“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.
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 his head, 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.