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 in Faraglionensis? I should hardly have supposed it, but it seems thoroughly probable that they are found, not only in the Faraglioni of 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; buried in 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 of some 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 really good, 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 noon hour, 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 without him. 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 had been 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.