Even we are not prepared for that. Our hero begins to rise from his
humility and to play an active rôle. He is, apparently, entirely cured
of his delusion, lifted far above it, and proves this by tearing asunder
the last threads of the web of delusion. Patients, also, who have been
freed from the compulsion of their delusion, by the disclosure of the
repression behind it, always act in just that way. When they have once
understood, they themselves offer the solutions for the last and most
significant riddles of their strange condition in suddenly emerging
ideas. We had already believed, of course, that the Greek ancestry of
the mythical Gradiva was an after-effect of the Greek name, Zoë, but
with the name, Gradiva, we had ventured nothing; we had supposed it the
free creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination, and behold! this very
name now shows itself to be a remnant, really a translation of the
repressed family-name of the supposedly forgotten beloved of his youth.
The derivation and solution of the delusion are now completed. What
follows may well serve as a harmonious conclusion of the tale. In regard
to the future, it can have only a pleasant effect on us, if the
rehabilitation of the man, who formerly had to play the lamentable rôle
of one needing to be cured, progresses, and he succeeds in awakening in
the girl some of the emotions which he formerly experienced. Thus it
happens that he makes her jealous by mentioning the congenial young
lady, who disturbed them in Meleager’s house, and by the acknowledgment
that the latter was the first girl who had impressed him much. When Zoë
is then about to take a cool departure, with the remark that now
everything is reasonable again, she herself not least of all, that he
might look up Gisa Hartleben, or whatever her name might now be, and be
of scientific assistance to her about the purpose of her stay in
Pompeii, but she has to go now to the “Albergo del Sole” where her
father is already waiting for her at lunch, perhaps they may see each
other again some time at a party in Germany or on the moon, he seizes
upon the troublesome fly as a means of taking possession of her cheek,
first, and then of her lips, and assumes the aggressive, which is the
duty of a man in the game of love. Only once more does a shadow seem to
fall on their happiness, when Zoë reminds him that now she must really
go to her father, who will otherwise starve in the “Sole.” “Your
father—what will he——?” (_G._ p. 106.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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