Sidonie was making anxious calculations about Gottfried. He might be asked about the stranger in the Wilde Mann, and it would be impossible for him, if asked, to do anything less than tell the truth to the Freiherr. But then, Gottfried did not know that the man he had seen was a painter, and Sidonie was reassured also by the thought that her father never gave his concentrated attention to more than one subject at a time. Lately, to her mother’s relief, he had once again allowed the Leipziger Zeitung into the house. At the moment he was anxious to hear how much Fritz had gathered from his visit to the salt-works and pan-houses of Artern, then he wished to discuss, or rather to give his opinions, on Buonaparte, who, on the whole, he thought, showed signs of competence. That should last them at least until tomorrow.
Fritz went in through the shabby darkly-polished house, where the sound of the early evening hymn-singing could be heard from behind the shut doors of the kitchen quarters. First to his mother and little Christoph, thin as a shadow with summer fever. ‘Are you well, Fritz? Is there anything you want? Are you happy?’ He would have liked to ask her to give him something, or to tell him something, but could think of nothing. She asked unexpectedly, ‘Are you concealing anything from your father?’ Fritz took her hand. ‘You must trust me, mother! I shall tell him everything - that is, everything that -‘ With quite unaccustomed energy she cried, ‘No, in heaven’s name, whatever it is, don’t do that!’
33
At Jena
BEFORE starting work in earnest, but having realised at Artern what it would be like when he did, Fritz went to see his friends at Jena. The Gaul could do the necessary thirty miles, though without enthusiasm. He had not been to see them, Caroline Schlegel had been saying, for centuries.
‘We shall hope to hear him talking, as he used to do, before he gets round the corner of Grammatische Strasse,’ said Dorothea Schlegel, ‘saying something about the Absolute.’
Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a guest in her house as so often, reminded her that Hardenberg could not be judged by any ordinary standards, not even the ordinary standards of Jena, where fifteen out of every twenty inhabitants were said to be Professors. ‘For him there is no real barrier between the unseen and the seen. The whole of existence dissolves itself into a myth.’
‘But that is the trouble,’ interrupted Caroline. ‘He used, of course, to say that every day the world was drawing nearer to infinity. Now, we are told, he interests himself in the extraction and refinement of salt and brown coal, which can’t be dissolved into a myth, no matter how hard he tries.’
‘Goethe himself undertook to administer a silver mine for the Duke of Saxe-Weimar,’ said her husband.
‘Very unsuccessfully. Goethe’s mine went bankrupt. However, I believe that Hardenberg will manage his efficiently, and that is what I can’t forgive him. Enfin, he will become totally merkantilistisch. He will marry the niece of the Kreisamtmann and in good time he will become a Kreisamtmann himself.’
‘I am sorry that he allows himself to become an object of jest,’ said Ritter.
‘That is not on account of his philosophy, or even his mania for salt. It is because he has such large hands and feet,’ said Caroline. ‘We all love him.’
‘Dearly we love him,’ said Dorothea.
In Jena, in autumn, friends walked together in the pine woods above the little town, or in Paradise, Jena’s name for its towpath along the Saale. Sometimes Goethe, who often spent the summers here, was to be seen in Paradise, also walking, his hands clasped behind his back, in reverie. He was now forty-six years old, and was referred to by the Schlegel women as His Ancient and Divine Majesty. Goethe did not like to meet too many people at once. As he advanced, groups dexterously broke up before he was obliged to meet them. Fritz hung back, not aspiring to the attention of so great a man.
‘And yet you have plenty to say,’ Caroline told him. ‘You could speak to him, as a young man, a coming poet, to one who seems almost indestructible.’
‘I have nothing good enough to show him.’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘You may talk to me, Hardenberg. Talk to me about salt.’
The musical evenings and conversazione at Jena were crowded, but not everyone said brilliant things, or indeed, anything at all. Some of the guests stood uneasily, certain that they had been invited, but not, now that they had arrived, that their names had been remembered.
‘Dietmahler!’
‘Hardenberg! I knew you as soon as you came into the room.’
‘How do I come into a room?’
Dietmahler scarcely liked to say, You still look ridiculous and everyone is still glad to see you. He felt, like a wound, the irrecoverable gap between student days and those that follow.
‘Are you a surgeon now?’ Fritz asked him.
‘Not quite, but soon. You see I have not moved far from Jena. When I qualify, I shall not do so badly. My mother is alive, but I have no younger brothers now and no sisters.’
‘Gott sei Dank, I have plenty of both,’ cried Fritz, on an impulse. ‘Come and stay with us in Weissenfels. Dear friend, pay us a visit.’
It was in this way that Dietmahler witnessed the Great Wash at Weissenfels, and told the Freiherr von Hardenberg, in all sincerity, that he knew nothing about his son’s entanglement with a young woman of the middle class, or, indeed, with any other woman.
34
The Garden-House
AT Tennstedt, Karoline Just heard that the Rockenthiens had asked Fritz to stand godfather to Gunther, the new baby. She thought, ‘They are trying to bind him to them with links of iron.’
Erasmus, who wrote to her from Hubertusberg, was her only ally. ‘I am prepared to resign myself, as I explained to you, to taking a much smaller place in Fritz’s life,’ he told her, ‘at least, I tell myself that I am resigned. But not to having him taken away from us by a greedy infant. If Sophie von Kuhn is an infant, however, by the way, she will not stay constant, she will change her mind. And yet I don’t quite like the idea of that either.’
Fritz came back to Tennstedt, and went into the kitchen, saying he was too dusty from the summer’s roads for the front room. ‘Where is the Kreisamtmann? Where is Frau Rahel?’
What does it matter where they are? Karoline felt like answering. You have been away for so long, now is your opportunity to speak to someone who truly understands you. Didn’t you say that we were like two watches, set to the same time? She said aloud, ‘They are in their garden-house. Yes! It is finished at last.’
‘That I must see,’ said Fritz. He was washing his face and hands under the pump, but as she put on her shawl he added, in a voice of great tenderness, ‘Dear Justen, you must not think I have forgotten the things we talked about not so long ago.’ Karoline did think he had forgotten all or most of it. Then as he dried himself he repeated, ‘Never does the heart sigh in vain, Justen,’ and she scarcely knew whether to be unhappy or not. In her mouth was something bitter, that tasted like the waters of death.
She would have twenty minutes alone with him on the walk down to the garden, which was in an area on the outskirts called the Runde. He would give her his arm. But they would have to stop and talk on the way to many neighbours and acquaintances, all of whom would say: ‘Ah, Freiherr, so you are back from Jena.’ ‘Yes, back from Jena.’ ‘We are glad that your health has been spared, we are glad to see you back from Jena.’ Many of these people would get up in Tennstedt, and go to bed again there at the end of the day, perhaps in all eighteen thousand or so times.
‘How good it is to be alive,’ several of them said, ‘in this warm weather.’
The Justs’ plot was small, and had no trees, but they had bought it already cultivated and it was planted up with vegetables, honeysuckle and centifolia roses. The garden-house itself was one of an accepted pattern, which could be ordered from either of the two master carpenters in Tennstedt, and was handsomely framed in carved and gilded wood. Its name was conspicuous, Der Garten Eden.
The Justs sat in a cloud of smoke from
the Kreisamtmann’s pipe, side by side on a new bench at the new entrance. There was no room for anyone else. This, too, was part of the accepted design of a garden-house. They looked happily outwards towards the Runde, half-asphyxiated by the fragrance of hop-vines, honeysuckle and tobacco. ‘Hail, ever-blessed pair!’ cried Fritz, from a distance.
Just, as he himself very well knew, had lately become almost absurdly absorbed by the details of design and installation. He had taken Fritz to Artern, as part of his apprenticeship, to listen to both sides in a disagreement between the different brotherhoods of salt workers. But although he had told Fritz to take careful notes, he had returned with impatience to the matter of the exact placing of the Vorbau, or porch, on the garden-house. At what angle would it receive most morning sun? Afternoon sun, of course, was to be avoided.
Even now, while Rahel was asking after her former friends in Jena (but without, Fritz thought, her old hint of sharpness), the Kreisamtmann once again introduced the subject of the Vorbau. It had always seemed to Fritz that Coelestin Just knew what contentment was, but not passion, and could therefore be accounted a happy man. He saw now how mistaken he had been. It was discontent that, at last, was making Just truly happy. Although, short of dismantling and re-constructing the entire garden-house nothing could now be done about the Vorbau, he would never be quite satisfied with it, never cease to build and rebuild it in his mind. The universe, after all, is within us.
35
Sophie is Cold Through and Through
Sophie to Fritz - ‘… I have coughs and sneezes, but it seems to me that I feel quite well again when you are in my mind. Your Sophie.’
IN the autumn of 1795 Fritz plodded over to Gruningen to find Sophie without cares. She was playing with Gunther, whose experience of life must so far have been favourable, since he smiled at anything in human form. ‘He is stronger by far than our Christoph,’ said Fritz with a pang of regret. Gunther did nothing by halves. He had caught the household’s cough, but reserved it for the night-time, when it echoed, like a large dog barking, down the corridors.
‘Yes, he smiles and coughs at us all alike,’ said Fritz, ‘and yet I’m flattered when my turn comes. It is so much more pleasant to deceive oneself.’
‘Hardenberg, why have you not written to me?’ Sophie asked.
‘Dear, dear Sophgen, I wrote to you every day this week. On Monday I wrote to explain to you that although God created the world it has no real existence until we apprehend it.’
‘So all this unholy muddle is our own doing,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘What a thing to tell a young girl!’
‘Things of the body aren’t our own doing,’ said Sophie. ‘I have a pain in my left side, and that is not my own doing.’
‘Well, let us all complain to each other,’ said Fritz, but the Mandelsloh declared that she was always well. ‘Did you not know that? It is generally agreed that I was born to be always well. My husband is quite sure of it, and so is everyone in this house.’
‘Why did you not come earlier, Hardenburch?’ asked Sophie.
‘I have to work very seriously now,’ he told her. ‘If we are ever to get married, I must apply myself. I sit up late at night, reading.’
‘But why do you do all this reading? You are not a student any more.’
‘He would not read if he was,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘Students do not read, they drink.’
‘Why do they drink?’ Sophie asked.
‘Because they desire to know the whole truth,’ said Fritz, ‘and that makes them desperate.’
Gunther, who had been half asleep, came to, and protested.
‘What would it cost them,’ Sophie asked, ‘to know the whole truth?’
‘They can’t reckon that,’ said Fritz, ‘but they know they can get drunk for three groschen.’
She is thirteen, she will be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. It takes time. One would say that God has stopped his clock.
But she is cold, cold through and through.
36
Dr Hofrat Ebhard
AT Gruningen, when Fritz was gone, the Mandelsloh asked why Sophie had mentioned the pain in her left side. ‘You told me we were not to say anything about it.’
‘He is not to know,’ said Sophie earnestly.
‘Then why did you speak of it?’
‘Just for the pleasure of talking about it while he was there. He took no notice, you know, Frieke, I laughed and so he did not notice it.’
The pain was no better by the beginning of November. It was Sophie’s first serious illness, the first illness in fact that she had ever had. At first they thought it better not to notify Fritz, but on the 14th of November, when he went back to the Justs’ house at mid-day, the maid Christel, when she brought him his coffee, told him that there was a messenger waiting for him. The messenger was from Gruningen. Christel’s feelings about this were mixed, for she wanted at all costs to keep the young Freiherr in the house. He had come to them, and she considered him theirs, and indeed hers.
‘I was not too frightened at first,’ Fritz wrote to Karl, ‘but when I heard that she was ill - my Philosophy was ill - I notified Just (we had been starting on the year’s accounts) and without any further enquiry left for Gruningen.’
‘What am I to tell Fraulein Karoline?’ Christel had asked. ‘She has gone to the market.’
‘Tell her what you told me, she will feel exactly the same as I do,’ he had said.
Sophie’s pain was the first symptom of a tumour on her hip related to tuberculosis. Such pains can disappear, it is said, of their own accord. The doctor, Hofrat Friedrich Ebhard, relied a good deal on this possibility, and a good deal on experience. Of Brownismus he had never had the opportunity to learn anything.
In his Elementa Medicinae Brown gives a Table of Excitability for the main disorders, the correct balance being indicated by the figure 40. Phthisis, the early stage of consumption, is shown in his table as coming well below 40. Brown, therefore, in cases of phthisis, would prescribe that the wish to go on living should be supported by electric shocks, alcohol, camphor and rich soups.
None of these things suggested themselves to Ebhard, but he made no mistake in his diagnosis. This was not surprising, since one in four of his patients died of consumption. Fraulein von Kuhn was young, but youth in these cases was not always on the patient’s side. He had never had the chance to hear the opening of The Blue Flower, but if he had done so he could have said immediately what he thought it meant.
37
What is Pain?
SOPHIE’S cough soon put Gunther’s into the shade. It came with an immense draught of breath which reminded her of laughing, so that in fact she would have been hard put to it, except for the pain, not to laugh.
What if there were no such thing as pain? When they were all children at Gruningen, Friederike, not yet the Mandelsloh, but already on duty, used to collect them together after the evening service to tell them a Sunday story.
‘There was a certain honest shopkeeper,’ she said, ‘who unlike the rest of us, felt no pain. He had never felt any since he was born, so that when he reached the age of forty-five he was quite unaware that he was ill and never thought to call the doctor, until one night he heard the sound of the door opening, and sitting up in his bed saw in the bright moonlight that someone he did not know had come into his room, and that this was Death.’
Sophie had been unable to grasp the point of the story.
‘He was so lucky, Frieke.’
‘Not at all. The pain would have been a warning to him that he was ill, and as it was he had no warning.’
‘We don’t want any warnings,’ the children told her. ‘We get into enough trouble as it is.’
‘But he had no time to consider how he had spent his life, and to repent.’
‘Repentance is for old women and arse-holes,’ shouted George.
‘George, no-one can tolerate you,’ said Friederike. ‘They ought to whip you at school.’
‘They do whi
p me at school,’ said George.
The Hofrat ordered the application of linseed poultices to Sophie’s hip, which were so scalding hot that they marked the skin for good. The linseed smelled of the open forest, of solid furniture, of the night-watchman’s heavy oiled boots, specially issued to him by the town councillors because he had to patrol the streets in all weathers, of pine trees and green spruce. Unmistakeably, Sophie began to get better.
‘Liebster, bester Freund,’ Rockenthien wrote to Fritz. ‘How are you? Here it is the same old story. Sophgen dances, jumps, sings, demands to be taken to the fair at Greussen, eats like a woodcutter, sleeps like a rat, walks straight as a fir-tree, has given up whey and medicine, has to take two baths a day by way of treatment, and is as happy as a fish in water.’
‘Sometimes, I wish that I were the Hausherr,’ Fritz wrote to Karl from Tennstedt, ‘the world is not a problem to him, and yet this time what he says is true. My dear, treasured Philosophy had had sleepless nights, burning fever, had been bled twice, was too feeble to move. The Hofrat - by the way, it is possible that he is a fool - spoke of inflammation of the liver. And now, since the 20th of November, we are told and indeed we can see with our own eyes that all danger is past.’ He asked Karl to send, by a good messenger, two hundred oysters - these to go straight to Gruningen, as a delicacy for the invalid - and to Tennstedt, Fritz’s winter trousers, his woollen stockings, his santes (the comforters that went under the waistcoat), material for a green jacket, white cashmere for a waistcoat and trousers, a hat, and the loan of Karl’s gold epaulettes. He would explain later why he wanted these things, and he would come to Weissenfels and settle up while der Alte was meeting old friends, as he did once a year, at the fair in Dresden.
The Blue Flower Page 11