38
Karoline at Gruningen
EVEN Tennstedt had its fair, specialising in Kesselfleisch - the ears, snout and strips of fat from the pig’s neck boiled with peppermint schnaps. Great iron kettles dispersed the odours of pig sties and peppermint. There was music of sorts, and the stall-keepers, who had come in from the country, danced with each other to keep warm. Karoline had been accustomed to go to the fair at first with her uncle, then with her uncle and step-aunt, and she did so again this year. - A fine young woman still, what a pity she has no affianced to treat her to a pig’s nostril!
Her uncle said, ‘You will want to call at Schloss Gruningen, to congratulate them on their daughter’s renewed health. Why do you not come with me next week, when I have to see Rockenthien on business?’
Karoline had never asked him, and did not now ask, what he thought of Hardenberg’s engagement, although he must surely know about it, and how he felt about the Freiherr being kept so long in the dark. She was sure that it must give him pain to conceal anything from his old friend, and in this case the Freiherr had trusted him, after all, to supervise his eldest son. But she knew also that her uncle, like most men, believed that what had not been put into words, and indeed into written words, was not of great importance.
For their visit to the Rockenthiens, Coelestin had hired a horse and trap. They broke their journey at Gebesee, where the manor house belonged, he told Karoline, to the von Oldershausen family - the family, that was, of the Freiherr’s long dead first wife. ‘The property is now in ruins. They have not been fortunate.’
At the Black Boy, he sent out for schnaps, and looked at his niece attentively for the first time for months, since though he was no less fond of her than ever, her health and well-being could now fairly be left to Rahel. He felt that he should, perhaps, be sorry about something.
‘My dear, you must be very tired of hearing about my garden and my garden-house.’
She smiled. That was not the trouble, then, Just thought to himself. Try again. At different ages, women had different troubles, but always there was something. ‘I had meant to tell you that in Treffurt, a few weeks ago, I saw your cousin Carl August.’
She gave the same smile.
‘And my sister, your Aunt Luisa, and I …’
‘You thought the two of us might make a respectable match. But, you know, I haven’t seen Carl August for years, and he is younger than I am.’
‘One would never think it, Karolinchen. You are always rather pale, but …’
Karoline put a lump of sugar and a small amount of hot water in her glass. ‘Don’t make any arrangements for me with Tante Luisa, Uncle. Wait until all hope is gone, until behind me roars youth’s wild ocean.’
‘Is that from some poem or other?’ asked Just doubtfully.
‘Yes, from some poem or other. To tell you the truth, I don’t like my cousin.’
‘My dear, you said yourself you hadn’t seen him for some time. I think I can tell you exactly when.’
In one of the top inside pockets of his winter coat, Just kept his minutely written diary for the last five years, and he began now to pat the outside of his pocket, as though expecting it to call out to him in response.
‘My cousin was very irritating then, and he will be very irritating now,’ Karoline went on. ‘I am sure he prides himself on his consistency.’
‘You must not let yourself become too difficult, my Karoline,’ said her uncle, in some distress, and she reflected that he was being a little more frank than he had no doubt intended, and that she must not let him worry, as he would probably soon begin to do, that he had hurt her feelings. But it was never difficult to distract him. ‘I daresay Hardenberg has spoiled me,’ she said. ‘I daresay talking to a poet has turned my head.’
At Schloss Gruningen she was relieved to find that Rockenthien had already gone to his office. The Kreisamtmann followed him there. Karoline paid her respects to the tranquil mistress of the house, and admired Gunther, to whom she had sent an ivory teething ring, with a porcelain sweet-box for Sophie, marzipan and pfefferkuchen for Mimi and Rudi, and a brace of hares for the household.
‘You are a good, generous girl,’ said Frau Rockenthien. ‘Your lodger, Hardenberg, is here, you know, and his brother Erasmus, yes, Erasmus this time. He often brings one of his brothers with him.’
Karoline’s heart seemed to open and shut.
‘I expect Hardenberg will return with us to Tennstedt this evening,’ she said.
‘Ach, well, they are in the morning room now. All are welcome, it is no matter and it is no trouble, whoever comes,’ said Frau Rockenthien, and indeed for her it was not. ‘I don’t know, however, why Hardenberg has sent quite so many oysters. Do you care for oysters, my dear? Of course, they do not keep for ever.’
The morning room. Hardenberg, Erasmus, Friederike Mandelsloh, George trying, apparently for the first time, to play the flute, a pack of little dogs, Sophie in a pale pink dress. When Karoline had last seen her she had thought of her as one of the children. She still thought of her as one of the children. Every night she prayed that she might be spared to have children of her own, though not, perhaps, children quite like Sophie.
Hardenberg stayed beside his Philosophy, with his large feet stowed away under his chair. Erasmus came over at once to Karoline, delighted, not having expected to see her. Sophie was in raptures, absolutely genuine, over her sweet-box; she was going to give up chewing tobacco altogether, only sweets from now on.
‘They will give you colic,’ said the Mandelsloh.
‘Ach, I have colic already. I tell Hardenburch he must call me his little wind-bag.’
Karoline turned to Erasmus, as though to another survivor from drowning. ‘This is really all I need,’ she thought, ‘one moment only with someone who feels as I do.’ And Erasmus took her hand in his warm one, and seemed about to say something, but in another moment he had turned back towards Sophie with an indulgent smile, half-senseless, like a drunken man.
Karoline perceived that Erasmus also had fallen in love with Sophie von Kuhn.
39
The Quarrel
IN his poem for her thirteenth birthday Fritz wrote that he could hardly credit that there had been a time when he had not known Sophie and when he was ‘the man of yesterday,’ careless, irresponsible, and so forth. The man of yesterday was now set, once and forever, on the right path. ‘But he has been hateful to me,’ Sophie told the Mandelsloh, ‘we have quarrelled, it is all over.’
This was all the more unjust because she had looked forward to her first quarrel, having been told by her friend, Jette Goldacker, that she and Hardenberg certainly ought to have one. It was the right thing for lovers to do, the Goldacker had said, and afterwards the ties between them would be strengthened. But what can we quarrel about? Sophie asked. About any little thing, it seemed, the more unimportant the better. But after they had been sitting together talking for about half an hour, perhaps not quite so long, her Hardenberg broke out, as though something in him had been overstretched and worked ruinously loose: ‘Sophie, you are thirteen years old. How have you spent your time so far? Your first year was passed, I suppose, in smiling and sucking, as little Gunther does now. During your second year, as girls are more forward than boys, you learned to speak. Your first words - what were they? “I want!” At three you became still greedier, and finished off the sweet wine from the grown-ups’ glasses. At four you began to laugh, and finding that pleasant, you laughed at everything and everybody. At five years old they started to try to educate you. At eleven, having learned nothing, you discovered you had become a woman. You were frightened, I daresay, and went to your gracious mother, who told you not to disturb yourself. Then it came to you that those succulent looks of yours, not quite blonde, not quite brunette, made it unnecessary for you to know, still less to say, anything rational. And now, of course, you’re crying, sensibility itself, I suppose, let us see how long you can cry for, my Philosophy -‘
He
had no manners, Sophie had wept. That was what they said to her when she was in disgrace, the strongest reproach she knew. Fritz replied that he had been to the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, and knew somewhat more about manners than a thing of thirteen.
‘A thing of thirteen, Frieke! Can you believe that, can you explain that?’
‘How did he explain it himself?’
‘He said I was a torment to him.’
In his next letters to Sophie, Fritz called himself inexcusable, uncultivated, ungracious, impolite, incorrect, intolerable, impertinent and inhuman.
The Mandelsloh advised him to stop it. ‘Whatever the cause of the trouble was, she has forgotten it.’
‘There was no cause,’ Fritz told her.
‘That makes it more difficult, still, she has forgotten it.’
He set about applying to Prince Friedrich August III, in Dresden, for consideration as a salaried salt mine inspector designate in the Electorate of Saxony.
40
How to Run a Salt Mine
IT was still Fritz’s business to take the minutes and pick up what he could, in silence, at the meetings of the Direction Committee, which were held at the Salt Offices in Weissenfels. Freiherr von Hardenberg presided, assisted by Salt Mine Director Bergrath Heun and Salt Mine Inspector Bergrath Senf. The Bernhard delighted in this name - Salt Mine Inspector Mustard! - and he alone - although everybody knew about it - referred openly to the unfortunate episode when, as a result of falsifying the receipts for official building work and sending unauthorised sums on his own private house, Senf had been sentenced to two years in the common convicts’ jail, subsequently reduced to eight weeks’ normal imprisonment. ‘That was a pity,’ said the Bernhard. ‘We could have chatted to him about it, it would have been interesting to know what it was like to live on bread and water.’ ‘You may make the experiment here at home, at any time you like,’ said Sidonie.
Heun was of a very different character from Senf. Only a few years older than his two colleagues, he seemed ancient, and referred to himself as ‘old Heun, the living archive of the salt mines’. In his long coat of coarse stuff, in which dust seemed to be incorporated, he suggested one of those elementals of the caves and passages of the inner earth, who emerge only reluctantly, and not with good omen, into daylight. The idea partly arose from his blanched skin and frequent blinking and creaking. ‘The living archive has, perhaps, a touch of the rheumatismus.’ Heun, given time, could answer on every point. He consulted the ledgers only to see that they confirmed the details and figures he had given. ‘They would not dare to do otherwise,’ thought Fritz.
Senf, on the other hand, smouldered with the suppressed energy of a very intelligent man who, as the result of a foolish miscalculation, was never likely to be able to profit from his intelligence again. At certain fixed intervals everyone connected with the mines and the salt works was permitted to submit their suggestions for improvements in writing. In an elaborate scheme, to which he still hoped his name would be one day attached, Senf had proposed that the salt of Thuringia and Saxony should no longer be evaporated in iron pans over wood fires at eighty degrees centigrade, but by the sun’s warmth only. Very many fewer salt workers would be needed and there would be no necessity for them to have houses on the premises. His projects for solar power passed over, Senf put forward a new proposal for doubling the number of wheels on the pulleys which drew the salt water to the surface. ‘When the Director, Freiherr von Hardenberg, had considered this scheme,’ Fritz wrote in his minutes, ‘his comment was, Quod potest fieri per pauca, non debet fieri per plura (Manage with as little as you can).’ Salt Mine Inspector Senf replied with much warmth that this was not the way forward, and that these mean economies led rather to inertia and stagnation. In any case, with the coming of the nineteenth century, a time when, as Kant had foreseen, men would at last have learned to govern themselves, pulleys and tread wheels would in all probability have no place. Salt Mine Director Heun remarked that in that event, they need not waste more time in discussing them. Inspector Senf said that he was obliged to accept the Director’s decision, but could not pretend that he felt satisfied.
‘I have applied myself to everything you asked for,’ Fritz told his father, ‘and I shall do so even more earnestly in the future. You cannot expect me, in a few months, to become like old Heun.’
‘Unfortunately I cannot and do not,’ said the Freiherr. ‘Even if you are granted a long life, I do not think you will ever resemble Wilhelm Heun.’
Formerly when he rode across country Fritz had admired the ancient mountains. Now he looked at the foothills and the coal-bearing ranges with a prospector’s eye for copper, silver, and lignite. He intended to be a practical engineer and went, as often as he could manage it, down the shafts of the Bergwerke, wearing a miner’s grey jacket and trousers.
‘Your son would like to live underground,’ Just told the Freiherr. ‘Only reluctantly he returns to the light of day … I warned him, of course, that he must not shake hands with the miners, as they would consider that it brought bad luck. This disappointed him.’
‘Fritz covered sheet after sheet of paper with schemes for discovering new lignite beds and improving the supervision of tile-kilns and lime-kilns, with meteorological records which might help to bring the refinement of brine to a higher standard, and with notes on the legal aspect of salt manufacture. But he also saw himself as a geognost, a natural scientist, who, as he put it, had come ‘to an entirely new land, and dark stars’. The mining industry, it seemed to him, was not a science, but an art. Could anyone but an artist, a poet, understand the relationship between the rocks and the constellations? The mountain ranges, and the foothills with their burden of precious metals, coal and rock salt, were perhaps no more than traces of the former paths of stars and planets, who once trod this earth.
‘What has been, must be again,’ he wrote. ‘At what point in history will they return to walk among us as they once did?’
Patiently Karoline Just listened to everything he had learned and therefore needed to repeat to another intelligence. She continued to sew while Fritz ploughed through a Continuation of the Report on the Purchase of Coal-bearing Plots of Land at Mertendorf. ‘When these data are correlated, one cannot be in any doubt as to the future scheme of acquisition, in the course of which we freely confess that the peasants, by all accounts, will make, in relation to the old prices, fairly high demands …’
‘Of course they will,’ said Karoline, ‘but when did you make this report?’
‘I did not make it, it was made some time ago. I have to train myself by making reports on reports. That, after all, is what your uncle taught me to do.’
‘You have been his best pupil. Indeed, I don’t think that he will ever want another one.’
‘And yet I don’t think that as yet my father takes me seriously.’
‘You don’t take him seriously,’ said Karoline.
‘It is my father who must make the application to the administration to consider me for a salaried post. I might hope in the first instance to receive 400 thaler.’ She had paused to rethread her needle. ‘Justen, how often you must have tried to calculate whether you and he could keep house on such a sum!’
She realised that his imagination had sped on far ahead of her own, and that the cruel separation between herself and the Unwanted had now become a question of money. The Unwanted, evidently, had no salaried post. This vexed her. Bitterly though she had regretted the whole pretence from its very first moment, it was nevertheless hers. She had created, even if she hadn’t meant to, the Unwanted, and she resented his being made into a failure (for he must be more than thirty), and unable to support her as a wife. She felt he had been slighted. She had an impulse to disconcert Hardenberg.
Usually that was easy enough. She told him now - quite truthfully - that although she wished him well, from the bottom of her heart, in his search for a post, she must admit to some doubts about the profession itself. Erasmus was
to be a forestry official, well and good, if he ever finished at St Hubertusberg. Karl and Anton were to be soldiers and about that she knew nothing and had nothing to say, but mining, the extraction of minerals and salts from the earth - well, she had been more than once to the salt-refineries at Halle and Artern, and she had seen, and smelled, the clouds of dark yellowish smoke from the amalgam works near Freiberg, and she could not help thinking of them as an offence against Nature, which could never create such ugliness. ‘So often, Hardenberg, we have spoken of Nature. Only on Wednesday evening you were saying at table that although human culture and industry may grow, Nature remains the same, and our first duty is to consider what she asks of us.’ Taking a risk which she had forbidden herself, she went on, ‘You have spoken of Sophie as Nature herself.’
Karoline shut her eyes for a moment as she said this, not being anxious to see the effect. Fritz cried - ‘No, Justen, you have not understood. The mining industry is not a violation of Nature’s secrets, but a release. You must imagine that in the mines you reach the primal sons of Mother Earth, the age-old life, trapped in the ground beneath your feet. I have seen this process as a meeting with the King of Metals, who waits underground, listening in hope for the first sounds of the pick, while the miner struggles through hardships to bring him up to the light of day. Release, Justen! What must the King of Metals feel when he turns his face to the sunlight for the first time?’
She meant to say, ‘I wonder if you have mentioned these ideas to the Direction Committee’ - but she could not bring herself to it. She recognised the voice in which he had read to her the opening chapter of The Blue Flower. Meanwhile he had opened his file again, and taken out another page of his delicate crocketed writing, another report on a report, this time a summary, in tabular form, of the boiling-points of cooking-salt and salt fertilisers.
The Blue Flower Page 12