“ingresso.” Norbert remembered a circuit he had once made on the old
city-wall, and attempted to mount the latter by means of all sorts of
bushes and wild growth. Thus he wandered along for some distance a
little above the city of graves, which lay on his right, motionless and
quiet. It looked like a dead rubbish field already almost covered with
shadow, for the evening sun stood in the west not far from the edge of
the Tyrrhenian Sea. Round about, on the other hand, it still bathed all
the hilltops and fields with an enchanting brilliancy of life, gilded
the smoke-cone rising above the Vesuvius crater and clad the peaks and
pinnacles of Monte Sant’ Angelo in purple. High and solitary rose Monte
Epomeo from the sparkling, blue sea glittering with golden light, from
which Cape Misenum reared itself with dark outline, like a mysterious,
titanic structure. Wherever the gaze rested, a wonderful picture was
spread combining charm and sublimity, remote past and joyous present.
Norbert Hanold had expected to find here what he longed for vaguely. Yet
he was not in the mood for it, although no bridal couples and flies
molested him on the deserted wall; even nature was unable to offer him
what he lacked in his surroundings and within himself. With a calmness
bordering closely on indifference, he let his eyes pass over the
all-pervading beauty, and did not regret in the least that it was
growing pale and fading away in the sunset, but returned to the
“Diomed,” as he had come, dissatisfied.
* * * * *
But as he had now, although with ill-success, been conveyed to this
place through his indiscretion, he reached the decision overnight, to
get from the folly he had committed at least one day of scientific
profit, and went to Pompeii on the regular road as soon as the
“ingresso” was opened in the morning. In little groups commanded by
official guides, armed with red _Baedekers_ or their foreign cousins,
longing for secret excavations of their own, there wandered before and
behind him the population of the two hotels. The still fresh, morning
air was filled almost exclusively by English or Anglo-American chatter;
the German couples were making each other mutually happy with German
sweets and inspiration up there on Capri behind Monte Sant’ Angelo at
the breakfast table of the Pagano. Norbert remembered how to free
himself soon, by well chosen words, combined with a good “mancia,” from
the burden of a “guida,” and was able to pursue his purposes alone and
unhindered. It afforded him some satisfaction to know that he possessed
a faultless memory; wherever his glance rested, everything lay and stood
exactly as he remembered it, as if only yesterday he had imprinted it in
his mind by means of expert observation. This continually repeated
experience brought, however, the added feeling that his presence there
seemed really very unnecessary, and a decided indifference took
possession of his eyes and his intellect more and more, as during the
evening on the wall. Although, when he looked up, the pine-shaped
smoke-cone of Vesuvius generally stood before him against the blue sky,
yet, remarkably, it did not once appear in his memory that he had
dreamed some time ago that he had been present at the destruction of
Pompeii by the volcanic eruption of 79. Wandering around for hours made
him tired and half-sleepy, of course, yet he felt not the least
suggestion of anything dreamlike, but there lay about him only a
confusion of fragments of ancient gate arches, pillars and walls
significant to the highest degree for archæology, but, viewed without
the esoteric aid of this science, really not much else than a big pile
of rubbish, neatly arranged, to be sure, but extremely devoid of
interest; and although science and dreams were wont formerly to stand on
footings exactly opposed, they had apparently here to-day come to an
agreement to withdraw their aid from Norbert Hanold and deliver him over
absolutely to the aimlessness of his walking and standing around.
So he had wandered in all directions from the Forum to the Amphitheatre,
from the Porta di Stabia to the Porta del Vesuvio through the Street of
Tombs as well as through countless others, and the sun had likewise, in
the meanwhile, made its accustomed morning journey to the position where
it usually changes to the more comfortable descent toward the sea.
Thereby, to the great satisfaction of their misunderstood, hoarsely
eloquent guides, it gave the English and American men and women, forced
to go there by a traveller’s sense of duty, a signal to become mindful
of the superior comfort of sitting at the lunch-tables of the twin
hotels; besides, they had seen with their own eyes everything that could
be required for conversation on the other side of the ocean and channel;
so the separate groups, satiated by the past, started on the return,
ebbed in common movement down through the Via Marina, in order not to
lose meals at the, to be sure somewhat euphemistically Lucullan, tables
of the present, in the house of “Diomed” or of Mr. Swiss. In
consideration of all the outer and inner circumstances, this was
doubtless also the wisest thing that they could do, for the noon sun of
May was decidedly well disposed toward the lizards, butterflies and
other winged inhabitants or visitors of the extensive mass of ruins, but
for the northern complexion of a Madame or Miss its perpendicular
obtrusiveness was unquestionably beginning to become less kindly, and,
supposedly in some causal connection with that, the “charmings” had
already in the last hour considerably diminished, the “shockings” had
increased in the same proportion, and the masculine “ah’s” proceeding
from rows of teeth even more widely distended than before had begun a
noticeable transition to yawning.
It was remarkable, however, that simultaneously with their vanishing,
what had formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an entirely changed
appearance, but not a living one; it now appeared rather to be becoming
completely petrified in dead immobility. Yet out of it stirred a feeling
that death was beginning to talk, although not in a manner intelligible
to human ears. To be sure, here and there was a sound as if a whisper
were proceeding from the stone which, however, only the softly murmuring
south wind, Atabulus, awoke, he who, two thousand years ago, had buzzed
in this fashion about the temples, halls and houses, and was now
carrying on his playful game with the green, shimmering stalks on the
low ruins. From the coast of Africa he often rushed across, casting
forth wild, full blasts: he was not doing that to-day, but was gently
fanning again the old acquaintances which had come to light again. He
could not, however, refrain from his natural tendency to devastate, and
blew with hot breath, even though lightly, on everything that he
encountered on the way.
In this, the sun, his eternally youthful mother, helped him. She
strengthened his fiery breath, and accomplished, besides, what he could
not, steeped everything with trembling, glittering, dazzling splendour.
As with a golden eraser, she effaced from the edges of the houses on the
_semitæ_ and _crepidine viarum_, as the sidewalks were once called,
every slight shadow, cast into all the vestibules, inner courts,
peristyles and balconies her luminous radiance, or desultory rays where
a shelter blocked her direct approach. Hardly anywhere was there a nook
which successfully protected itself against the ocean of light and
veiled itself in a dusky, silver web; every street lay between the old
walls like long, rippling, white strips of linen spread out to bleach;
and without exception all were equally motionless and mute, for not only
had the last of the rasping and nasal tones of the English and American
messengers disappeared, but the former slight evidences of lizard- and
butterfly-life seemed also to have left the silent city of ruins. They
had not really done so, but the gaze perceived no more movement from
them.
As had been the custom of their ancestors out on the mountain slopes and
cliff walls for thousands of years, when the great Pan laid himself to
sleep, here, too, in order not to disturb him, they had stretched
themselves out motionless or, folding their wings, had squatted here and
there; and it seemed as if, in this place, they felt even more strongly
the command of the hot, holy, noonday quiet in whose ghostly hour life
must be silent and suppressed, because during it the dead awake and
begin to talk in toneless spirit-language.
This changed aspect which the things round about had assumed really
thrust itself less upon the vision than it aroused the emotions, or,
more correctly, an unnamed sixth sense; this latter, however, was
stimulated so strongly and persistently that a person endowed with it
could not throw off the effect produced upon him. To be sure, of those
estimable boarders already busy with their soup spoons at the two
“alberghi” near the “ingresso,” hardly a man or woman would have been
counted among those thus invested, but Nature had once bestowed this
great attention upon Norbert Hanold and he had to submit to its effects,
not at all because he had an understanding with it, however, for he
wished nothing at all and desired nothing more than that he might be
sitting quietly in his study with an instructive book in his hand,
instead of having undertaken this aimless spring journey. Yet as he had
turned back from the Street of Tombs through the Hercules gate into the
centre of the city, and at Casa di Sallustio had turned to the left,
quite without purpose or thought, into the narrow “vicolo,” suddenly
that sixth sense was awakened in him; but this last expression was not
really fitting, rather he was transported by it into a strangely dreamy
condition, about half-way between a waking state and loss of senses. As
if guarding a secret, everywhere round about him, suffused in light, lay
deathly silence, so breathless that even his own lungs hardly dared to
take in air. He stood at the intersection of two streets where the
Vicolo Mercurio crossed the broader Strada di Mercurio, which stretched
out to right and left; in answer to the god of commerce, business and
trades had formerly had their abodes here; the street corners spoke
silently of it; many shops with broken counters, inlaid with marble,
opened out upon them; here the arrangement indicated a bakery, there, a
number of large, convex, earthenware jugs, an oil or flour business.
Opposite more slender, two-handled jars set into the counters showed
that the space behind them had been a bar-room; surely in the evening,
slaves and maids of the neighbourhood might have thronged here to get
wine for their masters in their own jugs; one could see that the now
illegible inscription inlaid with mosaic on the sidewalk in front of the
shop was worn by many feet; probably it had held out to passers-by a
recommendation of the excellent wine. On the outer wall, at about half
the height of a man, was visible a “graffito” probably scratched into
the plastering, with his finger-nail or an iron nail, by a schoolboy,
perhaps derisively explaining the praise, in this way, that the owner’s
wine owed its peerlessness to a generous addition of water. For from the
scratch there seemed raised before Norbert Hanold’s eyes the word
“caupo,” or was it an illusion. Certainly he could not settle it. He
possessed a certain skill in deciphering “graffiti” which were
difficult, and had already accomplished widely recognized work in that
field, yet at this time it completely failed him. Not only that, he had
a feeling that he did not understand any Latin, and it was absurd of him
to wish to read what a Pompeiian school youth had scratched into the
wall two thousand years before.
Not only had all his science left him, but it left him without the least
desire to regain it; he remembered it as from a great distance, and he
felt that it had been an old, dried-up, boresome aunt, dullest and most
superfluous creature in the world. What she uttered with puckered lips
and sapient mien, and presented as wisdom, was all vain, empty
pompousness, and merely gnawed at the dry rind of the fruit of knowledge
without revealing anything of its content, the germ of life, or bringing
anything to the point of inner, intelligent enjoyment. What it taught
was a lifeless, archæological view, and what came from its mouth was a
dead, philological language. These helped in no way to a comprehension
with soul, mind and heart, as the saying is, but he, who possessed a
desire for that, had to stand alone here, the only living person in the
hot noonday silence among the remains of the past, in order not to see
with physical eyes nor hear with corporeal ears. Then something came
forth everywhere without movement and a soundless speech began; then the
sun dissolved the tomblike rigidity of the old stones, a glowing thrill
passed through them, the dead awoke, and Pompeii began to live again.
The thoughts in Norbert Hanold’s mind were not really blasphemous, but
he had an indefinite feeling deserving of that adjective, and with this,
standing motionless, he looked before him down the Strada di Mercurio
toward the city-wall. The angular lava-blocks of its pavement still lay
as faultlessly fitted together as before the devastation, and each one
was of a light-grey colour, yet such dazzling lustre brooded over them
that they stretched like a quilted silver-white ribbon passing in
faintly glowing void between the silent walls and by the side of column
fragments.
Then suddenly—
With open eyes he gazed along the street, yet it seemed to him as if he
were doing it in a dream. A little to the right something suddenly
stepped forth from the Casa di Castore e Polluce, and across the lava
stepping-stones, which led from the house to the other side of the
Strada di Mercurio, Gradiva stepped buoyantly.
Quite indubitably it was she; even if the sunbeams did surround her
figure as with a thin veil of gold, he perceived her in profile as
plainly and as distinctly as on the bas-relief. Her head, whose crown
was entwined with a scarf which fell to her neck, inclined forward a
little; her left hand held up lightly the extremely voluminous dress
and, as it reached only to her ankles, one could perceive clearly that
in advancing, the right foot, lingering, if only for a moment, rose on
the tips of the toes almost perpendicularly. Here, however, it was not a
stone representation, everything in uniform colourlessness; the dress,
apparently made of extremely soft, clinging material, was not of cold
marble-white, but of a warm tone verging faintly on yellow, and her
hair, wavy under the scarf on her brow, and peeping forth at the
temples, stood out, with golden-brown radiance, in bold contrast to her
alabaster countenance.
As soon as he caught sight of her, Norbert’s memory was clearly awakened
to the fact that he had seen her here once already in a dream, walking
thus, the night that she had lain down as if to sleep over there in the
Forum on the steps of the Temple of Apollo. With this memory he became
conscious, for the first time, of something else; he had, without
himself knowing the motive in his heart, come to Italy on that account
and had, without stop, continued from Rome and Naples to Pompeii to see
if he could here find trace of her—and that in a literal sense—for,
with her unusual gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a
foot-print different from all the others.
Again it was a noonday dream-picture that passed there before him and
yet also a reality. For that was apparent from an effect which it
produced. On the last stepping-stone on the farther side, there lay
stretched out motionless, in the burning sunlight, a big lizard, whose
body, as if woven of gold and malachite, glistened brightly to Norbert’s
eyes. Before the approaching foot, however, it darted down suddenly and
wriggled away over the white, gleaming lava pavement.
Gradiva crossed the stepping-stones with her calm buoyancy, and now,
turning her back, walked along on the opposite sidewalk; her destination
seemed to be the house of Adonis. Before it she stopped a moment, too,
but passed then, as if after further deliberation, down farther through
the Strada di Mercurio. On the left, of the more elegant buildings,
there now stood only the Casa di Apollo, named after the numerous
representations of Apollo excavated there, and, to the man who was
gazing after her, it seemed again that she had also surely chosen the
portico of the Temple of Apollo for her death sleep. Probably she was
closely associated with the cult of the sun-god and was going there.
Soon, however, she stopped again; stepping-stones crossed the street
here, too, and she walked back again to the right side. Thus she turned
the other side of her face toward him and looked a little different, for
her left hand, which held up her gown, was not visible and instead of
her curved arm, the right one hung down straight. At a greater distance
now, however, the golden waves of sunlight floated around her with a
thicker web of veiling, and did not allow him to distinguish where she
had stopped, for she disappeared suddenly before the house of Meleager.
Norbert Hanold still stood without having moved a limb. With his eyes,
and this time with his corporeal ones, he had surveyed, step by step,
her vanishing form. Now, at length, he drew a deep breath, for his
breast too had remained almost motionless.
Simultaneously the sixth sense, suppressing the others completely, held
him absolutely in its sway. Had what had just stood before him been a
product of his imagination or a reality?
He did not know that, nor whether he was awake or dreaming, and tried in
vain to collect his thoughts. Then, however, a strange shudder passed
down his spine. He saw and heard nothing, yet he felt from the secret
inner vibrations that Pompeii had begun to live about him in the noonday
hour of spirits, and so Gradiva lived again, too, and had gone into the
house which she had occupied before the fateful August day of the year
79.
From his former visit, he was acquainted with the Casa di Meleagro, had
not yet gone there this time, however, but had merely stopped briefly in
the Museo Nazionale of Naples before the wall paintings of Meleager and
his Arcadian huntress companion, Atalanta, which had been found in the
Strada di Mercurio in that house, and after which the latter had been
named. Yet as he now again acquired the ability to move and walked
toward it, he began to doubt whether it really bore its name after the
slayer of the Caledonian boar. He suddenly recalled a Greek poet,
Meleager, who, to be sure, had probably lived about a century before the
destruction of Pompeii. A descendant of his, however, might have come
here and built the house for himself. That agreed with something else
that had awakened in his memory, for he remembered his supposition, or
rather a definite conviction, that Gradiva had been of Greek descent. To
be sure there mingled with his idea the figure of Atalanta as Ovid had
pictured it in his _Metamorphoses_:
—her floating vest
A polished buckle clasped—her careless locks
In simple knot were gathered—
_Trans. by_ Henry 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 there
looked 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, an _œcus_, the former dining-room, likewise
surrounded on three sides by pillars painted 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 whole _œcus_, 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 wall of 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, at
first 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.