“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 good hundred miles nearer; diagonally across from your house, in the corner house; in my window, in a cage, is a canary,” she discloses to the still bewildered man.
This last word touches the hero like a memory from afar. That is surely the same bird whose song has suggested to him the trip to Italy.
“In that house lives my father, Richard Bertgang, professor of zoology.”
As his neighbour, therefore, she is acquainted with him and his name. It seems as if the disappointment of a superficial solution is threatening us—a solution unworthy of our expectations.
As yet Norbert Hanold shows no regained independence of thought, when he repeats, “Then are you—are you Miss Zoë Bertgang? But she looked quite different——”
Miss Bertgang’s answer shows then that other relations besides those of neighbourliness have existed between them. She knows how to intercede for the familiar manner of address, which he has, of course, used to the noonday spirit, but withdrawn again from the living girl; she makes former privileges of use to her here. “If you find that form of address more suitable between us, I can use it too, you know, but the other came to me more naturally. I don’t know whether I looked different when we used to run about before with each other as friends, every day, and occasionally beat and cuffed each other for a change, but if, in recent years, you had favoured me with even one glance you might perhaps have seen that I have looked like this for a long time.”
A childhood friendship had therefore existed between the two, perhaps a childhood love, from which the familiar form of address derived its justification. Isn’t this solution perhaps as superficial as the one first supposed? The fact that it occurs to us that this childhood relation explains in an unexpected way so many details of what has occurred in the present intercourse between them makes the matter essentially deeper. Does it not seem that the blow on Zoë-Gradiva’s hand which Norbert Hanold has so splendidly motivated by the necessity of solving, experimentally, the question of the physical existence of the apparition, is, from another standpoint, remarkably similar to a revival of the impulse for “beating and cuffing,” whose sway in childhood Zoë’s words have testified to? And when Gradiva puts to the archæologist the question whether it does not seem to him that they have once already, two thousand years ago, shared their luncheon, does not the incomprehensible question become suddenly senseful, when we substitute for the historical past the personal childhood, whose memories persist vividly for the girl, but seem to be forgotten by the young man? Does not the idea suddenly dawn upon us that the fancies of the young man about his Gradiva may be an echo of his childhood memories? Then they would, therefore, be no arbitrary products of his imagination, but determined, without his knowing it, by the existing material of childhood impressions already forgotten, but still active in him. We must be able to point out in detail the origin of these fancies, even if only by conjecture. If, for instance, Gradiva must be of pure Greek ancestry, the daughter of a respected man, perhaps of a priest of Ceres, that predisposes us fairly well for an after-effect of the knowledge of her Greek name—Zoë, and of her membership in the family of a professor of zoology. If, however, these fancies of Hanold’s are transformed memories, we may expect to find in the disclosures of Zoë Bertgang, the suggestion of the sources of these fancies. Let us listen; she tells us of an intimate friendship of childhood; we shall soon learn what further development this childhood relation had in both.
“Then up to the time when people call us ‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown reason, I had really acquired a remarkable attachment for you, and thought that I could never find a more pleasing friend in the world. Mother, sister, or brother I had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm in alcohol was far more interesting than I, and people (I count girls such) must surely have something with which they can occupy their thoughts and the like. Then you were that something, but when archæology overcame you, I made the discovery that you—excuse the familiarity, but your new formality sounds absurd to me—I was saying that I imagined that you had become an intolerable person, who had no longer, at least for me, an eye in his head, a tongue in his mouth, nor any of the memories that I retained of our childhood friendship. So I probably looked different from what I did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met you at a party, even last winter, you did not look at me and I did not hear your voice; in this, of course, there was nothing that marked me out especially, for you treated all the others in the same way. To you I was but air, and you, with your shock of light hair, which I had formerly pulled so often, were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo and at the same time as grandiose as an—archæopteryx; I believe the excavated antediluvian bird-monster is so called; but that your head harboured an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me as something excavated and restored to life—I had not surmised that of you, and when you suddenly stood before me unexpectedly, it cost me some effort at first to understand what kind of incredible fancy your imagination had invented. Then I was amused and, in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected it of you.” (G. p. 101.)
So she thus tells us clearly enough what, with the years, has become of the childhood friendship for both of them. With her it expanded into an intense love affair, for one must have something, you know, to which one, that is, a girl, pins her affections. Miss Zoë, the incarnation of cleverness and clarity, makes her psychic life, too, quite transparent for us. If it is already the general rule for a normal girl that she first turns her affection to her father, she is especially ready to do it, she who has no one but her father in her family; but this father has nothing left for her; the objects of science have captured all his interest. So she has to look around for another person, and clings with especial fervour to the playmate of her youth. When he, too, no longer has any eyes for her, it does not destroy her love, rather augments it, for he has become like her father, like him absorbed by science and, by it, isolated from life and from Zoë. So it is granted to her to be faithful in unfaithfulness, to find her father again in her beloved, to embrace both with the same feeling as we may say, to make them both identical in her emotions. Where do we get justification for this little psychological analysis, which may easily seem autocratic? In a single, but intensely characteristic detail the author of the romance gives it to us. When Zoë pictures for us the transformation of the playmate of her youth, which seems so sad for her, she insults him by a comparison with the archæopteryx, that bird-monster which belongs to the archæology of zoology. So she has found a single concrete expression for identifying the two people; her resentment strikes the beloved as well as the father with the same word. The archæopteryx is, so to speak, the compromise, or intermediary representation in which the folly of her beloved coincides with her thought of an analogous folly of her father.