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 and at 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 had occurred. 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 her bright 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 and
wherefore, 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 and buildings 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 not recall 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, but with 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 through
the 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 moment I
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, not sandals, 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 had forgotten 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.