Part 3

For the achievement of such fame, he lacked here the necessary weapon, and like the greatest battle hero of antiquity, who had, however, been alone and unable to do otherwise, he left the field, or rather his room, in view of the hundredfold overwhelming number of the common foe. Outside it dawned upon him that he had thereby done in a small way what he would have to repeat on a larger scale on the morrow. Pompeii, too, apparently offered no peacefully gratifying abode for his needs. To this idea was added, at least dimly, another, that his dissatisfaction was certainly caused not by his surroundings alone, but to a degree found its origin in him. To be sure, flies had always been very repulsive to him, but they had never before transported him into such raging fury as this. On account of the journey his nerves were undeniably in an excited and irritable condition, for which indoor air and overwork at home during the winter had probably begun to pave the way. He felt that he was out of sorts because he lacked something without being able to explain what, and this ill-humour he took everywhere with him; of course flies and bridal couples swarming _en masse_ were not calculated to make life agreeable anywhere. Yet if he did not wish to wrap himself in a thick cloud of self-righteousness, it could not remain concealed from him that he was travelling around Italy just as aimless, senseless, blind and deaf as they, only with considerably less capacity for enjoyment. For his travelling companion, science, had, most decidedly, much of an old Trappist about her, did not open her mouth when she was not spoken to, and it seemed to him that he was almost forgetting in what language he had communed with her.

It was now too late in the day to go into Pompeii through the “ingresso.” Norbert remembered a circuit he had once made on the old city-wall, and attempted to mount the latter by means of all sorts of bushes and wild growth. Thus he wandered along for some distance a little above the city of graves, which lay on his right, motionless and quiet. It looked like a dead rubbish field already almost covered with shadow, for the evening sun stood in the west not far from the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Round about, on the other hand, it still bathed all the hilltops and fields with an enchanting brilliancy of life, gilded the smoke-cone rising above the Vesuvius crater and clad the peaks and pinnacles of Monte Sant’ Angelo in purple. High and solitary rose Monte Epomeo from the sparkling, blue sea glittering with golden light, from which Cape Misenum reared itself with dark outline, like a mysterious, titanic structure. Wherever the gaze rested, a wonderful picture was spread combining charm and sublimity, remote past and joyous present. Norbert Hanold had expected to find here what he longed for vaguely. Yet he was not in the mood for it, although no bridal couples and flies molested him on the deserted wall; even nature was unable to offer him what he lacked in his surroundings and within himself. With a calmness bordering closely on indifference, he let his eyes pass over the all-pervading beauty, and did not regret in the least that it was growing pale and fading away in the sunset, but returned to the “Diomed,” as he had come, dissatisfied.

* * * * *

But as he had now, although with ill-success, been conveyed to this place through his indiscretion, he reached the decision overnight, to get from the folly he had committed at least one day of scientific profit, and went to Pompeii on the regular road as soon as the “ingresso” was opened in the morning. In little groups commanded by official guides, armed with red _Baedekers_ or their foreign cousins, longing for secret excavations of their own, there wandered before and behind him the population of the two hotels. The still fresh, morning air was filled almost exclusively by English or Anglo-American chatter; the German couples were making each other mutually happy with German sweets and inspiration up there on Capri behind Monte Sant’ Angelo at the breakfast table of the Pagano. Norbert remembered how to free himself soon, by well chosen words, combined with a good “mancia,” from the burden of a “guida,” and was able to pursue his purposes alone and unhindered. It afforded him some satisfaction to know that he possessed a faultless memory; wherever his glance rested, everything lay and stood exactly as he remembered it, as if only yesterday he had imprinted it in his mind by means of expert observation. This continually repeated experience brought, however, the added feeling that his presence there seemed really very unnecessary, and a decided indifference took possession of his eyes and his intellect more and more, as during the evening on the wall. Although, when he looked up, the pine-shaped smoke-cone of Vesuvius generally stood before him against the blue sky, yet, remarkably, it did not once appear in his memory that he had dreamed some time ago that he had been present at the destruction of Pompeii by the volcanic eruption of 79. Wandering around for hours made him tired and half-sleepy, of course, yet he felt not the least suggestion of anything dreamlike, but there lay about him only a confusion of fragments of ancient gate arches, pillars and walls significant to the highest degree for archæology, but, viewed without the esoteric aid of this science, really not much else than a big pile of rubbish, neatly arranged, to be sure, but extremely devoid of interest; and although science and dreams were wont formerly to stand on footings exactly opposed, they had apparently here to-day come to an agreement to withdraw their aid from Norbert Hanold and deliver him over absolutely to the aimlessness of his walking and standing around.

So he had wandered in all directions from the Forum to the Amphitheatre, from the Porta di Stabia to the Porta del Vesuvio through the Street of Tombs as well as through countless others, and the sun had likewise, in the meanwhile, made its accustomed morning journey to the position where it usually changes to the more comfortable descent toward the sea. Thereby, to the great satisfaction of their misunderstood, hoarsely eloquent guides, it gave the English and American men and women, forced to go there by a traveller’s sense of duty, a signal to become mindful of the superior comfort of sitting at the lunch-tables of the twin hotels; besides, they had seen with their own eyes everything that could be required for conversation on the other side of the ocean and channel; so the separate groups, satiated by the past, started on the return, ebbed in common movement down through the Via Marina, in order not to lose meals at the, to be sure somewhat euphemistically Lucullan, tables of the present, in the house of “Diomed” or of Mr. Swiss. In consideration of all the outer and inner circumstances, this was doubtless also the wisest thing that they could do, for the noon sun of May was decidedly well disposed toward the lizards, butterflies and other winged inhabitants or visitors of the extensive mass of ruins, but for the northern complexion of a Madame or Miss its perpendicular obtrusiveness was unquestionably beginning to become less kindly, and, supposedly in some causal connection with that, the “charmings” had already in the last hour considerably diminished, the “shockings” had increased in the same proportion, and the masculine “ah’s” proceeding from rows of teeth even more widely distended than before had begun a noticeable transition to yawning.

It was remarkable, however, that simultaneously with their vanishing, what had formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an entirely changed appearance, but not a living one; it now appeared rather to be becoming completely petrified in dead immobility. Yet out of it stirred a feeling that death was beginning to talk, although not in a manner intelligible to human ears. To be sure, here and there was a sound as if a whisper were proceeding from the stone which, however, only the softly murmuring south wind, Atabulus, awoke, he who, two thousand years ago, had buzzed in this fashion about the temples, halls and houses, and was now carrying on his playful game with the green, shimmering stalks on the low ruins. From the coast of Africa he often rushed across, casting forth wild, full blasts: he was not doing that to-day, but was gently fanning again the old acquaintances which had come to light again. He could not, however, refrain from his natural tendency to devastate, and blew with hot breath, even though lightly, on everything that he encountered on the way.

In this, the sun, his eternally youthful mother, helped him. She strengthened his fiery breath, and accomplished, besides, what he could not, steeped everything with trembling, glittering, dazzling splendour. As with a golden eraser, she effaced from the edges of the houses on the _semitæ_ and _crepidine viarum_, as the sidewalks were once called, every slight shadow, cast into all the vestibules, inner courts, peristyles and balconies her luminous radiance, or desultory rays where a shelter blocked her direct approach. Hardly anywhere was there a nook which successfully protected itself against the ocean of light and veiled itself in a dusky, silver web; every street lay between the old walls like long, rippling, white strips of linen spread out to bleach; and without exception all were equally motionless and mute, for not only had the last of the rasping and nasal tones of the English and American messengers disappeared, but the former slight evidences of lizard- and butterfly-life seemed also to have left the silent city of ruins. They had not really done so, but the gaze perceived no more movement from them.

As had been the custom of their ancestors out on the mountain slopes and cliff walls for thousands of years, when the great Pan laid himself to sleep, here, too, in order not to disturb him, they had stretched themselves out motionless or, folding their wings, had squatted here and there; and it seemed as if, in this place, they felt even more strongly the command of the hot, holy, noonday quiet in whose ghostly hour life must be silent and suppressed, because during it the dead awake and begin to talk in toneless spirit-language.

This changed aspect which the things round about had assumed really thrust itself less upon the vision than it aroused the emotions, or, more correctly, an unnamed sixth sense; this latter, however, was stimulated so strongly and persistently that a person endowed with it could not throw off the effect produced upon him. To be sure, of those estimable boarders already busy with their soup spoons at the two “alberghi” near the “ingresso,” hardly a man or woman would have been counted among those thus invested, but Nature had once bestowed this great attention upon Norbert Hanold and he had to submit to its effects, not at all because he had an understanding with it, however, for he wished nothing at all and desired nothing more than that he might be sitting quietly in his study with an instructive book in his hand, instead of having undertaken this aimless spring journey. Yet as he had turned back from the Street of Tombs through the Hercules gate into the centre of the city, and at Casa di Sallustio had turned to the left, quite without purpose or thought, into the narrow “vicolo,” suddenly that sixth sense was awakened in him; but this last expression was not really fitting, rather he was transported by it into a strangely dreamy condition, about half-way between a waking state and loss of senses. As if guarding a secret, everywhere round about him, suffused in light, lay deathly silence, so breathless that even his own lungs hardly dared to take in air. He stood at the intersection of two streets where the Vicolo Mercurio crossed the broader Strada di Mercurio, which stretched out to right and left; in answer to the god of commerce, business and trades had formerly had their abodes here; the street corners spoke silently of it; many shops with broken counters, inlaid with marble, opened out upon them; here the arrangement indicated a bakery, there, a number of large, convex, earthenware jugs, an oil or flour business. Opposite more slender, two-handled jars set into the counters showed that the space behind them had been a bar-room; surely in the evening, slaves and maids of the neighbourhood might have thronged here to get wine for their masters in their own jugs; one could see that the now illegible inscription inlaid with mosaic on the sidewalk in front of the shop was worn by many feet; probably it had held out to passers-by a recommendation of the excellent wine. On the outer wall, at about half the height of a man, was visible a “graffito” probably scratched into the plastering, with his finger-nail or an iron nail, by a schoolboy, perhaps derisively explaining the praise, in this way, that the owner’s wine owed its peerlessness to a generous addition of water. For from the scratch there seemed raised before Norbert Hanold’s eyes the word “caupo,” or was it an illusion. Certainly he could not settle it. He possessed a certain skill in deciphering “graffiti” which were difficult, and had already accomplished widely recognized work in that field, yet at this time it completely failed him. Not only that, he had a feeling that he did not understand any Latin, and it was absurd of him to wish to read what a Pompeiian school youth had scratched into the wall two thousand years before.

Not only had all his science left him, but it left him without the least desire to regain it; he remembered it as from a great distance, and he felt that it had been an old, dried-up, boresome aunt, dullest and most superfluous creature in the world. What she uttered with puckered lips and sapient mien, and presented as wisdom, was all vain, empty pompousness, and merely gnawed at the dry rind of the fruit of knowledge without revealing anything of its content, the germ of life, or bringing anything to the point of inner, intelligent enjoyment. What it taught was a lifeless, archæological view, and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language. These helped in no way to a comprehension with soul, mind and heart, as the saying is, but he, who possessed a desire for that, had to stand alone here, the only living person in the hot noonday silence among the remains of the past, in order not to see with physical eyes nor hear with corporeal ears. Then something came forth everywhere without movement and a soundless speech began; then the sun dissolved the tomblike rigidity of the old stones, a glowing thrill passed through them, the dead awoke, and Pompeii began to live again.

The thoughts in Norbert Hanold’s mind were not really blasphemous, but he had an indefinite feeling deserving of that adjective, and with this, standing motionless, he looked before him down the Strada di Mercurio toward the city-wall. The angular lava-blocks of its pavement still lay as faultlessly fitted together as before the devastation, and each one was of a light-grey colour, yet such dazzling lustre brooded over them that they stretched like a quilted silver-white ribbon passing in faintly glowing void between the silent walls and by the side of column fragments.

Then suddenly—

With open eyes he gazed along the street, yet it seemed to him as if he were doing it in a dream. A little to the right something suddenly stepped forth from the Casa di Castore e Polluce, and across the lava stepping-stones, which led from the house to the other side of the Strada di Mercurio, Gradiva stepped buoyantly.

Quite indubitably it was she; even if the sunbeams did surround her figure as with a thin veil of gold, he perceived her in profile as plainly and as distinctly as on the bas-relief. Her head, whose crown was entwined with a scarf which fell to her neck, inclined forward a little; her left hand held up lightly the extremely voluminous dress and, as it reached only to her ankles, one could perceive clearly that in advancing, the right foot, lingering, if only for a moment, rose on the tips of the toes almost perpendicularly. Here, however, it was not a stone representation, everything in uniform colourlessness; the dress, apparently made of extremely soft, clinging material, was not of cold marble-white, but of a warm tone verging faintly on yellow, and her hair, wavy under the scarf on her brow, and peeping forth at the temples, stood out, with golden-brown radiance, in bold contrast to her alabaster countenance.

As soon as he caught sight of her, Norbert’s memory was clearly awakened to the fact that he had seen her here once already in a dream, walking thus, the night that she had lain down as if to sleep over there in the Forum on the steps of the Temple of Apollo. With this memory he became conscious, for the first time, of something else; he had, without himself knowing the motive in his heart, come to Italy on that account and had, without stop, continued from Rome and Naples to Pompeii to see if he could here find trace of her—and that in a literal sense—for, with her unusual gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a foot-print different from all the others.

Again it was a noonday dream-picture that passed there before him and yet also a reality. For that was apparent from an effect which it produced. On the last stepping-stone on the farther side, there lay stretched out motionless, in the burning sunlight, a big lizard, whose body, as if woven of gold and malachite, glistened brightly to Norbert’s eyes. Before the approaching foot, however, it darted down suddenly and wriggled away over the white, gleaming lava pavement.

Gradiva crossed the stepping-stones with her calm buoyancy, and now, turning her back, walked along on the opposite sidewalk; her destination seemed to be the house of Adonis. Before it she stopped a moment, too, but passed then, as if after further deliberation, down farther through the Strada di Mercurio. On the left, of the more elegant buildings, there now stood only the Casa di Apollo, named after the numerous representations of Apollo excavated there, and, to the man who was gazing after her, it seemed again that she had also surely chosen the portico of the Temple of Apollo for her death sleep. Probably she was closely associated with the cult of the sun-god and was going there. Soon, however, she stopped again; stepping-stones crossed the street here, too, and she walked back again to the right side. Thus she turned the other side of her face toward him and looked a little different, for her left hand, which held up her gown, was not visible and instead of her curved arm, the right one hung down straight. At a greater distance now, however, the golden waves of sunlight floated around her with a thicker web of veiling, and did not allow him to distinguish where she had stopped, for she disappeared suddenly before the house of Meleager. Norbert Hanold still stood without having moved a limb. With his eyes, and this time with his corporeal ones, he had surveyed, step by step, her vanishing form. Now, at length, he drew a deep breath, for his breast too had remained almost motionless.

Simultaneously the sixth sense, suppressing the others completely, held him absolutely in its sway. Had what had just stood before him been a product of his imagination or a reality?

He did not know that, nor whether he was awake or dreaming, and tried in vain to collect his thoughts. Then, however, a strange shudder passed down his spine. He saw and heard nothing, yet he felt from the secret inner vibrations that Pompeii had begun to live about him in the noonday hour of spirits, and so Gradiva lived again, too, and had gone into the house which she had occupied before the fateful August day of the year 79.

From his former visit, he was acquainted with the Casa di Meleagro, had not yet gone there this time, however, but had merely stopped briefly in the Museo Nazionale of Naples before the wall paintings of Meleager and his Arcadian huntress companion, Atalanta, which had been found in the Strada di Mercurio in that house, and after which the latter had been named. Yet as he now again acquired the ability to move and walked toward it, he began to doubt whether it really bore its name after the slayer of the Caledonian boar. He suddenly recalled a Greek poet, Meleager, who, to be sure, had probably lived about a century before the destruction of Pompeii. A descendant of his, however, might have come here and built the house for himself. That agreed with something else that had awakened in his memory, for he remembered his supposition, or rather a definite conviction, that Gradiva had been of Greek descent. To be sure there mingled with his idea the figure of Atalanta as Ovid had pictured it in his _Metamorphoses_:

—her floating vest A polished buckle clasped—her careless locks In simple knot were gathered—

_Trans. by_ Henry King.

He could not recall the verses word for word, but their content was present in his mind; and from his store of knowledge was added the fact that Cleopatra was the name of the young wife of Œneus’ son, Meleager. More probably this had nothing to do with him, but with the Greek poet, Meleager. Thus, under the glowing sun of the Campagna, there was a mythological-literary-historical-archæological juggling in his head.

When he had passed the house of Castor and Pollux and that of the Centaur, he stood before the Casa di Meleagro from whose threshold there looked up at him, still discernible, the inlaid greeting “Ave.” On the wall of the vestibule, Mercury was handing Fortuna a pouch filled with money; that probably indicated, allegorically, the riches and other fortunate circumstances of the former dweller. Behind this opened up the inner court, the centre of which was occupied by a marble table supported by three griffins.

Empty and silent, the room lay there, appearing absolutely unfamiliar to the man, as he entered, awaking no memory that he had already been here, yet he then recalled it, for the interior of the house offered a deviation from that of the other excavated buildings of the city. The peristyle adjoined the inner court on the other side of the balcony toward the rear—not in the usual way, but at the left side and on that account was of greater extent and more splendid appearance than any other in Pompeii. It was framed by a colonnade supported by two dozen pillars painted red on the lower, and white on the upper half. These lent solemnity to the great, silent space; here in the centre was a spring with a beautifully wrought enclosure, which served as a fish-pool. Apparently the house must have been the dwelling of an estimable man of culture and artistic sense.