Irretrievable

by Theodor Fontane

  Holk stared blankly in front of him without a word and once again he realized that she had hit the mark. “Very well, then,” continued Ebba, “you have already committed the stupidest blunder of all and I refuse to accept any responsibility for it. I’ve never made myself out to be better than I am and nobody can say of me that I ever seriously pretended anything untrue. Words are only words; that much, even you must have known. Yes, Helmut, life at court is futile and boring, here and elsewhere, and because it’s so boring, you either have to be as priggish as Schimmelmann or—how shall I put it?—as unpriggish as Ebba. And now, instead of stripping all the greenhouses in the country to strew flowers in my path or singing the praises of your lady like a troubadour—before going on to try your luck elsewhere—instead of doing that, you want to make me swear everlasting love on the strength of a single word, or not very much more, and turn a mere game into bitter earnest, all at the expense of a woman who is worth much more than both of us and whose feelings you are outraging just because you fancy yourself in a role for which you’re quite unsuited. Once again, I refuse to accept any responsibility. I’m young and you’re no longer young and so it wasn’t for me to preach morality to you and, since I was bored, keep you anxiously on the path of virtue—that was none of my business, it was yours. I disclaim any guilt on my side and even if there was any (I suppose there may have been just a little), well, I’ve no desire to magnify it ten- or a hundred-fold and turn a peccadillo into real sin, one which I myself would recognize as such.”

  Holk felt his head spinning. So this was the happiness of which he had dreamt! While he had been contemplating this step, he had certainly been filled with a vague feeling of anxiety at the thought of what the world, his children (whom he would be bound to alienate), and perhaps, sooner or later, his own heart would have to say. That had been in his mind but nothing else. And now a snub, a complete and unqualified rebuff, his proposal refused, his love spurned, with a peremptory firmness that excluded any possibility of a further attempt. If only he could have found relief in a sudden outburst of indignation! But even that solace was denied him, for as she stood there, loftily tearing his character to pieces, he found her more entrancing than ever.

  “And so everything ends,” he said after a short pause, “with my complete humiliation, to which is added for good measure all the bitterness of being ridiculous—and all pour passer le temps. Everything has been calculated to pander to your vanity, and I must accept and submit to your latest caprice. But in one thing, Ebba, I’m not going to accept your verdict: I refuse to recognize that it was my duty to doubt the genuineness of your feelings; on the contrary, I felt that I could believe in them and I still think so. You have simply changed your mind and in the meantime—it’s not for me to try to explore your reasons—you have decided that you prefer to call it all just a game. Well, if it was one and nothing more and you say so, then all that I can say is, that you played it very well.”

  He bowed and left the room. Outside stood Karin, eavesdropping. Contrary to her usual custom, she said not a word but her attitude as she accompanied Holk along the corridor showed plainly that she disapproved of her mistress’s conduct. She was, indeed, fond of the Count, on whose kindness and, no doubt also, on whose weakness she may well have been building many a plan for the future.

  31

  Almost eighteen months had passed; it was the end of May and the London squares were offering the charming prospect that is usual at Whitsun time. This applied in particular to Tavistock Square: the carefully watered turf was fresh and green behind its iron railings, the lilacs were in the full splendour of their blossom, and the yellow panicles of laburnum hung over the railings into the wide streets round the square.

  It was indeed a charming prospect and Holk, too, was enjoying it as he sat in his first-floor room of the beautifully kept old corner-house, with its balcony running all along the double front overlooking the delightful square. Holk had loved this district of London ever since the time when, as a young attaché to the Danish Legation, he had lived there twenty years before; and he had taken it as a sign of good omen that on arriving in England the previous November he had succeeded in finding suitable lodgings there.

  Yes, Holk had been in London since November, after travelling all over Europe and visiting all the most famous beauty spots where, year in, year out, many thousands of people seek distraction, only to find at the end that the dullest place at home is still better than the liveliest place abroad. After taking written leave of the Princess and sending a full and friendly letter to Arne, appealing to him not to desert him in his hour of need, he had gone first to Brussels and then to Paris, but found such little contentment there that by Easter he was already in Rome and a few weeks later had arrived in Sorrento, that same Sorrento in which he had dreamt of spending happy days with Ebba …. These happy days had not been realized but the depression which had been weighing on him was cured at last by meeting a friendly English family with whom he shared an annexe at the Hotel Tramontana and he had once more discovered what it means to live and, more important still, to be concerned with other people’s lives. In this way the weeks went by, with drives to Amalfi and excursions to Capri while sailors sang their full-throated, nostalgic songs; but the hot season, which began earlier than he had hoped, drove him north into Switzerland where, although he normally loved it, he was unsuccessful in finding any place to suit his present mood: Lake Geneva was too dazzling, the Rigi too much of a caravanserai, Pfäffers too much like a hospital. So feeling drawn, if not homewards, at least towards somewhere in the north, he decided to try London, to which he was attached by pleasant memories of his youth and where his friends, who had left Sorrento at the same time as he, had been urging him to come and visit them. So to London he went, where he had been for the last six months; and surrounded by customs and a way of life which were more or less akin to those of Schleswig-Holstein, he found himself feeling as much at home as any homeless person can expect. The social conditions suited him, therefore; but many other things, too, helped him to forget, for a few hours or days at least, his growing sense of loneliness. He rediscovered his passion for the theatre, which even in his youth had made his time as attaché so agreeable; and at the Princess Theatre, which was very close to Tavistock Square, he was to be seen regularly, sitting in the stalls whenever Charles Kean, who was at that time making history with his Shakespeare revivals, was playing one evening in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Winter’s Tale and the next in The Tempest or King Henry VIII, with a hitherto undreamt-of magnificence. In the course of that winter he entered into personal relations with Charles Kean and in that celebrated actor’s house, the haunt of so many distinguished artists and writers, he finally made the acquaintance of Charles Dickens and found himself drawn into all sorts of theatrical and literary circles whose lively behaviour and extreme good humour he found uncommonly sympathetic, without in any way having to neglect his Sorrento friends, who were country gentry. He had become particularly enthusiastic about Dickens himself and on the occasion of a “whitebait party” in Greenwich he drank a toast to his new-found friend, of whose work, he said, it was true that he knew only David Copperfield but that work alone sufficed to make its author the greatest of all living writers. When at the end of his speech, he was challenged by the others present, amid laughter, to read other works of Dickens, he stated that he felt compelled to refuse because even Dickens would find it hard to better David Copperfield, so that any further reading could only lead to a diminution of his admiration.

  Parties such as these, at which ladies famous in the artistic world of London were regularly to be seen, such as the beautiful and much-courted Miss Heath and, above all, Miss Atkinson, whose Lady Macbeth was a performance of genius—such parties were more than a mere distraction for Holk and with such agreeable company he would not merely have escaped from his loneliness but been uplifted in mind and spirit, had he only been able to feel himself a free man. But this was exactly what he lacked: t
he little patch of earth to which he felt attached body and soul, where he had been born and had spent so many happy years, that single patch of earth was closed to him and presumably would remain closed unless he succeeded in making his peace with society, which again presupposed a reconciliation with Christine. But according to all that he heard from home, such a reconciliation was unthinkable, for although, on the one hand, the Countess insisted that the children should fulfil all their obligations to their father with the utmost conscientiousness and would make sure, for example, that every one of his letters received a respectful answer (for, driven by this feeling of loneliness, he often wrote), on the other hand, every attempt to bring about a reconciliation had been in vain. With characteristic bluntness, Christine had opened her heart to her brother on this question, avoiding for once her usual lofty moralizing tone.

  “All of you,” she wrote, “have become accustomed to considering me as something abstract and doctrinaire, and in the past I may have had more than my fair share of that, in any case more than men like to find in a woman. But I can assure you that, first and foremost, I am still a woman and because of that, after all that has happened, I have been left with something still preying on my vanity; please notice that I don’t claim that it is anything more than wounded amourpropre. But to put it bluntly, Holk is not yet properly cured. If he had married that young woman over in Copenhagen and sooner or later had realized that he had made a mistake, then perhaps it would have been all right. But it didn’t happen like that. She simply did not want him and so, as far as I am concerned, the unpleasant possibility still remains that, had she been prepared to have him, the affair might have had quite a different ending. It’s quite likely that my turn would not have come again. So, in this tragi-comedy, I have played something of the part of a pis-aller and this I find disagreeable.” Holk had been informed of the gist of this letter and the feelings expressed in it were never far from his mind, in spite of the fact that old Petersen and Arne both took pains to encourage his hopes of a successful outcome to the matter. “You must never give up hope,” wrote Petersen to Holk. “I know Christine better than any of you, even better than her brother, and I assure you that, apart from any question of Christian charity, which after all teaches forgiveness for the sinner, she still loves you truly as a woman; so much so that she is embarrassed because she still feels a certain affectionate weakness for you. I can see this quite plainly from the letters which I receive now and then from Gnadenfrei. Things are more favourable to your case than you imagine or deserve and it would spoil my last few days on earth if it were otherwise. In any case, at eighty, one knows what things are like and I guarantee, Helmut, that I shall live to join your hands in a new marriage with Christine. That will be my last act as pastor and then I shall retire and wait till God calls me to Him.”

  Petersen had written this letter at the beginning of April and if Holk personally had little trust in its overconfident tone, yet there were still times, as today, when he found himself counting on it. So, filled with cheerful thoughts, he was sitting on the front balcony of his house under the branches of a splendid old plane-tree which might well have already been standing there a hundred years before, when the quarter was first built. The tall sash-windows, reaching to the floor and open at the bottom, gave free access between room and balcony and the fire in his drawing-room, more for appearance than for warmth, as well as his morning cigar, increased his feeling of present well-being. Beside him on a bamboo stool lay a copy of The Times which, contrary to his habit, he had pushed to one side, diverted by the charming glimpse of spring outside. Now he picked it up and began as usual at the top left-hand corner with the personal column where, picked out in sharp and elegant type, the personal announcements of London society were to be found: births, marriages, and deaths, one after the other. When Holk reached the marriage column, he read: “Miss Ebba von Rosenberg, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Maria Eleanor of Denmark, married to Lord Randolph Ashingham, formerly Second Secretary to the British Legation at Copenhagen.”

  “So that’s that,” said Holk, paling in spite of himself, for he did not feel especially moved. He would perhaps have been more deeply affected by this announcement had he come upon it suddenly and unexpectedly, but this was not the case. Towards the end of the winter, Pentz, who used to write to keep him au courant, at the end of one of his longer letters, had spoken of this marriage as more or less imminent: “And now, my dear Holk, a small piece of information which will interest you more than all these stories of the Hansen household—Ebba Rosenberg yesterday gave notice to the Princess of her engagement which, however, in order to facilitate the settlement of certain difficulties, must be kept provisionally secret. The happy man is no less than Lord Randolph Ashingham whom you will remember, if not from Vincent’s then perhaps from a soirée at the Princess’s. It was at the very beginning of the ’59–’60 season. Lord Randolph, who is rumoured to own a whole quarter of London (perhaps the very quarter where you are living at the moment), as well as forests of fifty million pine trees in Fifeshire, has been thinking over this matter for a good year—perforce, I may say, because all sorts of scruples were being put forward by a much richer uncle from whom he has expectations. These scruples, in fact, still exist. But Ebba would not be Ebba if she could not succeed in convincing the highly eccentric uncle of her virtues in the realm of le chic and in society, and so the engagement will be announced very shortly. It’s only a question of time. Incidentally, it seems that the two of them, his lordship and Ebba, need have no fear of mutual recriminations; he, like so many of his kind, is said to have been an extinct volcano by the age of fourteen and is only marrying Ebba in order to have someone to tell him little stories to keep him amused and from this point of view he has chosen just the right person. Every day she will say something—and I suppose, later on, do something—which will strike his lordship, and perhaps one day she will set light to the fifty million pine trees and take the opportunity of showing herself and her beloved spouse in the right light. And now, tout à vous, beau Tristan, Yours, Pentz.”

  The two lines in The Times were therefore only a confirmation of Pentz’s letter. “It’s a good thing,” said Holk, after a while. “Now the slate is wiped clean. Her ghost was always haunting me and I could never quite rid myself of it. Now she has done it herself; everything is finished, everything gone and even if Christine is still lost to me and will remain so, at least the thought of her can now occupy the place in my heart where it belongs.”

  He took up the paper again and tried to immerse himself in the correspondent’s report from Berlin which, it seemed, was dealing in some detail with the doubling of the strength of the army and with the opposition party that was resisting it. But today he had no patience for such things and he was soon glancing over the top of his paper. The clock of nearby St. Pancras’ Church, whose steeple reared up before his eyes, had just struck nine and through Southampton Street, which formed his side of the square, cab after cab was rolling by from Euston Square station towards the centre of the town. He broke off one of the plane-tree leaves that was hanging down by the window and played with it and, hearing some sparrows chirping, he took a few crumbs and scattered them over the balcony. At once the sparrows flew down from the branches, pecking and squabbling, but a moment later they fluttered off again, as a sudden series of loud knocks announced that the postman was at the door. Holk, whose birthday it was tomorrow, listened eagerly and soon afterwards Jane came in and handed him four letters.

  The four postmarks, Gnadenfrei, Bunzlau, Glücksburg, and Arnewieck, left no doubt as to the writers of the letters; and they brought little news, or so it seemed at first. Asta and Axel sent their best wishes in stiff, formal and certainly rather short letters and even Petersen, who was usually full of news, was content this time merely to send birthday greetings. Holk was rather disappointed at this but recovered his good humour on opening Arne’s letter and seeing from the very first line how affectionate and friendly it was. “Yes,” s
aid Holk to himself, “he never changes, he will always be the same. And yet it is he who should be most angry with me, as the brother of his beloved sister. Yet that is the reason and explanation, after all, for he loves his sister and almost idolizes her, but he has lived long enough to know very well, in spite of being a bachelor, what it must be like to be married to a St. Elizabeth[1] …. If only she were a St. Elizabeth, who was gentle and forgiving …. But enough of that,” he added, interrupting himself. “I’m only becoming embittered when I should be trying to put myself into a conciliatory mood. I had better read what he’s written.”

  Arnewieck, 27th May, 1861

  Dear Helmut,

  Your birthday is due and I must see to it that you have my good wishes. If they arrive a day early, as I imagine they may, you must take it as a sign of my eagerness to wish you the best of luck. But there is no need for me to make a recital of all the things that I wish you. They all add up, as always, to the one hope that your reconciliation with Christine shall not be long delayed. I know very well that you have little confidence in the possibility of this and try to explain your lack of confidence by Christine’s character. And perhaps there is an inner voice whispering into your ear that she is justified, which only strengthens your disbelief. But now things are much more favourable. You used to suffer from your wife’s dogmatism and I warned Christine, in a friendly fashion, long before there was any serious conflict, not to try to force you to toe any narrowly sectarian line or impose on you any sort of asceticism quite foreign to your nature. Any criticism of Christine implicit in such an attitude was justified and, if I may repeat myself yet again, I have no desire or reason to withdraw any of it. But the antidote is supplied by the very strictness of the doctrines from which we have all had to suffer. Whether her love for you—which still exists and, often against her will, appears in many of her letters—whether that love is strong enough to make her forgive you is a question that we must leave unanswered and I cannot say one way or another; but what she might be incapable of doing for love, she might find herself impelled to do out of a sense of duty, if only the matter can be put into the right hands. I emphasize: into the right hands; all the suggestions put forward by good old Petersen in his letters (he, incidentally, continues to remain confident) have had up till now very little success and, in any case, have certainly not managed to win her over. But where our rationalistic old friend has failed—in spite of the fact that Christine is so fond of him and disapproves only of his religious attitudes—I think that Schwarzkoppen, who was appointed Superintendent-General four weeks ago, might find it easy or at least not too difficult if he chooses the right moment. I have been seeing Schwarzkoppen almost every day during the last week and I have now addressed an urgent request to him to take the matter in hand before he leaves us and the neighbourhood, and since his religious convictions and his personal feelings coincide where you and Christine are concerned, I don’t, for an instant, doubt that he will succeed where Petersen has hitherto failed. Schwarzkoppen has always been the highest court of appeal for Christine and particularly now when he is leaving his post as principal of the seminary to become a major luminary of the church. He has been appointed to Stettin in his home province of Pomerania and will be leaving us at the end of September to take up his new post on October 1st. I won’t write any more now and, above all, won’t trouble you with any estate matters, on which I shall be writing to you another time. I see Countess Brockdorff frequently now, sometimes in her own house, sometimes at the Rantzaus, but also, occasionally, here in Arnewieck, when we have the meetings of the mission here, at one of which I was recently a most unworthy chairman. Christine refused my invitation for Whitsun, ostensibly because Julie has not been well since the spring and needed attention. The real reason is no doubt that she does not wish to return to places and people that can only awaken painful memories. In her eyes Gnadenfrei has many advantages, not the least of which is that of being able to hide from the world. But I console myself with the thought that her need to retreat from the world will slowly disappear and that we shall very soon see her return to us and find happiness once more, a happiness only interrupted by a moment of madness—a fit of madness that became a guilty act. What would I not give if our Whitsun procession this year were to see you back here and the whole arcade at Holkenäs decorated with green may-trees and the old coat of arms over the entrance bedecked with roses! That that time will come, and soon, is the dearest wish of your Alfred.