The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘I must speak to Father,’ he told Erasmus.

  ‘He will be displeased.’

  ‘How many people are pleased when they are asked for money?’

  ‘What have you done with it, Fritz?’

  ‘Well, I have spent what I had on the necessities of life. There is the soul, and there is the flesh. But the old one too, when he was a student, must have had these necessities.’

  ‘That would be before he was awakened,’ said Erasmus gloomily. ‘You cannot expect sympathy from him now. Nineteen years should have taught you that much.’

  On his next return to Weissenfels, Fritz said: ‘Father, I am young, and, speaking with due respect, I cannot live like an old man. I have kept myself under extreme restraint in Leipzig, I have ordered one pair of shoes only since I have been there. I have grown my hair long to avoid expense at the barber. In the evening I eat only bread …’

  ‘In what respects do you find that you cannot live like an old man?’ asked the Freiherr.

  Fritz shifted his ground.

  ‘Father, there is not a student in Leipzig who does not owe money. I cannot manage on what you allow me at the moment. There are six of us still at home, I know, but we still have estates at Oberwiederstadt, and at Schloben.’

  ‘Did you think I had forgotten them?’ asked the Freiherr.

  He passed his hand over his face.

  ‘Go to Oberwiederstadt, and see Steinbrecher. I will give you a letter to him.’

  Steinbrecher was the revenue steward.

  ‘But isn’t he at Schloben?’

  ‘He deals now with all our properties. This month he is at Oberwiederstadt.’

  Fritz took a place in the diligence, which left the Stag in Weissenfels at four in the morning, and went by way of Halle and Eisleben. The German diligence was the slowest in Europe, since all the luggage, which was loaded onto a kind of creaking extension of the floor extending over the back axle, had to be unloaded and re-loaded every time a passenger got in or out. While the conductor supervised this work the driver fed himself and his horses, on loaves of coarse brown bread.

  At the Black Boy at Eisleben a farm servant was sitting on the bench outside, waiting for him.

  ‘Gruss dich, Joseph,’ said Fritz, remembering him from seven years back. ‘Let us go into the grocer’s and take a glass of schnaps.’ In Saxony the inns were not allowed to sell spirits.

  ‘I should be sorry to see your father’s son diverting himself in such a way,’ Joseph replied.

  ‘But, Joseph, I was hoping to divert you.’ This, it was clear, was not possible. The inn provided horses, and in silence they rode to Oberwiederstadt.

  The revenue steward was waiting for them, although by now it was dark. Fritz presented his father’s letter, and waited for him to read it through twice. Then, feeling the awkwardness of silence, he said, ‘Herr Revenue Steward, I think my Father has commissioned you to give me some money.’

  Steinbrecher took off his spectacles.

  ‘Young Freiherr, there is no money.’

  ‘He sent me a long way to be told that.’

  ‘I imagine that he wanted you to remember it.’

  11

  A Disagreement

  FRITZ walked the thirty-two miles back to Weissenfels. When he reached the Kloster Gasse his father had returned from the offices of the Salt Mines Administration, but he was not alone.

  ‘His Highmindedness, the Uncle Wilhelm, is here,’ Sidonie told him. ‘The Big Cross himself. They are discussing your affairs. How did you get on with Steinbrecher? I’ll tell you what I think, it’s this: if some people were not older than others, and young people were as rich as old ones -‘

  ‘But, Sidonie, I really believe now that we are much poorer even than we thought.’

  ‘You don’t ask me what I believe,’ said Sidonie. ‘I am here in the house, I have more opportunity to think about it than you do.’

  ‘It depends on all of us now, but on myself in particular -‘ Fritz began, but the Bernhard, who had made his appearance, interrupted: ‘I am the chief sufferer. When the Big Cross is here, my mother brings me forward, believing that I am his favourite. In fact he dislikes children, and myself in particular.’

  ‘He will expect better wine and more company than we usually have,’ said Sidonie. ‘He mentioned that, you know, the last time he honoured us with a visit.’

  ‘Last time I was called upon to recite,’ the Bernhard continued, ‘my uncle shouted: “For what reason has he been taught such idiocies?”’

  ‘My mother is not in the salon,’ said Sidonie. ‘What shall I tell her to do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Karl, who was lying at ease on the only sofa. His position was unassailable. In a week he was off to begin his military training as a cadet with a regiment of carabiniers in the service of the Elector of Saxony. He was therefore approved of by his Uncle Wilhelm, even though he had never been invited to Lucklum. Fritz appeared not to be listening. Some urgency, some private resolution seemed to possess him. Sidonie had not noticed it when he first walked in, she had perhaps been too pleased to see him, but now it was unmistakable, as though he had brought an embarrassing stranger in with him, who was waiting for the moment of introduction.

  In the reception room the Big Cross did not take a chair, but walked rapidly up and down, displaying each time he turned back into the room the dazzling emblem on his dark blue cloak. The Freiherr, tired after a day of disputes at the Inspectorate, sat in his roomy elbow-chair, thinking that if his brother did not take off his outer garment, there was some hope that he would soon go. ‘But where is your wife, where is Auguste?’ enquired Wilhelm.

  ‘I don’t imagine she will appear this afternoon.’

  ‘Why is that? She need not fear me, I am not a spook.’

  ‘She needs rest, she is delicate.’

  ‘If a woman keeps working, she will find she is never tired.’

  ‘You have never married, Wilhelm. But here, at least, is Friedrich.’ Fritz, pale as clay, came into the salon, and after greeting his father and his uncle not quite attentively enough began at full pitch.

  ‘I want to tell you that I have decided what I am to do with my life. It came to me on the journey back from Oberwiederstadt.’

  ‘How fortunate that I am here,’ said the Big Cross, ‘just when my advice is most needed.’

  ‘During my studies at Jena and now at Leipzig you, Uncle, have taken it amiss because I preferred philosophy and history to law, and you Father, have been offended when I said that even law would be preferable to theology. But now I want both of you to put these anxieties away from you - to blow them away, as if they were dust from the earth. I see now that my duty is to be a soldier. Everything points to it. In that way I shall cost you nothing. And I know now that I need discipline. I have romantic tendencies. In a barracks these will be corrected by the practical, unromantic duties of my daily life - the shit house, the fever ward, the route march, foot inspection. Later, when I see action, I shall have nothing to fear, because life, after all, is a goal, not a means. I have it in mind to apply to the Cuirassiers of the Elector’s Guard.’

  ‘Scheisskerl, shut your muzzle!’ bellowed the Big Cross.

  ‘That is not the way to address my son, or any decent man’s son,’ said the Freiherr. ‘But it’s true that he’s talking like an idiot.’

  ‘But Karl -‘ Fritz broke in.

  ‘- is a smart young fellow, anxious to start life on his own account,’ the Uncle cried. ‘Whereas you! - The Cuirassiers! - I have heard you say at my own table, when you were the age that Karl is now, that life would be better if it were a dream, and that perhaps it will become one. Where is your practical ability? You’ve never even seen a man wounded!’

  Fritz left the room. ‘Whatever you have been talking about, you have put things much too strongly,’ said Sidonie, coming past with two of the servants carrying coffee and bread and butter, which the Uncle, in disgust, waved away from a distance.

  ‘At l
east they are agreed,’ said Fritz. ‘They are at one in thinking me incapable, and possibly a coward.’

  Sidonie pressed his elbow in sympathy. But through the open doors of the salon the Uncle and the Father could be seen to turn towards each other in furious confrontation.

  ‘Leave your son’s concerns to me. You know absolutely nothing of these matters.’

  ‘You forget that I served seven years in the Hanoverian Legion,’ cried the Freiherr.

  ‘But without acquiring the slightest military competence.’

  Karl and Sidonie took the dejected Fritz into the garden, and down to the orchard. ‘We’re going to have pears and plums innumerable this year,’ said Sidonie. ‘Wherever did you get such a stupid idea? Why should you think you would ever make a soldier?’

  ‘Where is your sense?’ added Karl.

  ‘I don’t know. Tell me, Karl, what makes a man a soldier?’

  ‘I, myself, wanted to enter the service of my Prince. I also wanted to get away from home,’ said Karl.

  ‘Won’t you miss us, Karl?’ asked Sidonie.

  ‘I cannot afford to think about that sort of thing. I am of more use to you all, in any case, out in the world. And you, Sido, will soon be married, and forget about your brothers.’

  ‘Never!’ cried Sidonie.

  12

  The Sense of Immortality

  ONCE he had got rid of the Uncle and his travelling entourage of body-servants and cooks, who had been infesting the kitchen quarters, Freiherr von Hardenberg summoned his eldest son and told him that after his year at Leipzig and a further year at Wittenberg to study chemistry, geology and law he would be ready to take his first steps as a trainee clerk in the Directorate of Salt Mines. Erasmus would be sent from Leipzig to Hubertusberg, where he would enrol in the School of Forestry, a wholesome, open-air life for which so far he had shown no inclination whatsoever. Karl had already seen action, at the age of sixteen. He had been with his regiment when the French were driven out of Mainz. He expected to come home frequently. It was not at all difficult to get army leave. Officers on leave were not paid, so that until they reported back, the regiment was able to save money.

  If Fritz sometimes took the diligence, or walked long distances, it was because he rarely had a decent horse to ride. If ever he managed to hire or borrow one, he noted it down in his diary. His own horse, known only as the Gaul (the Crock), he could remember at Oberwiederstadt, although he had been too young to ride him until they moved to Weissenfels. How old was the Gaul? Age had brought him cunning, rather than wisdom, and he had arrived with his master at an elaborate creaturely bargain as to place and time - when he might slow down, when he might stop, when consent to go on. Fritz did not disturb himself about his own appearance, or about the shabbiness of his horse, as long as they could get from one point to another.

  From the age of seventeen he had been in almost perpetual motion, or the Gaul’s unhurried version of it, back and forth, though not over a wide area. His life was lived in the ‘golden hollow’ in the Holy Roman Empire, bounded by the Harz Mountains and the deep forest, crossed by rivers - the Saale, the Unstrut, the Helme, the Elster, the Wipper - proceeding in gracious though seemingly quite unnecessary bends and sweeps past mine-workings, salt-houses, timber-mills, waterside inns where the customers sat placidly hour after hour, waiting for the fish to be caught from the river and broiled. Scores of miles of rolling country, uncomplainingly bringing forth potatoes and turnips and the great whiteheart pickling cabbages which had to be sliced with a saw, lay between hometown and hometown, each with its ownness, but also its welcome likeness to the last one. The hometowns were reassuring to the traveller, who fixed his sights from a distance on the wooden roof of the old church, the cupola of the new one, and came at length to the streets of small houses drawn up in order, each with its pig sty, its prune oven and bread oven and sometimes its wooden garden-house, where the master, in the cool of the evening, sat smoking in total blankness of mind, under a carved motto: ALL HAPPINESS IS HERE or CONTENTMENT IS WEALTH. Sometimes, though not often, a woman, also, found time to sit in the garden-house.

  When Fritz rode back southwards from Wittenberg at the end of his year’s studies, it was a day in a thousand, crystal-clear, heavenly blue. They were just beginning the potato-lifting, with which he had so often helped, willingly enough, as a child with the Brethren at Neudietendorf.

  Between Rippach and Lutzen he stopped where a stream crossed the road, to let the Gaul have a drink, although the horse usually had to wait for this until the end of the day. As Fritz loosened the girths, the Gaul breathed in enormously, as though he had scarcely known until that moment what air was. Fritz’s valise, tied to the crupper, rose and fell with a sound like a drum on his broad quarters. Then, deflating little by little, he lowered his head to the water to find the warmest and muddiest part, sank his jaws to a line just below the nostrils, and began to drink with an alarming energy which he had never displayed on the journey from Wittenberg.

  Fritz sat by the empty roadside, on the damp Saxon earth which he loved, and with nothing in view except a convoy of potato-wagons and the line of alders which marked the course of the Elster. His education was now almost at an end. What had he learned? Fichtean philosophy, geology, chemistry, combinatorial mathematics, Saxon commercial law. One of his greatest friends in Jena, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, had tried to show him that the ultimate explanation of life was galvanism, and that every exchange of energy between the mind and the body must be accompanied by an electric charge. Electricity was sometimes visible as light, but not all light was visible, indeed most of it was not. ‘We must never judge by what we see.’ Ritter was almost penniless. He had never attended a university, never in fact been to school. A glass of wine was immeasurable encouragement to him. After that, lying in his wretched lodgings, he could see the laws of electricity written in cloudy hieroglyphs on the whole surface of the universe, and on the face of the waters, where the Holy Spirit still moved.

  - My teachers did not agree with each other, my friends did not agree with my teachers, Fritz thought, but that is only on a superficial level, they were men of intellect and passion, let me believe in them all.

  The children of large families hardly ever learn to talk to themselves aloud, that is one of the arts of solitude, but they often keep diaries. Fritz took out his pocket journal. Certain words came readily to him - weaknesses, faults, urges, striving for fame, striving against the crushing, wretched, bourgeois conditions of everyday life, youth, despair. Then he wrote, ‘But I have, I can’t deny it, a certain inexpressible sense of immortality.’

  13

  The Just Family

  ‘YOU have heard me speak of Kreisamtmann Coelestin Just of Tennstedt,’ said the Freiherr. Fritz thought that he had. ‘He is of course the local presiding magistrate, but also, which is not always the case, supervisor of the tax collection for his district. I have arranged for you to study with him at Tennstedt in order to learn administration and practical office management, of which you know nothing.’ Fritz asked if he should take lodgings. ‘No, you will lodge with the Justs themselves. The Kreisamtmann has a niece, Karoline, a very steady young woman who keeps house for him, and in addition he has married, at the age of forty-six, the widow of Christian Nurnberger, the late Professor of Anatomy and Botany at Wittenberg. Very likely you may have met her there, during the past year.’

  In the University towns it might be different, but no woman in Weissenfels, Tennstedt, Gruningen or Langensalza tried to look younger than they were or knew of any way of doing so. They accepted what the years sent.

  Karoline Just saw, when she looked in her glass, the face of a woman of twenty-seven, uniformly smooth and pale, with noticeably dark eyebrows. She had been housekeeping for her Uncle Coelestin Just at his house in Tennstedt for four years. It had not been thought that her uncle would ever marry, but only six months ago he had done so. ‘My dear, you will be glad for me and for yourself,’ he had said. �
��If at any time now the question arises of your making a home of your own, you will be able to be sure that you are not deserting me.’

  ‘The question has not arisen,’ said Karoline.

  That Karoline had nowhere else to go, except back to Merseburg (where her father was Pronotary of the Cathedral Seminary) did not strike Just as a difficulty. In either place she was truly welcome. Meanwhile he congratulated himself that his Rahel was not only that most eligible of German women, a Professor’s widow, but also, at thirty-nine, most likely past the age of childbearing. The three of them could live peaceably together without unwelcome change or disturbance.

  In Tennstedt they said - Now he has two women under one roof. Well, there’s a proverb … Who, then, is going to give the orders and spend the Kreisamtmann’s money? - About the expected lodger - expected because the servants were talking about him, and because an extra bedstead had been purchased - they knew that he was said to be twenty-two years of age.

  At the Universities the professors often arranged for their daughters to marry their likeliest pupil. Everywhere master carpenters, printers and bakers were satisfied when a daughter, or a niece, married one of their apprentices. The Kreisamtmann was neither a professor nor a skilled craftsman, he was a magistrate and an area tax-inspector, and such an arrangement might never have occurred to him, but now that he was a married man, they said, he had someone else to do the thinking for him.

  Fritz arrived on foot, a day after he was expected, and at a time when Coelestin Just was at his office. ‘The Long-Expected is here,’ said Rahel to Karoline. She herself remembered him very well from Wittenberg, but was distressed to see him so dishevelled. ‘You find the exercise healthy, Hardenberg?’ she asked anxiously as she brought him into the house. Fritz looked at her vaguely, but with a radiant smile. ‘I don’t know, Frau Rahel. I hadn’t thought about it, but I will think about it.’ Once in the parlour, he looked round him as though at a revelation. ‘It is beautiful, beautiful.’