Then he suddenly recoiled, as he turned one of the four corners of the colonnade. A half-dozen paces away from him there sat, rather high up on a fragmentary wall-ruin, one of the young girls who had found death here in the ashes.
No, that was nonsense, which his reason rejected. His eyes, too, and a nameless something else recognized that fact. It was Gradiva; she was sitting on a stone ruin as she had formerly sat on the step, only, as the former was considerably higher, her slender feet, which hung down free in the sand-colour shoes, were visible up to her dainty ankles.
With an instinctive movement, Norbert was at first about to run out between the pillars through the garden; what, for a half-hour, he had feared most of anything in the world had suddenly appeared, viewed him with bright eyes and with lips which, he felt, were about to burst into mocking laughter; yet they didn’t, but the familiar voice rang out calmly from them, “You’ll get wet outside.”
Now, for the first time, he saw that it was raining; for that reason it had become so dark. That unquestionably was an advantage to all the plants about and in Pompeii, but that a human being in the place would be benefited by it was ridiculous, and for the moment Norbert Hanold feared, far more than danger of death, appearing ridiculous. Therefore he involuntarily gave up the attempt to get away, stood there, helpless, and looked at the two feet, which now, as if somewhat impatient, were swinging back and forth; and as this view did not have so clearing an effect upon his thoughts that he could find expression for them, the owner of the dainty feet again took up the conversation. “We were interrupted before; you were just going to tell me something about flies—I imagined that you were making scientific investigations here—or about a fly in your head. Did you succeed in catching and destroying the one on my hand?”
This last she said with a smiling expression about her lips, which, however, was so faint and charming that it was not at all terrifying. On the contrary, it now lent to the questioned man power of speech, but with this limitation, that the young archæologist suddenly did not know how to address her. In order to escape this dilemma, he found it best to avoid that and replied, “I was—as they say—somewhat confused mentally and ask pardon that I—the hand—in that way—how I could be so stupid, I can’t understand—but I can’t understand either how its owner could use my name in upbraiding me for my—my madness.”
Gradiva’s feet stopped moving and she rejoined, still addressing him familiarly, “Your power of understanding has not yet progressed that far, Norbert Hanold. Of course, I cannot be surprised, for you have long ago accustomed me to it. To make that discovery again I should not have needed to come to Pompeii, and you could have confirmed it for me a good hundred miles nearer.”
“A hundred miles nearer”—he repeated, perplexed and half stuttering—“where is that?”
“Diagonally across from your house, in the corner house; in my window, in a cage, is a canary.”
Like a memory from far away this last word moved the hearer, who repeated, “A canary”—and he added, stuttering more—“He—he sings?”
“They usually do, especially in spring when the sun begins to seem warm again. In that house lives my father, Richard Bertgang, professor of zoology.”