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?”