt, not only logically, but desirably valid. Only the question arose whether, upon meeting her then, the eyes of others could see her as a corporeal being, or whether only his possessed the ability to do that. The former was not to be denied, claimed even probability for itself, transformed the desirable thing into quite the opposite, and transported him into a low-spirited, restless mood. The thought that others might also speak to her and sit down near her to carry on a conversation with her made him indignant; to that he alone possessed a claim, or at any rate a privilege, for he had discovered Gradiva, of whom no one had formerly known, had observed her daily, taken her into his life, to a degree, imparted to her his life-strength, and it seemed to him as if he had thereby again lent to her life that she would not have possessed withouthim. Therefore he felt that there devolved upon him a right, to which he alone might make a claim, and which he might refuse to share with anyone else.The advancing day was hotter than the two preceding; the sun seemed to have set her mind to-day on a quite extraordinary feat, and made it regrettable, not only in an archæological, but also in a practical connection, that the water system of Pompeii had lain burst and dried up for two thousand years. Street fountains here and there commemorated it and likewise gave evidence of their informal use by thirsty passers-by, who had, in order to bend forward to the jet, leaned a hand on the marble railing and gradually dug out a sort of trough in the place, in the same way that dropping wears away stone; Norbert observed this at a corner of the Strada della Fortuna, and from that the idea occurred to him that the hand of Zoë-Gradiva, too, might formerly have rested here in that way, and involuntarily he laid his hand into the little hollow, yet he immediately rejected the idea, and felt annoyance at himself that he could have done it; the thought did not harmonize at all with the nature and bearing of the young Pompeiian girl of a refined family; there was something profane in the idea that she could have bent over so and placed her lips on the very pipe from which the plebeians drank with coarse mouths. In a noble sense, he had never seen anything more seemly than her actions and movements; he was frightened by the idea that she might be able to see by looking at him that he had had the incredibly unreasonable thought, for her eyes possessed something penetrating; a couple of times, when he hadbeen with her, the feeling had seized him that she looked as if she were seeking for access to his inmost thoughts and were looking about them as if with a bright steel probe. He was obliged, therefore, to take great care that she might come upon nothing foolish in his mental processes.It was now an hour until noon and in order to pass it, he went diagonally across the street into the Casa del Fauno, the most extensive and magnificent of all the excavated houses. Like no other, it possessed a double inner court and showed, in the larger one, on the middle of the ground, the empty base on which had stood the famous statue of the dancing faun after which the house had been named. Yet there stirred in Norbert Hanold not the least regret that this work of art, valued highly by science, was no longer here, but, together with the mosaic picture of the Battle of Alexander, had been transferred to the Museo Nazionale in Naples; he possessed no further intention nor desire than to let time move along, and he wandered about aimlessly in this place through the large building. Behind the peristyle opened a wider room, surrounded by numerous pillars, planned either as another repetition of the peristyle or as an ornamental garden; so it seemed at present for, like the dining-room of the Casa di Meleagro, it was completely covered with poppy-blooms. Absent-mindedly the visitor passed through the silent dereliction.Then, however, he stopped and rested on one foot; but he found himself not alone here; at some distance his glance fell upon two figures, who first gave the impression of only one, becausethey stood as closely as possible to each other. They did not see him, for they were concerned only with themselves, and, in that corner, because of the pillars, might have believed themselves undiscoverable by any other eyes. Mutually embracing each other, they held their lips also pressed together, and the unsuspected spectator recognized, to his amazement, that they were the young man and woman who had last evening seemed to him the first congenial people encountered on this trip. For brother and sister, their present position, the embrace and the kiss, it seemed to him had lasted too long. So it was surely another pair of lovers, probably a young bridal couple, an Augustus and Gretchen, too.Strange to relate, however, the two latter did not, at the moment, enter Norbert’s mind, and the incident seemed to him not at all ridiculous nor repulsive, rather it heightened his pleasure in them. What they were doing seemed to him as natural as it did comprehensible; his eyes clung to the living picture, more widely open than they ever had been to any of the most admired works of art, and he would have gladly devoted himself for a longer time to his observation. Yet it seemed to him that he had wrongfully penetrated into a consecrated place and was on the point of disturbing a secret act of devotion; the idea of being noticed there struck terror to his heart, and he quickly turned, went back some distance noiselessly on tiptoe and, when he had passed beyond hearing distance, ran out with bated breath and beating heart to the Vicolo del Fauno.When he arrived before the house of Meleager, he did not know whether it was already noon, and did not happen to question his watch about it, but remained before the door, standing looking down with indecision for some time at the “Ave” in the entrance. A fear prevented him from stepping in, and strangely, he was equally afraid of not meeting Gradiva within, and of finding her there; for, during the last few moments, he had felt quite sure that, in the first case, she would be staying somewhere else with some younger man, and, in the second case, the latter would be in company with her on the steps between the pillars. Toward the man, however, he felt a hate far stronger than against all the assembled common house-flies; until to-day he had not considered it possible that he could be capable of such violent inner excitement. The duel, which he had always considered stupid nonsense, suddenly appeared to him in a different light; here it became a natural right which the man injured in his own rights, or mortally insulted, made use of as the only available means to secure satisfaction or to part with an existence which had become purposeless. So he suddenly stepped forward to enter; he would challenge the bold man and would—this rushed upon him almost more powerfully—express unreservedly to her that he had considered her something better, more noble, and incapable of such vulgarity.He was so filled to the brim with this rebellious idea that he uttered it, even though there was not apparently the least occasion for it, for, when he had covered the distance to the dining-room with stormy haste, he demanded violently, “Are youalone?” although appearances allowed of no doubt that Gradiva was sitting there on the steps, just as much alone as on the two previous days.She looked at him amazed and replied, “Who should still be here after noon? Then the people are all hungry and sit down to meals. Nature has arranged that very happily for me.”His surging excitement could not, however, be allayed so quickly, and without his knowledge or desire, he let slip, with the conviction of certainty, the conjecture which had come over him outside; for he added, to be sure somewhat foolishly, that he could really not think otherwise.Her bright eyes remained fixed upon his face until he had finished. Then she made a motion with one finger against her brow and said, “You——” After that, however, she continued, “It seems to me quite enough that I do not remain away from here, even though I must expect that you are coming here at this time; but the place pleases me, and I see that you have brought me my sketch-book that I forgot here yesterday. I thank you for your vigilance. Won’t you give it to me?” The last question was well founded, for he showed no disposition to do so, but remained motionless. It began to dawn upon him that he had imagined and worked out a monstrous piece of nonsense, and had also given expression to it; in order to compensate, as far as possible, he now stepped forward hastily, handed Gradiva the book, and at the same time sat down near her on the step, mechanically. Casting a glance at his hand, she said, “You seem to be a lover of roses.”At these words he suddenly became consciousof what had caused him to pluck and bring them and he responded, “Yes,—of course, not for myself, have I—you spoke yesterday—and last night, too, some one said it to me—people give them in spring.”She pondered briefly before she answered, “Ah, so—yes, I remember. To others, I meant, one does not give asphodel, but roses. That is polite of you; it seems your opinion of me is improved.”Her hand stretched out to receive the red flowers, and, handing them to her, he rejoined, “I believed at first that you could be here only during the noon hour, but it has become probable to me that you also, at some other time—that makes me very happy——”“Why does it make you happy?”Her face expressed lack of comprehension—only about her lips there passed a slight, hardly noticeable quiver. Confused, he offered, “It is beautiful to be alive; it has never seemed so much so to me before—I wished to ask you?” He searched in his breast pocket and added, as he drew out the object, “Has this brooch ever belonged to you?”She leaned forward a little toward it, but shook her head. “No, I can’t remember. Chronologically it would, of course, not be impossible, for it probably did not exist until this year. Did you find it in the sun perhaps? The beautiful green patina surely seems familiar to me, as if I had already seen it.”Involuntarily he repeated, “In the sun?—why in the sun?”“‘Sole’ it is called here. It brings to light many things of that sort. Was the brooch saidto have belonged to a young girl who is said to have perished, I believe, in the vicinity of the Forum, with a companion?”“Yes, who held his arm about her——”“Ah, so——”The two little words apparently lay upon Gradiva’s tongue as a favourite interjection, and she stopped after it for a moment before she added, “Did you think that on that account I might have worn it? and would that have made you a little—how did you say it before?—unhappy?”It was apparent that he felt extraordinarily relieved and it was audible in his answer, “I am very happy about it—for the idea that the brooch belonged to you made me—dizzy.”“You seem to have a tendency for that. Did you perhaps forget to eat breakfast this morning? That easily aggravates such attacks; I do not suffer from them, but I make provision, as it suits me best to be here at noon. If I can help you out of your unfortunate condition a little by sharing my lunch with you——”She drew out of her pocket a piece of white bread wrapped in tissue paper, broke it, put half into his hand, and began to devour the other with apparent appetite. Thereby her exceptionally dainty and perfect teeth not only gleamed between her lips with pearly glitter, but in biting the crust caused also a crunching sound so that they gave the impression of being not unreal phantoms, but of actual, substantial reality. Besides, with her conjecture about the postponed breakfast, she had, to be sure, hit upon the right thing; mechanically he, too, ate, and felt from ita decidedly favourable effect on the clearing of his thoughts. So, for a little while, the couple did not speak further, but devoted themselves silently to the same practical occupation until Gradiva said, “It seems to me as if we had already eaten our bread thus together once two thousand years ago. Can’t you remember it?”He could not, but it seemed strange to him now that she spoke of so infinitely remote a past, for the strengthening of his mind by the nourishment had brought with it a change in his brain. The idea that she had been going around here in Pompeii such a long time ago would no longer harmonize with sound reason; everything about her seemed of the present, as if it could be scarcely more than twenty years old. The form and colour of her face, the especially charming, brown, wavy hair, and the flawless teeth; also, the idea that the bright dress, marred by no shadow of a spot, had lain countless years in the pumice ashes contained something in the highest degree inconsistent. Norbert was seized by a feeling of doubt whether he were really sitting here awake or were not more probably dreaming in his study, where, in contemplation of the likeness of Gradiva, he had been overcome by sleep, and had dreamed that he had gone to Pompeii, had met her as a person still living, and was dreaming further that he was still sitting so at her side in the Casa di Meleagro. For that she was really still alive or had been living again could only have happened in a dream—the laws of nature raised an objection to it——To be sure, it was strange that she had justsaid that she had once shared her bread with him in that way two thousand years ago. Of that he knew nothing, and even in the dream could find nothing about it.Her left hand lay with the slender fingers calmly on her knees. They bore the key to the solution of an inscrutable riddle——Even in the dining-room of the Casa di Meleagro the boldness of the common house-fly was not deterred; on the yellow pillar opposite him he saw one running up and down in a worthless way in greedy quest; now it whizzed right past his nose.He, however, had to make some answer to her question, if he did not remember the bread that he had formerly consumed with her, and he said suddenly, “Were the flies then as devilish as now, so that they tormented you to death?”She glanced at him with utterly incomprehending astonishment and repeated, “The flies? Have you flies on your mind now?”Then suddenly the black monster sat upon her hand, which did not reveal by the slightest quiver that she noticed it. Thereupon, however, there united in the young archæologist two powerful impulses to execute the same deed. His hand went up suddenly and clapped with no gentle stroke on the fly and the hand of his neighbour.With this blow there came to him, for the first time, sense, consternation and also a joyous fear. He had delivered the stroke not through empty air, but on an undoubtedly real, living and warm, human hand which, for a moment apparently absolutely startled, remained motionless under his. Yet then she drew it away with a jerk, and themouth above it said, “You are surely apparently crazy, Norbert Hanold.”The name, which he had disclosed to no one in Pompeii, passed so easily, assuredly and clearly from her lips that its owner jumped up from the steps, even more terrified. At the same time there sounded in the colonnade footsteps of people who had come near unobserved; before his confused eyes appeared the faces of the congenial pair of lovers from the Casa del Fauno, and the young lady cried, with a tone of greatest surprise, “Zoë! You here, too? and also on your honeymoon? You have not written me a word about it, you know.”Norbert was again outside before Meleager’s house in the Strada di Mercurio. How he had come there was not clear to him, it must have happened instinctively, and, caused by a lightning-like illumination in him, was the only thing that he could do not to present a thoroughly ridiculous figure to the young couple, even more to the girl greeted so pleasantly by them, who had just addressed him by his Christian and family names, and most of all to himself. For even if he grasped nothing, one fact was indisputable. Gradiva, with a warm, human hand, not unsubstantial, but possessing corporeal reality, had expressed an indubitable truth; his mind had, in the last two days, been in a condition of absolute madness; and not at all in a silly dream, but rather with the use of eyes and ears such as is given by nature to man for reasonable service. Like everything else, how such a thing had happened escaped hisunderstanding, and only darkly did he feel that there must have also been in the game a sixth sense which, obtaining the upper hand in some way, had transformed something perhaps precious to the opposite. In order to get at least a little more light on the matter by an attempt at meditation, a remote place in solitary silence was absolutely required; at first, however, he was impelled to withdraw as quickly as possible from the sphere of eyes, ears and other senses, which use their natural functions as suits their own purpose.As for the owner of that warm hand, she had, at any rate, from her first expression, been surprised by the unforeseen and unexpected visit at noon in the Casa di Meleagro in a not entirely pleasant manner. Yet, of this, in the next instant, there was no trace to be seen in her bright countenance; she stood up quickly, stepped toward the young lady and said, extending her hand, “It certainly is pleasant, Gisa; chance sometimes has a clever idea too. So this is your husband of two weeks? I am glad to see him, and, from the appearance of both of you, I apparently need not change my congratulations for condolence. Couples to whom that would be applied are at this time usually sitting at lunch in Pompeii; you are probably staying near the ‘ingresso’; I shall look you up there this afternoon. No, I have not written you anything; you won’t be offended at me for that, for you see my hand, unlike yours, is not adorned by a ring. The atmosphere here has an extremely powerful effect on the imagination, which I can see in you; it is better, of course, than if it made one too matter-of-fact. The youngman who just went out is labouring also under a remarkable delusion; it seems to me that he believes a fly is buzzing in his head; well, everyone has, of course, some kind of bee in his bonnet. As is my duty, I have some knowledge of entomology and can, therefore, be of a little service in such cases. My father and I live in the ‘Sole’; he, too, had a sudden and pleasing idea of bringing me here with him if I would be responsible for my own entertainment, and make no demands upon him. I said to myself that I should certainly dig up something interesting alone here. Of course I had not reckoned at all on the find which I made—I mean the good fortune of meeting you, Gisa; but I am talking away the time, as is usually the case with an old friend—— My father comes in out of the sun at two o’clock to eat at the ‘Sole’; so I have to keep company there with his appetite and, therefore, I am sorry to say, must for the moment forego your society. You will, of course, be able to view the Casa di Meleagro without me; that I think likely, though I can’t understand it, of course. Favorisca, signor! Arrivederci, Gisetta! That much Italian I have already learned, and one really does not need more. Whatever else is necessary one can invent—please, no, senza complimenti!”This last entreaty of the speaker concerned a polite movement by which the young husband had seemed to wish to escort her. She had expressed herself most vividly, naturally and in a manner quite fitting to the circumstances of the unexpected meeting of a close friend, yet with extraordinary celerity, which testified to the urgency of thedeclaration that she could not at present remain longer. So not more than a few minutes had passed since the hasty exit of Norbert Hanold, when she also stepped from the house of Meleager into the Strada di Mercurio. This lay, because of the hour, enlivened only here and there by a cringing lizard, and for a few moments the girl, hesitating, apparently gave herself over to a brief meditation. Then she quickly struck out in the shortest way to the gate of Hercules, at the intersection of the Vicolo di Mercurio and the Strada di Sallustio, crossed the stepping-stones with the gracefully buoyant Gradiva-walk, and thus arrived very quickly at the two ruins of the side wall near the Porta Ercolanese. Behind this there stretched at some length the Street of Tombs, yet not dazzlingly white, nor overhung with glittering sunbeams, as twenty-four hours ago, when the young archæologist had thus gazed down over it with searching eyes. To-day the sun seemed to be overcome by a feeling that she had done a little too much good in the morning; she held a grey veil drawn before her, the condensation of which was visibly being increased, and, as a result, the cypresses, which grew here and there in the Strada di Sepolcri, rose unusually sharp and black against the heavens. It was a picture different from that of yesterday; the brilliance which mysteriously glittered over everything was lacking; the street also assumed a certain gloomy distinctness, and had at present a dead aspect which honoured its name. This impression was not diminished by an isolated movement at its end, but was rather heightened by it; there, in the vicinity of theVilla of Diomede, a phantom seemed to be looking for its grave, and disappeared under one of the monuments.It was not the shortest way from the house of Meleager to the “Albergo del Sole,” rather the exactly opposite direction, but Zoë-Gradiva must have also decided that time was not yet importuning so violently to lunch, for after a quite brief stop at the Hercules Gate, she walked farther along the lava-blocks of the Street of Tombs, every time raising the sole of her lingering foot almost perpendicularly.The Villa of Diomede—named thus, for people of the present, after a monument which a certain freed-man, Marcus Arrius Diomedes, formerly promoted to the directorship of this city-section, had erected near by for his lady, Arria, as well as for himself and his relatives—was a very extensive building and concealed within itself a part of the history of the destruction of Pompeii not invented by imagination. A confusion of extensive ruins formed the upper part; below lay an unusually large sunken garden surrounded by a well-preserved portico of pillars with scanty remnants of a fountain and a small temple in the middle; and farther along two stairways led down to a circular cellar-vault, lighted only dimly by gloomy twilight. The ashes of Vesuvius had penetrated into this also, and the skeletons of eighteen women and children had been found here; seeking protection they had fled, with some hastily gathered provisions, into the half-subterranean space, and thedeceptive refuge had become the tomb of all. In another place the supposed, nameless master of the house lay, also stretched out choked on the ground; he had wished to escape through the locked garden-door, for he held the key to it in his fingers. Beside him cowered another skeleton, probably that of a servant, who was carrying a considerable number of gold and silver coins. The bodies of the unfortunates had been preserved by the hardened ashes; in the museum at Naples there is under glass, the exact impression of the neck, shoulders and beautiful bosom of a young girl clad in a fine, gauzy garment.The Villa of Diomede had, at one time, at least, been the inevitable goal of every dutiful Pompeii visitor, but now, at noon, in its rather roomy solitude, certainly no curiosity lingered in it, and therefore it had seemed to Norbert Hanold the place of refuge best suited to his newest mental needs. These longed most insistently for grave-like loneliness, breathless silence, and quiescent peace; against the latter, however, an impelling restlessness in his system raised counter-claims, and he had been obliged to force an agreement between the two demands, such that the mind tried to claim its own and yet gave the feet liberty to follow their impulse. So he had been wandering around through the portico since his entrance; he succeeded thus in preserving his bodily equilibrium, and he busied himself with changing his mental state into the same normal condition; that, however, seemed more difficult in execution than in intention; of course it seemed to his judgment unquestionable that he had been utterly foolishand irrational to believe that he had sat with a young Pompeiian girl, who had become more or less corporeally alive again, and this clear view of his madness formed incontestably an essential advance on the return to sound reason; but it was not yet restored entirely to normal condition, for, even if it had occurred to him that Gradiva was only a dead bas-relief, it was also equally beyond doubt that she was still alive. For that irrefutable proof was adduced; not he alone, but others also, saw her, knew that her name was Zoë and spoke with her, as with a being as much alive, in substance, as they. On the other hand, however, she knew his name too, and again, that could originate only from a supernatural power; this dual nature remained enigmatic even for the rays of understanding that were entering his mind. Yet to this incompatible duality there was joined a similar one in him, for he cherished the earnest desire to have been destroyed here in the Villa of Diomede two thousand years ago, in order that he might not run the risk of meeting Zoë-Gradiva again anywhere; at the same time, however, an extraordinary joyous feeling was stirring within him, because he was still alive and was therefore able to meet her again somewhere. To use a commonplace yet fitting simile, this was turning in his head like a mill-wheel, and through the long portico he ran around likewise without stopping, which did not aid him in the explanation of the contradictions. On the contrary, he was moved by an indefinite feeling that everything was growing darker and darker about and within him.Then he suddenly recoiled, as he turned one ofthe four corners of the colonnade. A half-dozen paces away from him there sat, rather high up on a fragmentary wall-ruin, one of the young girls who had found death here in the ashes.No, that was nonsense, which his reason rejected. His eyes, too, and a nameless something else recognized that fact. It was Gradiva; she was sitting on a stone ruin as she had formerly sat on the step, only, as the former was considerably higher, her slender feet, which hung down free in the sand-colour shoes, were visible up to her dainty ankles.With an instinctive movement, Norbert was at first about to run out between the pillars through the garden; what, for a half-hour, he had feared most of anything in the world had suddenly appeared, viewed him with bright eyes and with lips which, he felt, were about to burst into mocking laughter; yet they didn’t, but the familiar voice rang out calmly from them, “You’ll get wet outside.”
—her floating vestA polished buckle clasped—her careless locksIn simple knot were gathered—Trans. byHenry King.
—her floating vestA polished buckle clasped—her careless locksIn simple knot were gathered—Trans. byHenry King.
—her floating vest
A polished buckle clasped—her careless locks
In simple knot were gathered—
Trans. byHenry King.
He could not recall the verses word for word, but their content was present in his mind; and from his store of knowledge was added the fact that Cleopatra was the name of the young wife of Œneus’ son, Meleager. More probably this had nothing to do with him, but with the Greek poet, Meleager. Thus, under the glowing sun of the Campagna, there was a mythological-literary-historical-archæological juggling in his head.
When he had passed the house of Castor and Pollux and that of the Centaur, he stood before the Casa di Meleagro from whose threshold therelooked up at him, still discernible, the inlaid greeting “Ave.” On the wall of the vestibule, Mercury was handing Fortuna a pouch filled with money; that probably indicated, allegorically, the riches and other fortunate circumstances of the former dweller. Behind this opened up the inner court, the centre of which was occupied by a marble table supported by three griffins.
Empty and silent, the room lay there, appearing absolutely unfamiliar to the man, as he entered, awaking no memory that he had already been here, yet he then recalled it, for the interior of the house offered a deviation from that of the other excavated buildings of the city. The peristyle adjoined the inner court on the other side of the balcony toward the rear—not in the usual way, but at the left side and on that account was of greater extent and more splendid appearance than any other in Pompeii. It was framed by a colonnade supported by two dozen pillars painted red on the lower, and white on the upper half. These lent solemnity to the great, silent space; here in the centre was a spring with a beautifully wrought enclosure, which served as a fish-pool. Apparently the house must have been the dwelling of an estimable man of culture and artistic sense.
Norbert’s gaze passed around, and he listened. Yet nowhere about did anything stir, nor was the slightest sound audible. Amidst this cold stone there was no longer a breath; if Gradiva had gone into Meleager’s house, she had already dissolved again into nothing. At the rear of the peristyle was another room, anœcus, the former dining-room, likewise surrounded on three sides by pillarspainted yellow, which shimmered from a distance in the light, as if they were encrusted with gold. Between them, however, shone a red far more dazzling than that from the walls, with which no brush of antiquity, but young Nature of the present had painted the ground. The former artistic pavement lay completely ruined, fallen to decay and weather worn; it was May which exercised here again its most ancient dominion and covered the wholeœcus, as it did at the time in many houses of the buried city, with red, flowering, wild poppies, whose seeds the winds had carried thither, and these had sprouted in the ashes. It was a wave of densely crowded blossoms, or so it appeared, although, in reality, they stood there motionless, for Atabulus found no way down to them, but only hummed away softly above. Yet the sun cast such flaming, radiant vibrations down upon them that it gave an impression of red ripples in a pond undulating hither and thither. Norbert Hanold’s eyes had passed unheeding over a similar sight in other houses, but here he was strangely thrilled by it. The dream-flower grown at the edge of Lethe filled the space, and Hypnos lay stretched in their midst dispensing sleep, which dulls the senses, with the saps which night has gathered in the red chalices. It seemed to the man who had entered the dining-room through the portico of the peristyle as if he felt his temples touched by the invisible slumber wand of the old vanquisher of gods and men, but not with heavy stupor; only a dreamily sweet loveliness floated about his consciousness. At the same time, however, he still remained in control of his feet and stepped along by the wallof the former dining-room from which gazed old pictures: Paris, awarding the apple; a satyr, carrying in his hand an asp and tormenting a young Bacchante with it.
But there again suddenly, unforeseen—only about five paces away from him—in the narrow shadow cast down by a single piece of the upper part of the dining-room portico, which still remained in a state of preservation, sitting on the low steps between two of the yellow pillars was a brightly clad woman who now raised her head. In that way she disclosed to the unnoticed arrival, whose footstep she had apparently just heard, a full view of her face, which produced in him a double feeling, for it appeared to him at the same time unknown and yet also familiar, already seen or imagined; but by his arrested breathing and his heart palpitations, he recognized, unmistakably, to whom it belonged. He had found what he was looking for, what had driven him unconsciously to Pompeii; Gradiva continued her visible existence in the noonday spirit hour and sat here before him, as, in the dream, he had seen her on the steps of the Temple of Apollo. Spread out on her knees lay something white, which he was unable to distinguish clearly; it seemed to be a papyrus sheet, and a red poppy-blossom stood out from it in marked contrast.
In her face surprise was expressed; under the lustrous, brown hair and the beautiful, alabaster brow, two rarely bright, starlike eyes looked at him with questioning amazement. It required only a few moments for him to recognize the conformity of her features with those of the profile. They must be thus, viewed from the front, and therefore, atfirst glance, they had not been really unfamiliar to him. Near to, her white dress, by its slight tendency to yellow, heightened still more the warm colour; apparently it consisted of a fine, extremely soft, woollen material, which produced abundant folds, and the scarf around her head was of the same. Below, on the nape of the neck, appeared again the shimmering, brown hair artlessly gathered in a single knot; at her throat, under a dainty chin, a little gold clasp held her gown together.
Norbert Hanold dimly perceived that involuntarily he had raised his hand to his soft Panama hat and removed it; and now he said in Greek, “Are you Atalanta, the daughter of Jason, or are you a descendant of the family of the poet, Meleager?”
Without giving an answer, the lady addressed looked at him silently with a calmly wise expression in her eyes, and two thoughts passed through his mind; either her resurrected self could not speak, or she was not of Greek descent and was ignorant of the language. He therefore substituted Latin for it and asked: “Was your father a distinguished Pompeiian citizen of Latin origin?”
To this she was equally silent, only about her delicately curved lips there was a slight quiver as if she were repressing a burst of laughter. Now a feeling of fright came upon him; apparently she was sitting there before him like a silent image, a phantom to whom speech was denied. Consternation at this discovery was stamped fully and distinctly upon his features.
Then, however, her lips could no longer resist the impulse; a real smile played about them andat the same time a voice sounded from between them, “If you wish to speak with me, you must do so in German.”
That was really remarkable from the mouth of a Pompeiian woman who had died two centuries before, or would have been so for a person hearing it in a different state of mind. Yet every oddity escaped Norbert because of two waves of emotion which had rushed over him, one because Gradiva possessed the power of speech, and the other was one which had been forced from his inmost being by her voice. It sounded as clear as was her glance; not sharp, but reminiscent of the tones of a bell, her voice passed through the sunny silence over the blooming poppy-field, and the young archæologist suddenly realized that he had already heard it thus in his imagination, and involuntarily he gave audible expression to his feeling, “I knew that your voice sounded like that.”
One could read in her countenance that she was seeking comprehension of something, but was not finding it. To his last remark she now responded, “How could you? You have never talked with me.”
To him it was not at all remarkable that she spoke German, and, according to present usage, addressed him formally; as she did it, he understood completely that it could not have happened otherwise, and he answered quickly, “No—not talked—but I called to you when you lay down to sleep and stood near you then—your face was as calmly beautiful as if it were of marble. May I beg you—rest it again on the step in that way.”
While he was speaking, something peculiar hadoccurred. A golden butterfly, faintly tinged with red on the inner edge of its upper wing, fluttered from the poppies toward the pillars, flitted a few times about Gradiva’s head and then rested on the brown, wavy hair above her brow. At the same time, however, she rose, slender and tall, for she stood up with deliberate haste, curtly and silently directed at Norbert another glance, in which something suggested that she considered him demented; then, thrusting her foot forward, she walked out in her characteristic way along the pillars of the old portico. Only fleetingly visible for a while, she finally seemed to have sunk into the earth.
He stood up, breathless, as if stunned; yet with heavy understanding he had grasped what had occurred before his eyes. The noonday ghost hour was over, and in the form of a butterfly, a winged messenger had come up from the asphodel meadows of Hades to admonish the departed one to return. For him something else was associated with this, although in confused indistinctness. He knew that the beautiful butterfly of Mediterranean countries bore the name Cleopatra, and this had also been the name of Caledonian Meleager’s young wife who, in grief over his death, had given herself as sacrifice to those of the lower world.
From his mouth issued a call to the girl who was departing, “Are you coming here again to-morrow in the noon hour?” Yet she did not turn around, gave no answer, and disappeared after a few moments in the corner of the dining-room behind the pillar. Now a compelling impulse suddenly incited him to hasten after her, but herbright dress was no longer visible anywhere; glowing with the hot sun’s rays, the Casa di Meleagro lay about him motionless and silent; only Cleopatra hovered on her red, shimmering, golden wings, making slow circles again above the multitude of poppies.
When and how he had returned to the “ingresso,” Norbert Hanold could not recall; in his memory he retained only the idea that his appetite had peremptorily demanded to be appeased, though very tardily, at the “Diomed,” and then he had wandered forth aimlessly on the first good street, had arrived at the beach north of Castellamare, where he had seated himself on a lava-block, and the sea-wind had blown around his head until the sun had set about half-way between Monte Sant’ Angelo above Sorrento and Monte Epomeo on Ischia. Yet, in spite of this stay of at least several hours by the water, he had obtained from the fresh air there no mental relief, but was returning to the hotel in the same condition in which he had left it. He found the other guests busily occupied with dinner, had a little bottle of Vesuvio wine brought to him in a corner of the room, viewed the faces of those eating, and listened to their conversations. From the faces of all, as well as from their talk, it appeared to him absolutely certain that in the noon hour none of them had either met or spoken to a dead Pompeiian woman who had returned again briefly to life. Of course, all this had been a foregone conclusion, as they had all been at lunch at that time; why andwherefore, he himself could not state, yet after a while he went over to the competitor of the “Diomed,” “Hotel Suisse,” sat down there also in a corner, and, as he had to order something, likewise before a little bottle of Vesuvio, and here he gave himself over to the same kind of investigations with eye and ear. They led to the same results but also to the further conclusion that he now knew by sight all the temporary, living visitors of Pompeii. To be sure, this effected an increase of his knowledge which he could hardly consider an enrichment, but from it he experienced a certain satisfying feeling that, in the two hostelries, no guest, either male or female, was present with whom, by means of sight and hearing, he had not entered into a personal, even if one-sided, relation. Of course, in no way had the absurd supposition entered his mind that he might possibly meet Gradiva in one of the two hotels, but he could have taken his oath that no one was staying in them who possessed, in the remotest way, any trace of resemblance to her. During his observations, he had occasionally poured wine from his little bottle to his glass, and had drunk from time to time; and when, in this manner, the former had gradually become empty, he rose and went back to the “Diomed.” The heavens were now strewn with countless, flashing, twinkling stars, but not in the traditionally stationary way, for Norbert gathered the impression that Perseus, Cassiopeia and Andromeda with some neighbours, bowing lightly hither and thither, were performing a singing dance, and below, on earth, too, it seemed to him that the dark shadows of the tree-tops andbuildings did not stay in the same place. Of course on the ground of this region—unsteady from ancient times—this could not be exactly surprising, for the subterranean glow lurked everywhere, after an eruption, and let a little of itself rise in the vines and grapes from which was pressed Vesuvio, which was not one of Norbert Hanold’s usual evening drinks. He still remembered, however, even if a little of the circular movement of things might be ascribed to the wine, too, that since noon all objects had displayed an inclination to whirl softly about his head, and therefore he found, in the slight increase, nothing new, but only a continuation of the formerly existing conditions. He went up to his room and stood for a little while at the open window, looking over toward the Vesuvius mound, above which now no cone of smoke spread its top, but rather something like the fluctuations of a dark, purple cloak flowed back and forth around it. Then the young archæologist undressed, without having lighted the light, and sought his couch. Yet, as he stretched himself out upon it, it was not his bed at the “Diomed,” but a red poppy-field whose blossoms closed over him like a soft cushion heated by the sun. His enemy, the common house-fly, constrained by darkness to lethargic stupidity, sat fiftyfold above his head, on the wall, and only one moved, even in its sleepiness, by desire to torture, buzzed about his nose. He recognized it, however, not as the absolute evil, the century-old scourge of humanity, for before his eyes it poised like a red-gold Cleopatra.
When, in the morning, the sun, with lively assistance from the flies, awoke him, he could notrecall what, besides strange, Ovid-like metamorphoses, had occurred during the night about his bed. Yet doubtless some mystic being, continuously weaving dream-webs, had been sitting beside him, for he felt his head completely overhung and filled with them, so that all ability to think lay inextricably imprisoned in it and only one thing remained in his consciousness; he must again be in Meleager’s house at exactly noon. In this connection, however, a fear overcame him, for if the gatekeepers at the “ingresso” looked at him, they would not let him in. Anyway it was not advisable that he should expose himself to close observation by human eyes. To escape that, there was, for one well informed about Pompeii, a means which was, to be sure, against the rules, but he was not in a condition to grant to legal regulation a determination of his conduct. So he climbed again, as on the evening of his arrival, along the old city-wall, and upon it walked, in a wide semicircle, around the city of ruins to the solitary, unguarded Porta di Nola. Here it was not difficult to get down into the inside and he went, without burdening his conscience very much over the fact that by his autocratic deed he had deprived the administration of a two-lira entrance fee, which he could, of course, let it have later in some other way.
Thus, unseen, he had reached an uninteresting part of the city, never before investigated by any one and still mostly unexcavated; he sat down in a secluded, shady nook and waited, now and then drawing his watch to observe the progress of time. Once his glance fell upon something in the distance gleaming, silvery-white, rising from the ashes, butwith his unreliable vision, he was unable to distinguish what it was. Yet involuntarily he was impelled to go up to it and there it stood, a tall, flowering asphodel-plant with white, bell-like blossoms whose seeds the wind had carried thither from outside. It was the flower of the lower world, significant and, as he felt, destined to grow here for his purpose. He broke the slender stem and returned with it to his seat. Hotter and hotter the May sun burned down as on the day before, and finally approached its noonday position; so now he started out through the long Strada di Nola. This lay deathly still and deserted, as did almost all the others; over there to the west all the morning visitors were already crowding again to the Porta Marina and the soup-plates. Only the air, suffused with heat, stirred, and in the dazzling glare the solitary figure of Norbert Hanold with the asphodel branch appeared like that of Hermes, Psyche’s escort, in modern attire, starting out upon the journey to conduct a departed soul to Hades.
Not consciously, yet following an instinctive impulse, he found his way through the Strada della Fortuna farther along to the Strada di Mercurio, and turning to the right arrived at the Casa di Meleagro. Just as lifelessly as yesterday, the vestibule, inner court and peristyle received him, and between the pillars of the latter the poppies of the dining-room flamed across to him. As he entered, however, it was not clear to him whether he had been here yesterday or two thousand years ago to seek from the owner of the house some information of great importance to archæology;what it was, however, he could not state, and besides, it seemed to him, even though in contradiction to the above, that all the science of antiquity was the most purposeless and indifferent thing in the world. He could not understand how a human being could occupy himself with it, for there was only a single thing to which all thinking and investigation must be directed: what is the nature of the physical manifestation of a being like Gradiva, dead and alive at the same time, although the latter was true only in the noon hour of spirits—or had been the day before, perhaps the one time in a century or a thousand years, for it suddenly seemed certain that his return to-day was in vain. He did not meet the girl he was looking for, because she was not allowed to come again until a time when he too would have been dead for many years, and was buried and forgotten. Of course, as he walked now along by the wall below Paris awarding the apple, he perceived Gradiva before him, just as on yesterday, in the same gown, sitting between the same two yellow pillars on the same step. Yet he did not allow himself to be deceived by tricks of imagination, but knew that fancy alone was deceptively depicting before his eyes what he had really seen there the day before. He could not refrain, however, from stopping to indulge in the view of the shadowy apparition created by himself and, without his knowing it, there passed from his lips in a grieved tone the words, “Oh, that you were still alive!”
His voice rang out, but, after that, breathless silence again reigned among the ruins of the old dining-room. Yet soon another sounded throughthe vacant stillness, saying, “Won’t you sit down too? You look exhausted.”
Norbert Hanold’s heart stood still a moment. His head, however, collected this much reason; a vision could not speak; or was an aural hallucination practising deception upon him? With fixed gaze, he supported himself against the pillar.
Then again asked the voice, and it was the one which none other than Gradiva possessed, “Are you bringing me the white flowers?”
Dizziness rushed upon him; he felt that his feet no longer supported him, but forced him to be seated; and he slid down opposite her on the step, against the pillar. Her bright eyes were directed toward his face, yet with a different look from the one with which she had gazed at him yesterday when she suddenly rose and went away. In that, something ill-humoured and repellent had spoken; but it had disappeared, as if she had, in the meanwhile, arrived at a different view-point, and an expression of searching inquisitiveness or curiosity had taken its place. Likewise, she spoke with an easy familiarity. As he remained silent, however, to the last question also, she again resumed, “You told me yesterday that you had once called to me when I lay down to sleep and that you had afterwards stood near me; my face was as white as marble. When and where was that? I cannot remember it, and I beg you to explain more exactly.”
Norbert had now acquired enough power of speech to answer, “In the night when you sat on the steps of the Temple of Apollo in the Forum and the fall of ashes from Vesuvius covered you.”
“So—then. Yes, to be sure—that had not occurred to me, but I might have thought that it would be a case like that. When you said it yesterday, I was not expecting it, and I was utterly unprepared. Yet that happened, if I recall correctly, two thousand years ago. Were you living then? It seems to me you look younger.” She spoke very seriously, but at the end a faint, extremely sweet smile played about her mouth. He hesitated in embarrassment and answered, stuttering slightly, “No, I really don’t believe I was alive in the year 79—it was perhaps—yes, it surely is a psychic condition which is called a dream that transported me into the time of the destruction of Pompeii—but I recognized you again at first glance.”
In the expression of the girl sitting opposite him, a few feet away, surprise was apparent, and she repeated in a tone of amazement, “You recognized me again? In the dream? By what?”
“At the very first; by your manner of walking.”
“Had you noticed that? And have I a special manner of walking?”
Her astonishment had grown perceptibly. He replied, “Yes—don’t you realize that? A more graceful one—at least among those now living—does not exist. Yet I recognized you immediately by everything else too, your figure, face, bearing and drapery, for everything agreed most minutely with the bas-relief of you in Rome.”
“Ah, really—” she repeated in her former tone—“with the bas-relief of me in Rome. Yes, I hadn’t thought of that either, and at this momentI don’t know exactly—what is it—and you saw it there then?”
Now he told her that the sight of it had attracted him so that he had been highly pleased to get a plaster-cast of it in Germany, and that for years it had hung in his room. He observed it daily, and the idea had come to him that it must represent a young Pompeiian girl who was walking on the stepping-stones of a street in her native city; and the dream had confirmed it. Now he knew also that he had been impelled by it to travel here again to see whether he could find some trace of her; and as he had stood yesterday noon at the corner of Strada di Mercurio, she, herself, exactly like her image, had suddenly walked before him across the stepping-stones, as if she were about to go over into the house of Apollo. Then farther along she had recrossed the street and disappeared before the house of Meleager.
To this she nodded and said, “Yes, I intended to look up the house of Apollo, but I came here.”
He continued, “On that account the Greek poet, Meleager, came to my mind, and I thought that you were one of his descendants and were returning—in the hour which you are allowed—to your ancestral home. When I spoke to you in Greek, however, you did not understand.”
“Was that Greek? No, I don’t understand it or I’ve probably forgotten it. Yet as you came again just now, I heard you say something that I could understand. You expressed the wish that some one might still be alive here. Only I did not understand whom you meant by that.”
That caused him to reply that, at sight of her,he had believed that it was not really she, but that his imagination was deceptively putting her image before him in the place where he had met her yesterday. At that she smiled and agreed, “It seems that you have reason to be on your guard against an excess of imagination, although, when I have been with you, I never supposed so.” She stopped, however, and added, “What is there peculiar about my way of walking, which you spoke of before?”
It was noteworthy that her aroused interest brought her back to that, and he said, “If I may ask——”
With that he stopped, for he suddenly remembered with fear that yesterday she had suddenly risen and gone away when he had asked her to lie down to sleep again on that step, as on that of the Temple of Apollo, and, associated darkly with this, there came to him the glance which she had directed upon him in departing. Yet now the calm, friendly expression of her eyes remained, and as he spoke no further, she said, “It was nice that your wish that some one might still be alive concerned me. If you wish to ask anything of me on that account, I will gladly respond.”
That overcame his fear, and he replied, “It would make me happy to get a close view of you walking as you do in the bas-relief.”
Willingly, without answering, she stood up and walked along between the wall and the pillars. It was the very buoyantly reposeful gait, with the sole raised almost perpendicularly, that was so firmly imprinted on his mind, but for the first time he saw that she wore, below the raised gown, notsandals, but light, sand-coloured shoes of fine leather. When she came back and sat down again silently, he involuntarily started to talk of the difference in her foot-covering from that of the bas-relief. To that she rejoined, “Time, of course, always changes everything, and for the present sandals are not suitable, so I put on shoes, which are a better protection against rain and dust; but why did you ask me to walk before you? What is there peculiar about it?”
Her repeated wish to learn this proved her not entirely free from feminine curiosity. He now explained that it was a matter of the peculiarly upright position of the rising foot, as she walked, and he added how for weeks he had tried to observe the gait of modern women on the streets in his native city. Yet it seemed that this beautiful way of walking had been completely lost to them, with the exception, perhaps, of a single one who had given him the impression that she walked in that way. To be sure, he had not been able to establish this fact because of the crowd about her, and he had probably experienced an illusion, for it had seemed to him that her features had resembled somewhat those of Gradiva.
“What a shame,” she answered. “For confirmation of the fact would surely have been of great scientific importance, and if you had succeeded, perhaps you would not have needed to take the long journey here; but whom were you just speaking of? Who is Gradiva?”
“I have named the bas-relief that, because I didn’t know your real name, and don’t know it yet, either.”
This last he added with some hesitancy, and she faltered a moment before replying to the indirect question. “My name is Zoë.”
With pained tone the words escaped him: “The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means ‘life.’”
“One must adapt himself to the inevitable,” she responded, “and I have long accustomed myself to being dead; but now my time is over for to-day; you have brought the grave-flower with you to conduct me back. So give it to me.”
As she rose and stretched forth her slender hand, he gave her the asphodel cluster, but was careful not to touch her fingers. Accepting the flowering branch she said, “I thank you. To those who are more fortunate one gives roses in spring, but for me the flower of oblivion is the right one from your hand. To-morrow I shall be allowed to come here again at this hour. If your way leads you again into the house of Meleager, we can sit together at the edge of the poppies, as we did to-day. On the threshold stands ‘Ave,’ and I say it to you ‘Ave’!”
She went out and disappeared, as yesterday, at the turn in the portico, as if she had there sunk into the ground. Everything lay empty and silent again, but, from some distance, there once rang, short and clear, a sound like the merry note of a bird flying over the devastated city. This was stifled immediately, however. Norbert, who had remained behind, looked down at the step where she had just been sitting; there something white shimmered; it seemed to be the papyrus leaf which Gradiva had held on her knees yesterday and hadforgotten to take with her to-day. Yet, as he shyly reached for it, he found it to be a little sketch-book with pencil drawings of the different ruins in several houses of Pompeii. The page next to the last showed a drawing of the griffin-table in the central court of the Casa di Meleagro, and on the last was the beginning of a reproduction of the view across the poppies of the dining-room through the row of pillars of the peristyle. That the departed girl made drawings in a sketch-book of the present mode was as amazing as had been the fact that she expressed her thoughts in German. Yet those were only insignificant prodigies beside the great one of her revivification, and apparently she used the midday hour of freedom to preserve for herself, in their present state, with unusual artistic talent, the surroundings in which she had once lived. The drawings testified to delicately cultivated powers of perception, as each of her words did to a clever intellect; and she had probably often sat by the old griffin-table, so that it was a particularly precious reminder.
Mechanically Norbert also went, with the little book, along the portico, and at the place where this turned he noticed in the wall a narrow cleft wide enough to afford, to an unusually slender figure, passage into the adjoining building, and even farther to the Vicolo del Fauno at the other side of the house. Suddenly, however, the idea flashed through his mind that Zoë-Gradiva did not sink into the ground here—that was essentially unreasonable, and he could not understand how he had ever believed it—but went, on this street, back to her tomb. That must be in the Street of Tombs,and rushing forth, he hastened out into the Strada di Mercurio and as far as the gate of Hercules; but when, breathless and reeking with perspiration, he entered this, it was already too late. The broad Strada di Sepolcri stretched out empty and dazzlingly white, only at its extremity, behind the glimmering curtain of radiance, a faint shadow seemed to dissolve uncertainly before the Villa of Diomede.
Norbert Hanold passed the second half of the day with a feeling that Pompeii was everywhere, or at least wherever he stopped, veiled in a cloud of mist. It was not grey, gloomy and melancholy as formerly, but rather cheerful and vari-coloured to an extraordinary degree; blue, red and brown, chiefly a light-yellowish white and alabaster white, interwoven with golden threads of sunbeams. This injured neither his power of vision nor that of hearing, only, because of it, thinking was impossible, and that produced a cloud-wall whose effect rivalled the thickest mist. To the young archæologist it seemed almost as if hourly, in an invisible and not otherwise noticeable way, there was brought to him a little bottle of Vesuvio wine, which produced a continuous whirling in his head. From this he instinctively sought to free himself by the use of correctives, on the one hand drinking water frequently, and on the other hand moving about as much and as far as possible. His knowledge of medicine was not comprehensive, but it helped him to the diagnosis that this strange condition must arise from excessive congestion of blood in hishead, perhaps associated with accelerated action of the heart; for he felt the latter—something formerly quite unknown to him—occasionally beating fast against his chest. Otherwise, his thoughts, which could not penetrate into the outer world, were not in the least inactive within, or more exactly, there was only one thought there, which had come into sole possession and carried on a restless, though vain activity. It continually turned about the question of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva might possess, whether during her stay in the house of Meleager she was a corporeal being or only an illusory representation of what she had formerly been. For the former, physical, physiological and anatomical facts seemed to argue that she had at her disposal organs of speech, and could hold a pencil with her fingers. Yet Norbert was overwhelmed with the idea that if he should touch her, even lightly place his hand on hers, he would then encounter only empty air. A peculiar impulse urged him to make sure of this, but an equally great timidity hindered him from even thinking of doing it. For he felt that the confirmation of either of the two possibilities must bring with it something inspiring fear. The corporeal existence of the hand would thrill him with horror, and its lack of substance would cause him deep pain.
Occupied vainly with this problem, which was impossible to solve scientifically without experiment, he arrived, in the course of his extensive wanderings that afternoon, at the foothills of the big mountain group of Monte Sant’ Angelo, rising south from Pompeii, and here he unexpectedly came upon an elderly man, already grey-bearded,who, from his equipment with all sorts of implements, seemed to be a zoologist or botanist, and appeared to be making a search on a hot, sunny slope. He turned his head as Norbert came close to him, looked at the latter in surprise for a moment and then said, “Are you interested inFaraglionensis? I should hardly have supposed it, but it seems thoroughly probable that they are found, not only in theFaraglioniof Capri, but also dwell permanently on the mainland. The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is really good; I have already used it often with the best of success. Please remain quite still——”
The speaker stopped, stepped carefully forward a few paces and, stretched out motionless on the ground, held a little snare, made of a long grass-blade, before a narrow crevice in the rock, from which the blue, chatoyant little head of a lizard peeped. Thus the man remained without the slightest movement, and Norbert Hanold turned about noiselessly behind him and returned by the way he had come. It seemed to him dimly that he had already seen the face of the lizard-hunter once, probably in one of the two hotels; to this fact the latter’s manner pointed. It was hardly credible what foolishly remarkable purposes could cause people to make the long trip to Pompeii; happy that he had succeeded in so quickly ridding himself of the snare-layer, and being again able to direct his thoughts to the problem of corporeal reality or unreality, he started on the return. Yet a side street misled him once to a wrong turn and took him, instead of to the west boundary, to the east end of the extensive old city-wall; buriedin thought, he did not notice the mistake until he had come right up to a building which was neither the “Diomed” nor the “Hotel Suisse.” In spite of this it bore the sign of an hotel; near by he recognized the ruins of the large Pompeiian amphitheatre, and the memory came to him that near this latter there was another hotel, the “Albergo del Sole,” which, on account of its remoteness from the station, was sought out by only a few guests, and had remained unknown to even him. The walk had made him hot; besides, the cloudy whirling in his head had not diminished; so he stepped in through the open door and ordered the remedy deemed useful by him for blood congestion, a bottle of lime-water. The room stood empty except, of course, for the fly-visitors gathered in full numbers, and the unoccupied host availed himself of the opportunity to recommend highly his house and the excavated treasures it contained. He pointed suggestively to the fact that there were, near Pompeii, people at whose places there was not a single genuine piece among the many objects offered for sale, but that all were imitations, while he, satisfying himself with a smaller number, offered his guests only things undoubtedly genuine. For he acquired no articles which he himself had not seen brought to the light of day, and, in the course of his eloquence, he revealed that he had also been present when they had found near the Forum the young lovers who had clasped each other in firm embrace when they realized their inevitable destruction, and had thus awaited death. Norbert had already heard of this discovery, but had shrugged his shoulders about it as a fabulous invention ofsome especially imaginative narrator, and he did so now, too, when the host brought in to him, as authentic proof, a metal brooch encrusted with green patina, which, in his presence, had been gathered with the remains of the girl from the ashes. When the arrival at the “Sun Hotel” took it in his own hand, however, the power of imagination exercised such ascendency over him that suddenly, without further critical consideration, he paid for it the price asked from English people, and, with his acquisition, hastily left the “Albergo del Sole,” in which, after another turn, he saw in an open window, nodding down, an asphodel branch covered with white blossoms, which had been placed in a water-glass; and without needing any logical connection, it rushed through his mind, at the sight of the grave-flower, that it was an attestation of the genuineness of his new possession.
This he viewed with mingled feelings of excitement and shyness, keeping now to the way along the city-wall to Porta Marina. Then it was no fairy tale that a couple of young lovers had been excavated near the Forum in such an embrace, and there at the Apollo temple he had seen Gradiva lie down to sleep, but only in a dream; that he knew now quite definitely; in reality she might have gone on still farther from the Forum, met some one and died with him.
From the green brooch between his fingers a feeling passed through him that it had belonged to Zoë-Gradiva, and had held her dress closed at the throat. Then she was the beloved fiancée, perhaps the young wife of him with whom she had wished to die.
It occurred to Norbert Hanold to hurl the brooch away. It burned his fingers as if it had become glowing, or more exactly, it caused him the pain such as he had felt at the idea that he might put his hand on that of Gradiva and encounter only empty air.
Reason, nevertheless, asserted the upper hand; he did not allow himself to be controlled by imagination against his will. However probable it might be, there was still lacking invincible proof that the brooch had belonged to her and that it had been she who had been discovered in the young man’s arms. This judgment made it possible for him to breathe freely, and when at the dawn of twilight he reached the “Diomed,” his long wandering had brought to his sound constitution need of physical refreshment. Not without appetite did he devour the rather Spartan evening meal which the “Diomed,” in spite of its Argive origin, had adopted, and he then noticed two guests newly-arrived in the course of the afternoon. By appearance and language they marked themselves as Germans, a man and a woman; they both had youthful, attractive features endowed with intellectual expressions; their relation to each other could not be determined, yet, because of a certain resemblance, Norbert decided that they were brother and sister. To be sure the young man’s fair hair differed in colour from her light-brown tresses. In her gown she wore a red Sorrento rose, the sight of which, as he looked across from his corner, stirred something in his memory without his being able to think what it was. The couple were the first people he had met on his journey who seemed possibly congenial.They talked with one another, over a little bottle, in not too plainly audible tones, nor in cautious whisperings, apparently sometimes about serious things and sometimes about gay things, for at times there passed over her face a half-laughing expression which was very becoming to her, and aroused the desire to participate in their conversation, or perhaps might have awakened it in Norbert, if he had met them two days before in the room otherwise populated only by Anglo-Americans. Yet he felt that what was passing through his mind stood in too strong contrast to the happy naïveté of the couple about whom there undeniably lay not the slightest cloud, for they doubtless were not meditating profoundly over the essential nature of a girl who had died two thousand years ago, but, without any weariness, were taking pleasure in an enigmatical problem of their life of the present. His condition did not harmonize with that; on the one hand he seemed superfluous to them, and on the other, he recoiled from an attempt to start an acquaintance with them, for he had a dark feeling that their bright, merry eyes might look through his forehead into his thoughts and thereby assume an expression as if they did not consider him quite in his right mind. Therefore he went up to his room, stood, as yesterday, at the window, looking over to the purple night-mantle of Vesuvius, and then he lay down to rest. Exhausted, he soon fell asleep and dreamed, but remarkably nonsensically. Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a trap out of a blade of grass in order to catch a lizard, and she said, “Please stay quite still—my colleague is right; the method is reallygood, and she has used it with the greatest success.”
Norbert Hanold became conscious in his dream that it was actually the most utter madness, and he cast about to free himself from it. He succeeded in this by the aid of an invisible bird, who seemingly uttered a short, merry call, and carried the lizard away in its beak; afterwards everything disappeared.
On awakening he remembered that in the night a voice had said that in the spring one gave roses, or rather this was recalled to him through his eyes, for his gaze, passing down from the window, came upon a bright bush of red flowers. They were of the same kind as those which the young lady had worn in her bosom, and when he went down he involuntarily plucked a couple and smelled of them. In fact, there must be something peculiar about Sorrento roses, for their fragrance seemed to him not only wonderful, but quite new and unfamiliar, and at the same time he felt that they had a somewhat liberating effect upon his mind. At least they freed him from yesterday’s timidity before the gatekeepers, for he went, according to directions, in through the “ingresso” to Pompeii, paid double the amount of admission fee, and quickly struck out upon streets which took him from the vicinity of other visitors. The little sketch-book from the house of Meleager he carried along with the green brooch and the red roses, but the fragrance of the latter had made him forget to eat breakfast, and his thoughts were not in the present, but were directed exclusively to the noonhour, which was still far off; he had to pass the remaining interval, and for this purpose he entered now one house, now another, as a result of which activity the idea probably occurred to him that Gradiva had also walked there often before or even now sought these places out sometimes—his supposition that she was able to do it only at noon was tottering. Perhaps she was at liberty to do it in other hours of the day, possibly even at night in the moonlight. The roses strengthened this supposition strangely for him, when he inhaled, as he held them to his nose; and his deliberations, complaisant, and open to conviction, made advances to this new idea, for he could bear witness that he did not cling to preconceived opinions at all, but rather gave free rein to every reasonable objection, and such there was here without any doubt, not only logically, but desirably valid. Only the question arose whether, upon meeting her then, the eyes of others could see her as a corporeal being, or whether only his possessed the ability to do that. The former was not to be denied, claimed even probability for itself, transformed the desirable thing into quite the opposite, and transported him into a low-spirited, restless mood. The thought that others might also speak to her and sit down near her to carry on a conversation with her made him indignant; to that he alone possessed a claim, or at any rate a privilege, for he had discovered Gradiva, of whom no one had formerly known, had observed her daily, taken her into his life, to a degree, imparted to her his life-strength, and it seemed to him as if he had thereby again lent to her life that she would not have possessed withouthim. Therefore he felt that there devolved upon him a right, to which he alone might make a claim, and which he might refuse to share with anyone else.
The advancing day was hotter than the two preceding; the sun seemed to have set her mind to-day on a quite extraordinary feat, and made it regrettable, not only in an archæological, but also in a practical connection, that the water system of Pompeii had lain burst and dried up for two thousand years. Street fountains here and there commemorated it and likewise gave evidence of their informal use by thirsty passers-by, who had, in order to bend forward to the jet, leaned a hand on the marble railing and gradually dug out a sort of trough in the place, in the same way that dropping wears away stone; Norbert observed this at a corner of the Strada della Fortuna, and from that the idea occurred to him that the hand of Zoë-Gradiva, too, might formerly have rested here in that way, and involuntarily he laid his hand into the little hollow, yet he immediately rejected the idea, and felt annoyance at himself that he could have done it; the thought did not harmonize at all with the nature and bearing of the young Pompeiian girl of a refined family; there was something profane in the idea that she could have bent over so and placed her lips on the very pipe from which the plebeians drank with coarse mouths. In a noble sense, he had never seen anything more seemly than her actions and movements; he was frightened by the idea that she might be able to see by looking at him that he had had the incredibly unreasonable thought, for her eyes possessed something penetrating; a couple of times, when he hadbeen with her, the feeling had seized him that she looked as if she were seeking for access to his inmost thoughts and were looking about them as if with a bright steel probe. He was obliged, therefore, to take great care that she might come upon nothing foolish in his mental processes.
It was now an hour until noon and in order to pass it, he went diagonally across the street into the Casa del Fauno, the most extensive and magnificent of all the excavated houses. Like no other, it possessed a double inner court and showed, in the larger one, on the middle of the ground, the empty base on which had stood the famous statue of the dancing faun after which the house had been named. Yet there stirred in Norbert Hanold not the least regret that this work of art, valued highly by science, was no longer here, but, together with the mosaic picture of the Battle of Alexander, had been transferred to the Museo Nazionale in Naples; he possessed no further intention nor desire than to let time move along, and he wandered about aimlessly in this place through the large building. Behind the peristyle opened a wider room, surrounded by numerous pillars, planned either as another repetition of the peristyle or as an ornamental garden; so it seemed at present for, like the dining-room of the Casa di Meleagro, it was completely covered with poppy-blooms. Absent-mindedly the visitor passed through the silent dereliction.
Then, however, he stopped and rested on one foot; but he found himself not alone here; at some distance his glance fell upon two figures, who first gave the impression of only one, becausethey stood as closely as possible to each other. They did not see him, for they were concerned only with themselves, and, in that corner, because of the pillars, might have believed themselves undiscoverable by any other eyes. Mutually embracing each other, they held their lips also pressed together, and the unsuspected spectator recognized, to his amazement, that they were the young man and woman who had last evening seemed to him the first congenial people encountered on this trip. For brother and sister, their present position, the embrace and the kiss, it seemed to him had lasted too long. So it was surely another pair of lovers, probably a young bridal couple, an Augustus and Gretchen, too.
Strange to relate, however, the two latter did not, at the moment, enter Norbert’s mind, and the incident seemed to him not at all ridiculous nor repulsive, rather it heightened his pleasure in them. What they were doing seemed to him as natural as it did comprehensible; his eyes clung to the living picture, more widely open than they ever had been to any of the most admired works of art, and he would have gladly devoted himself for a longer time to his observation. Yet it seemed to him that he had wrongfully penetrated into a consecrated place and was on the point of disturbing a secret act of devotion; the idea of being noticed there struck terror to his heart, and he quickly turned, went back some distance noiselessly on tiptoe and, when he had passed beyond hearing distance, ran out with bated breath and beating heart to the Vicolo del Fauno.
When he arrived before the house of Meleager, he did not know whether it was already noon, and did not happen to question his watch about it, but remained before the door, standing looking down with indecision for some time at the “Ave” in the entrance. A fear prevented him from stepping in, and strangely, he was equally afraid of not meeting Gradiva within, and of finding her there; for, during the last few moments, he had felt quite sure that, in the first case, she would be staying somewhere else with some younger man, and, in the second case, the latter would be in company with her on the steps between the pillars. Toward the man, however, he felt a hate far stronger than against all the assembled common house-flies; until to-day he had not considered it possible that he could be capable of such violent inner excitement. The duel, which he had always considered stupid nonsense, suddenly appeared to him in a different light; here it became a natural right which the man injured in his own rights, or mortally insulted, made use of as the only available means to secure satisfaction or to part with an existence which had become purposeless. So he suddenly stepped forward to enter; he would challenge the bold man and would—this rushed upon him almost more powerfully—express unreservedly to her that he had considered her something better, more noble, and incapable of such vulgarity.
He was so filled to the brim with this rebellious idea that he uttered it, even though there was not apparently the least occasion for it, for, when he had covered the distance to the dining-room with stormy haste, he demanded violently, “Are youalone?” although appearances allowed of no doubt that Gradiva was sitting there on the steps, just as much alone as on the two previous days.
She looked at him amazed and replied, “Who should still be here after noon? Then the people are all hungry and sit down to meals. Nature has arranged that very happily for me.”
His surging excitement could not, however, be allayed so quickly, and without his knowledge or desire, he let slip, with the conviction of certainty, the conjecture which had come over him outside; for he added, to be sure somewhat foolishly, that he could really not think otherwise.
Her bright eyes remained fixed upon his face until he had finished. Then she made a motion with one finger against her brow and said, “You——” After that, however, she continued, “It seems to me quite enough that I do not remain away from here, even though I must expect that you are coming here at this time; but the place pleases me, and I see that you have brought me my sketch-book that I forgot here yesterday. I thank you for your vigilance. Won’t you give it to me?” The last question was well founded, for he showed no disposition to do so, but remained motionless. It began to dawn upon him that he had imagined and worked out a monstrous piece of nonsense, and had also given expression to it; in order to compensate, as far as possible, he now stepped forward hastily, handed Gradiva the book, and at the same time sat down near her on the step, mechanically. Casting a glance at his hand, she said, “You seem to be a lover of roses.”
At these words he suddenly became consciousof what had caused him to pluck and bring them and he responded, “Yes,—of course, not for myself, have I—you spoke yesterday—and last night, too, some one said it to me—people give them in spring.”
She pondered briefly before she answered, “Ah, so—yes, I remember. To others, I meant, one does not give asphodel, but roses. That is polite of you; it seems your opinion of me is improved.”
Her hand stretched out to receive the red flowers, and, handing them to her, he rejoined, “I believed at first that you could be here only during the noon hour, but it has become probable to me that you also, at some other time—that makes me very happy——”
“Why does it make you happy?”
Her face expressed lack of comprehension—only about her lips there passed a slight, hardly noticeable quiver. Confused, he offered, “It is beautiful to be alive; it has never seemed so much so to me before—I wished to ask you?” He searched in his breast pocket and added, as he drew out the object, “Has this brooch ever belonged to you?”
She leaned forward a little toward it, but shook her head. “No, I can’t remember. Chronologically it would, of course, not be impossible, for it probably did not exist until this year. Did you find it in the sun perhaps? The beautiful green patina surely seems familiar to me, as if I had already seen it.”
Involuntarily he repeated, “In the sun?—why in the sun?”
“‘Sole’ it is called here. It brings to light many things of that sort. Was the brooch saidto have belonged to a young girl who is said to have perished, I believe, in the vicinity of the Forum, with a companion?”
“Yes, who held his arm about her——”
“Ah, so——”
The two little words apparently lay upon Gradiva’s tongue as a favourite interjection, and she stopped after it for a moment before she added, “Did you think that on that account I might have worn it? and would that have made you a little—how did you say it before?—unhappy?”
It was apparent that he felt extraordinarily relieved and it was audible in his answer, “I am very happy about it—for the idea that the brooch belonged to you made me—dizzy.”
“You seem to have a tendency for that. Did you perhaps forget to eat breakfast this morning? That easily aggravates such attacks; I do not suffer from them, but I make provision, as it suits me best to be here at noon. If I can help you out of your unfortunate condition a little by sharing my lunch with you——”
She drew out of her pocket a piece of white bread wrapped in tissue paper, broke it, put half into his hand, and began to devour the other with apparent appetite. Thereby her exceptionally dainty and perfect teeth not only gleamed between her lips with pearly glitter, but in biting the crust caused also a crunching sound so that they gave the impression of being not unreal phantoms, but of actual, substantial reality. Besides, with her conjecture about the postponed breakfast, she had, to be sure, hit upon the right thing; mechanically he, too, ate, and felt from ita decidedly favourable effect on the clearing of his thoughts. So, for a little while, the couple did not speak further, but devoted themselves silently to the same practical occupation until Gradiva said, “It seems to me as if we had already eaten our bread thus together once two thousand years ago. Can’t you remember it?”
He could not, but it seemed strange to him now that she spoke of so infinitely remote a past, for the strengthening of his mind by the nourishment had brought with it a change in his brain. The idea that she had been going around here in Pompeii such a long time ago would no longer harmonize with sound reason; everything about her seemed of the present, as if it could be scarcely more than twenty years old. The form and colour of her face, the especially charming, brown, wavy hair, and the flawless teeth; also, the idea that the bright dress, marred by no shadow of a spot, had lain countless years in the pumice ashes contained something in the highest degree inconsistent. Norbert was seized by a feeling of doubt whether he were really sitting here awake or were not more probably dreaming in his study, where, in contemplation of the likeness of Gradiva, he had been overcome by sleep, and had dreamed that he had gone to Pompeii, had met her as a person still living, and was dreaming further that he was still sitting so at her side in the Casa di Meleagro. For that she was really still alive or had been living again could only have happened in a dream—the laws of nature raised an objection to it——
To be sure, it was strange that she had justsaid that she had once shared her bread with him in that way two thousand years ago. Of that he knew nothing, and even in the dream could find nothing about it.
Her left hand lay with the slender fingers calmly on her knees. They bore the key to the solution of an inscrutable riddle——
Even in the dining-room of the Casa di Meleagro the boldness of the common house-fly was not deterred; on the yellow pillar opposite him he saw one running up and down in a worthless way in greedy quest; now it whizzed right past his nose.
He, however, had to make some answer to her question, if he did not remember the bread that he had formerly consumed with her, and he said suddenly, “Were the flies then as devilish as now, so that they tormented you to death?”
She glanced at him with utterly incomprehending astonishment and repeated, “The flies? Have you flies on your mind now?”
Then suddenly the black monster sat upon her hand, which did not reveal by the slightest quiver that she noticed it. Thereupon, however, there united in the young archæologist two powerful impulses to execute the same deed. His hand went up suddenly and clapped with no gentle stroke on the fly and the hand of his neighbour.
With this blow there came to him, for the first time, sense, consternation and also a joyous fear. He had delivered the stroke not through empty air, but on an undoubtedly real, living and warm, human hand which, for a moment apparently absolutely startled, remained motionless under his. Yet then she drew it away with a jerk, and themouth above it said, “You are surely apparently crazy, Norbert Hanold.”
The name, which he had disclosed to no one in Pompeii, passed so easily, assuredly and clearly from her lips that its owner jumped up from the steps, even more terrified. At the same time there sounded in the colonnade footsteps of people who had come near unobserved; before his confused eyes appeared the faces of the congenial pair of lovers from the Casa del Fauno, and the young lady cried, with a tone of greatest surprise, “Zoë! You here, too? and also on your honeymoon? You have not written me a word about it, you know.”
Norbert was again outside before Meleager’s house in the Strada di Mercurio. How he had come there was not clear to him, it must have happened instinctively, and, caused by a lightning-like illumination in him, was the only thing that he could do not to present a thoroughly ridiculous figure to the young couple, even more to the girl greeted so pleasantly by them, who had just addressed him by his Christian and family names, and most of all to himself. For even if he grasped nothing, one fact was indisputable. Gradiva, with a warm, human hand, not unsubstantial, but possessing corporeal reality, had expressed an indubitable truth; his mind had, in the last two days, been in a condition of absolute madness; and not at all in a silly dream, but rather with the use of eyes and ears such as is given by nature to man for reasonable service. Like everything else, how such a thing had happened escaped hisunderstanding, and only darkly did he feel that there must have also been in the game a sixth sense which, obtaining the upper hand in some way, had transformed something perhaps precious to the opposite. In order to get at least a little more light on the matter by an attempt at meditation, a remote place in solitary silence was absolutely required; at first, however, he was impelled to withdraw as quickly as possible from the sphere of eyes, ears and other senses, which use their natural functions as suits their own purpose.
As for the owner of that warm hand, she had, at any rate, from her first expression, been surprised by the unforeseen and unexpected visit at noon in the Casa di Meleagro in a not entirely pleasant manner. Yet, of this, in the next instant, there was no trace to be seen in her bright countenance; she stood up quickly, stepped toward the young lady and said, extending her hand, “It certainly is pleasant, Gisa; chance sometimes has a clever idea too. So this is your husband of two weeks? I am glad to see him, and, from the appearance of both of you, I apparently need not change my congratulations for condolence. Couples to whom that would be applied are at this time usually sitting at lunch in Pompeii; you are probably staying near the ‘ingresso’; I shall look you up there this afternoon. No, I have not written you anything; you won’t be offended at me for that, for you see my hand, unlike yours, is not adorned by a ring. The atmosphere here has an extremely powerful effect on the imagination, which I can see in you; it is better, of course, than if it made one too matter-of-fact. The youngman who just went out is labouring also under a remarkable delusion; it seems to me that he believes a fly is buzzing in his head; well, everyone has, of course, some kind of bee in his bonnet. As is my duty, I have some knowledge of entomology and can, therefore, be of a little service in such cases. My father and I live in the ‘Sole’; he, too, had a sudden and pleasing idea of bringing me here with him if I would be responsible for my own entertainment, and make no demands upon him. I said to myself that I should certainly dig up something interesting alone here. Of course I had not reckoned at all on the find which I made—I mean the good fortune of meeting you, Gisa; but I am talking away the time, as is usually the case with an old friend—— My father comes in out of the sun at two o’clock to eat at the ‘Sole’; so I have to keep company there with his appetite and, therefore, I am sorry to say, must for the moment forego your society. You will, of course, be able to view the Casa di Meleagro without me; that I think likely, though I can’t understand it, of course. Favorisca, signor! Arrivederci, Gisetta! That much Italian I have already learned, and one really does not need more. Whatever else is necessary one can invent—please, no, senza complimenti!”
This last entreaty of the speaker concerned a polite movement by which the young husband had seemed to wish to escort her. She had expressed herself most vividly, naturally and in a manner quite fitting to the circumstances of the unexpected meeting of a close friend, yet with extraordinary celerity, which testified to the urgency of thedeclaration that she could not at present remain longer. So not more than a few minutes had passed since the hasty exit of Norbert Hanold, when she also stepped from the house of Meleager into the Strada di Mercurio. This lay, because of the hour, enlivened only here and there by a cringing lizard, and for a few moments the girl, hesitating, apparently gave herself over to a brief meditation. Then she quickly struck out in the shortest way to the gate of Hercules, at the intersection of the Vicolo di Mercurio and the Strada di Sallustio, crossed the stepping-stones with the gracefully buoyant Gradiva-walk, and thus arrived very quickly at the two ruins of the side wall near the Porta Ercolanese. Behind this there stretched at some length the Street of Tombs, yet not dazzlingly white, nor overhung with glittering sunbeams, as twenty-four hours ago, when the young archæologist had thus gazed down over it with searching eyes. To-day the sun seemed to be overcome by a feeling that she had done a little too much good in the morning; she held a grey veil drawn before her, the condensation of which was visibly being increased, and, as a result, the cypresses, which grew here and there in the Strada di Sepolcri, rose unusually sharp and black against the heavens. It was a picture different from that of yesterday; the brilliance which mysteriously glittered over everything was lacking; the street also assumed a certain gloomy distinctness, and had at present a dead aspect which honoured its name. This impression was not diminished by an isolated movement at its end, but was rather heightened by it; there, in the vicinity of theVilla of Diomede, a phantom seemed to be looking for its grave, and disappeared under one of the monuments.
It was not the shortest way from the house of Meleager to the “Albergo del Sole,” rather the exactly opposite direction, but Zoë-Gradiva must have also decided that time was not yet importuning so violently to lunch, for after a quite brief stop at the Hercules Gate, she walked farther along the lava-blocks of the Street of Tombs, every time raising the sole of her lingering foot almost perpendicularly.
The Villa of Diomede—named thus, for people of the present, after a monument which a certain freed-man, Marcus Arrius Diomedes, formerly promoted to the directorship of this city-section, had erected near by for his lady, Arria, as well as for himself and his relatives—was a very extensive building and concealed within itself a part of the history of the destruction of Pompeii not invented by imagination. A confusion of extensive ruins formed the upper part; below lay an unusually large sunken garden surrounded by a well-preserved portico of pillars with scanty remnants of a fountain and a small temple in the middle; and farther along two stairways led down to a circular cellar-vault, lighted only dimly by gloomy twilight. The ashes of Vesuvius had penetrated into this also, and the skeletons of eighteen women and children had been found here; seeking protection they had fled, with some hastily gathered provisions, into the half-subterranean space, and thedeceptive refuge had become the tomb of all. In another place the supposed, nameless master of the house lay, also stretched out choked on the ground; he had wished to escape through the locked garden-door, for he held the key to it in his fingers. Beside him cowered another skeleton, probably that of a servant, who was carrying a considerable number of gold and silver coins. The bodies of the unfortunates had been preserved by the hardened ashes; in the museum at Naples there is under glass, the exact impression of the neck, shoulders and beautiful bosom of a young girl clad in a fine, gauzy garment.
The Villa of Diomede had, at one time, at least, been the inevitable goal of every dutiful Pompeii visitor, but now, at noon, in its rather roomy solitude, certainly no curiosity lingered in it, and therefore it had seemed to Norbert Hanold the place of refuge best suited to his newest mental needs. These longed most insistently for grave-like loneliness, breathless silence, and quiescent peace; against the latter, however, an impelling restlessness in his system raised counter-claims, and he had been obliged to force an agreement between the two demands, such that the mind tried to claim its own and yet gave the feet liberty to follow their impulse. So he had been wandering around through the portico since his entrance; he succeeded thus in preserving his bodily equilibrium, and he busied himself with changing his mental state into the same normal condition; that, however, seemed more difficult in execution than in intention; of course it seemed to his judgment unquestionable that he had been utterly foolishand irrational to believe that he had sat with a young Pompeiian girl, who had become more or less corporeally alive again, and this clear view of his madness formed incontestably an essential advance on the return to sound reason; but it was not yet restored entirely to normal condition, for, even if it had occurred to him that Gradiva was only a dead bas-relief, it was also equally beyond doubt that she was still alive. For that irrefutable proof was adduced; not he alone, but others also, saw her, knew that her name was Zoë and spoke with her, as with a being as much alive, in substance, as they. On the other hand, however, she knew his name too, and again, that could originate only from a supernatural power; this dual nature remained enigmatic even for the rays of understanding that were entering his mind. Yet to this incompatible duality there was joined a similar one in him, for he cherished the earnest desire to have been destroyed here in the Villa of Diomede two thousand years ago, in order that he might not run the risk of meeting Zoë-Gradiva again anywhere; at the same time, however, an extraordinary joyous feeling was stirring within him, because he was still alive and was therefore able to meet her again somewhere. To use a commonplace yet fitting simile, this was turning in his head like a mill-wheel, and through the long portico he ran around likewise without stopping, which did not aid him in the explanation of the contradictions. On the contrary, he was moved by an indefinite feeling that everything was growing darker and darker about and within him.
Then he suddenly recoiled, as he turned one ofthe four corners of the colonnade. A half-dozen paces away from him there sat, rather high up on a fragmentary wall-ruin, one of the young girls who had found death here in the ashes.
No, that was nonsense, which his reason rejected. His eyes, too, and a nameless something else recognized that fact. It was Gradiva; she was sitting on a stone ruin as she had formerly sat on the step, only, as the former was considerably higher, her slender feet, which hung down free in the sand-colour shoes, were visible up to her dainty ankles.
With an instinctive movement, Norbert was at first about to run out between the pillars through the garden; what, for a half-hour, he had feared most of anything in the world had suddenly appeared, viewed him with bright eyes and with lips which, he felt, were about to burst into mocking laughter; yet they didn’t, but the familiar voice rang out calmly from them, “You’ll get wet outside.”