The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘Have you read this to anyone else, Hardenberg?’

  ‘Never to anyone else. How could I? It is only just written, but what does that matter?’

  He added, ‘What is the meaning of the blue flower?’

  Karoline saw that he was not going to answer this himself. She said, ‘The young man has to go away from his home to find it. He only wants to see it, he does not want to possess it. It cannot be poetry, he knows what that is already. It can’t be happiness, he wouldn’t need a stranger to tell him what that is, and as far as I can see he is already happy in his home.’

  The unlooked-for privilege of the reading was fading and Karoline, still outwardly as calm as she was pale, felt chilled with anxiety. She would rather cut off one of her hands than disappoint him, as he sat looking at her, trusting and intent, with his large light-brown eyes, impatient for a sign of comprehension.

  What distressed her most was that after waiting a little, he showed not a hint of resentment or even surprise, but gently shut the notebook. ‘Liebe Justen, it doesn’t matter.’

  18

  The Rockenthiens

  IN November, the Kreisamtmann took Fritz on a series of expeditions to local tax offices, whose drowsing inhabitants were brought to reluctant life by their younger visitor, on fire to learn everything as rapidly as possible. ‘The management of an office is not so difficult,’ Just told him. ‘It is largely a matter of knowing firstly, what is coming in, secondly, what is not yet attended to, thirdly, what has been dealt with and is ready to go out, and fourthly, what has in fact gone out. Everything must be at one of these four stages, and there will then be no excuse of any document being mislaid. For every transaction there must be a record, and of that record you must be able to lay your hand immediately on a written copy. The civilised world could not exist without its multitude of copying clerks, and they in turn could not exist if civilisation did not involve so many pieces of paper.’

  ‘I do not think I could endure life as a copying clerk,’ said Fritz. ‘Such occupations should not exist.’

  ‘A revolution would not remove them,’ said Coelestin Just, ‘you will find that there were copy clerks at the foot of the guillotine.’

  As they plodded on together, drops of moisture gathered and slowly fell from their hat-brims, the ends of their noses and the hairy tips of the horses’ ears which the animals turned backwards as a kind of protest against the weather. Earth and air were often indistinguishable in the autumn mist, and morning seemed to pass into afternoon without a discernible mid-day. By three o’clock the lamps were already lit in the windows.

  It was one of the year’s thirteen public holidays, when in Saxony and Thuringia even bread was not baked, but at Greussen Just had asked the local head tax-clerk to keep the office open for an hour or so in the morning. Fritz was explaining how, with the help of chemistry, the copying of documents might perhaps be done automatically. Just sighed.

  ‘Don’t suggest any improvements here.’

  ‘The office managers, perhaps, don’t welcome our visits,’ said Fritz, to whom this idea occurred for the first time, for they were still a strange species to him.

  After Greussen, Gruningen, where Just told his young probationary clerk they would take, ‘if it is offered’, a little refreshment. They turned out of the town up a long drive, bordered with shivering trees and sodden pastures where the autumn grass-burning was still smouldering, sending thin fragrant columns of smoke up to the sky.

  ‘This is the Manor House of Gruningen. We are calling on Herr Kapitan Rockenthien.’

  It was a very large house, quite recently built, plastered with yellow stucco.

  ‘Who is the Kapitan Rockenthien?’

  ‘Someone who keeps his doors open,’ said the Kreisamtmann.

  Fritz looked ahead and saw that the gate into the coach-yard under the high yellow stone arch, and the great entrance doors on the south side of the house, were in fact standing open. From every tall window the lights shone extravagantly. Perhaps they were expected at Schloss Rockenthien. Fritz never discovered whether that had been so or not.

  Two men came out to take their horses, and they went up the three front steps.

  ‘If Rockenthien is at home you will hear him laugh,’ said Just, seeming to brace himself up a little, and at that moment, shouting to the servants not to bother, Rockenthien appeared, holding out his broad arms to them, and laughing.

  ‘Coelestin Just, my oldest friend, my best friend.’

  ‘I’m nothing of the sort,’ said Just.

  ‘But why did you not bring your niece, the estimable Karoline?’

  ‘I have brought with me this young man, who I am training in business management. Herr Johann Rudolf von Rockenthien, formerly Captain in the army of his Highness Prince Schwarzburg-Sondeshausen, may I present Freiherr Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg.’

  ‘My youngest friend!’ roared von Rockenthien. The good cloth of his jacket strained and creaked as he held out his arms once again. ‘You will not be out of place here, I assure you.’ His remarks were not quite drowned by the pack of large dogs which had stationed itself in the hall in case something edible was dropped by the goers-in or -out.

  ‘Platz!’ shouted their master.

  Now they were in the Saal, which was heated by two great fireplaces, burning spruce and pine. The large number of chairs and tables gave the room the air of a knockdown furniture sale. Who were all these people, all these children? Rockenthien himself scarcely seemed to know, but, as a great joke - like everything else he had said so far - began counting on his fingers. ‘My own little ones - Jette, Rudi, Mimi -‘

  ‘He will not remember their ages,’ called out a peaceful looking blonde woman, not young, lying on a sofa.

  ‘Well, their ages, that is your business, rather than mine. This is my dear wife, Wilhelmine. And here are some, but not all of my stepchildren - George von Kuhn, Hans von Kuhn, and our Sophie must also be somewhere.’

  Fritz looked round about him from one to another, and bowed to the Frau von Rockenthien, who smiled but did not get up, while her husband jovially continued, introducing a French governess, said to have forgotten how to speak the language herself, and a number of callers - our physician, Dr Johann Langermann ‘who, unfortunately for himself, can never find anything wrong with us’, Herr Regierungsrat Hermann Muller, his wife Frau Regierungsrat Muller, two local attorneys, an instructor from the Luther Gymnasium - all these last, as was clear enough, putting in an hour at the Schloss without any definite invitation. There was, probably, nowhere else much to go in Gruningen.

  Young George, who had dashed out of the room as soon as the new visitors were announced, now came back and tugged at the sleeve of Fritz’s jacket.

  ‘Heigh-ho, Freiherr von Hardenberg, I’ve been out to the stable to have a look at your horse. He’s no good. Why don’t you buy another one?’

  Fritz did not heed either George or the company, who like the incoming tide on a shallow beach parted and re-formed behind the interesting newcomer with the object of cutting him off and trying out what he was made of. But he remained fixed, gazing intently down the room.

  ‘His so good manners, where have they gone?’ thought Coelestin, who was talking to the Regierungsrat.

  At the back of the room, a very young dark-haired girl stood by the window, tapping idly on the glass as though she was trying to attract the attention of someone outside.

  ‘Sophie, why has no-one put up your hair?’ called Frau von Rockenthien from her sofa, in an undemanding, indeed soothing tone. ‘And why are you looking out of the window?’

  ‘I’m willing it to snow, mother. Then we could all amuse ourselves.’

  ‘Let time stand still until she turns round,’ said Fritz, aloud.

  ‘If the soldiers came past, we could throw snow at them,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Sophgen, you are twelve years old, and at your age - you don’t seem to notice, either, that we have guests,’ her mother said.

>   At this she did turn round, as though caught by a gust, as children do in the wind. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  19

  A Quarter of an Hour

  HERR Rockenthien never had quite the air of one to whom the big house at Gruningen - or indeed any house - belonged. At forty, he was large and loose, with impulses as benevolent and ill-directed as a badger-hound’s as he trundled through Schloss Gruningen’s long corridors.

  In point of fact the place had been built fifty years earlier by the father of his wife’s first husband, Johann von Kuhn. Rockenthien, therefore, had only come into it in 1787, when he married. But he was not the kind of man whose behaviour would be affected by coming into property, or indeed by losing it, and he was not intimidated by finding himself responsible for a large number of other lives.

  The district tax office had been established in a relatively small front room to the left of the main entrance. There Rockenthien, in principle, as inheritor of the Rittergut, presided, but, though far from a weak man, he was too restless to preside for long over anything. Coelestin Just, with a clerk, rapidly got through the business.

  Fritz told Just: ‘Something happened to me.’

  Just replied that whatever it was, it must happen later, since his job, indeed his duty, was to come to the front office, where in former days the tenants of Schloss Gruningen had brought in their corn, their firewood and their geese, and now wrestled over their payments in compensation for the field work they no longer did for the Elector of Saxony.

  ‘We have arrived in good time, Hardenberg, but should start at once. It will take us certainly all this morning, then we may expect a good dinner, have no fear of that, then the Nachtisch, when we may all talk and express ourselves freely, and the after-dinner sleep, and we may expect to be at work again from four until six.’

  ‘Something has happened to me,’ Fritz repeated.

  Fritz wrote immediately to Erasmus at the School of Forestry at Hubertusberg, sending the letter by mail coach. Erasmus replied: ‘I was at first amazed when I received your letter, but since they have done away with Robespierre in Paris I have become so used to extraordinary happenings that I soon recovered.

  ‘You tell me, that a quarter of an hour decided you. How can you understand a Maiden in a quarter of an hour? If you had said, a quarter of a year, I should have admired your insight into the heart of a woman, but a quarter of an hour, just think of it!

  ‘You are young and fiery, the Maiden is only fourteen and also fiery. You are both sensual human beings and now a tender hour comes and you kiss one another for all you’re worth, and when that’s over you think, well, this was a Maiden, like other Maidens! But let’s suppose you get over all the obstacles, you get married. Then you can indulge as you never could before. But satisfaction makes for weariness, and you end up with what you’ve always so much dreaded, boredom.’

  Fritz was obliged to admit to his brother, from whom he had never had any concealments, that Sophie was not fourteen, but only twelve, and that he hadn’t had a tender hour, only the quarter of an hour he had mentioned, surrounded by other people, standing at the great windows of the Saal at Schloss Gruningen.

  ‘I am Fritz von Hardenberg,’ he had said to her. ‘You are Fraulein Sophie von Kuhn. You are twelve years of age, I heard your gracious mother say so.’

  Sophie put her hands to her hair. ‘Up, it should be up.’

  ‘In four years time you will have to consider what man would be fortunate enough to hope to be your husband. Don’t tell me that he would have to ask your stepfather! What do you say yourself?’

  ‘In four years time I don’t know what I shall be.’

  ‘You mean, you don’t know what you will become.’

  ‘I don’t want to become.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right.’

  ‘I want to be, and not to have to think about it.’

  ‘But you must not remain a child.’

  ‘I am not a child now.’

  ‘Sophie, I am a poet, but in four years I shall be an administrative official, receiving a salary. That is the time when we shall be married.’

  ‘I don’t know you!’

  ‘You have seen me. I am what you see.’

  Sophie laughed.

  ‘Do you always laugh at your guests?’

  ‘No, but at Gruningen we don’t talk like this.’

  ‘But would you be content to live with me?’

  Sophie hesitated, and then said:

  ‘Truly, I like you.’

  Erasmus was not reassured. ‘Who can guarantee’, he wrote, ‘that if she is unspoiled now, she will stay unspoiled when she comes out into the world? A commonplace, you will tell me, but commonplaces aren’t always wrong. And how can you tell, since you say that she is so beautiful and is sure to be courted by many others, that she won’t be untrue to you? Girls act on instinct at thirteen (he still could not quite believe she was any younger), although at twenty-three they are cleverer than we are. Remember what you have said to me so often on this subject - yes, even two months ago, in Weissenfels. Have you forgotten so soon?’

  Erasmus went on to say that what had hurt him above all in Fritz’s letter was his ‘coldly determined manner’. But if he was determined to go ahead, then he could rely on Erasmus for help - his love for his brother was unchanging, its only limit was death. The Father was sure to prove difficult, ‘but then we have discussed so often the place of a father in the scheme of things.’

  ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘what has happened to your friendship with Karoline Just? Fare well! Your true friend and brother, Erasmus.’

  20

  The Nature of Desire

  FRITZ asked whether he might spend Christmas at Tennstedt. ‘That I am quite sure you can, if your own family will not be disappointed,’ said Karoline. ‘My uncle and aunt will make you heartily welcome, and we shall of course be killing the pig.’

  ‘Justen, something has happened to me.’

  He was ill, she had always feared it. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’

  ‘Justen, people might say that we haven’t known each other for long, but your friendship - I cannot tell you - even when I am away I have such a clear remembrance of you that I feel as though you are still near me - we are like two watches set to the same time, and when we see one another again there has been no interval - we still strike together.’

  She thought: But I could think of nothing to say after he read me the beginning of his Blue Flower. Thank God, he doesn’t remember that.

  ‘I have fallen in love, Justen.’

  ‘Not at Gruningen!’

  She felt as though her body had been hollowed out. Fritz was perplexed. ‘Surely you know the family quite well. Herr von Rockenthien welcomed your uncle as his oldest friend.’

  ‘Surely I do know them. But none of the older girls are at home just now, only Sophgen.’ She had made this calculation already, when she had heard that her uncle was taking him to Gruningen.

  Fritz looked at her steadily.

  ‘Sophie is my heart’s heart.’

  ‘But Hardenberg, she can’t be much more than …’ she struggled for moderation. ‘And she laughs.’

  He said, ‘Justen, so far you have understood everything, you have listened to everything. But it would be wrong of me to ask too much of you. I see that there is one thing, the most important of all, unfortunately, that you don’t grasp, the nature of desire between a man and a woman.’

  Karoline could not tell, either then or afterwards, why it was impossible for her to let this pass. Perhaps it was vanity - which was sinful - perhaps the cold fear of losing his confidence for ever.

  ‘Not everyone can speak about what they suffer,’ she said. ‘Some are separated from the only one they love, but are obliged to remain silent.’

  That was not a lie. She had not mentioned herself. But Fritz’s generous sympathy and instant rush of fellow-feeling was very painful to her. What strong force had spoken with her voice and told him someth
ing which, after all, was a lie and intended as a lie? As the dear Fritz talked on, gently but eagerly, about the obstacles to happiness (he would of course ask her nothing more, what she had told him was sacred) - the obstacles which drew them even more closely together - she saw that between them they had created out of nothing a new and most unwelcome entity. So that now there were four of them, the poet, the much-desired Sophie screaming with laughter, herself, the sober niece-housekeeper, and now her absent, secret, frustrated lover, doubtless a respectable minor official of more than thirty, probably - as Karoline increasingly clearly saw him - in sober clothes of hard-wearing material, almost certainly a married man, or he might, perhaps, be a pastor. He was so real at that moment that she could have put out a hand and touched him. And he had been born entirely from the wound that Hardenberg had dealt her, when he told her that she did not understand the nature of desire.

  ‘Words are given us to understand each other, even if not completely,’ Fritz went on in great excitement.

  ‘And to write poetry.’

  ‘Yes that’s so, Justen, but you mustn’t ask too much of language. Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else.’