by A. N. Wilson
And now the Russian officer had brought George the chance not only to immortalize the Captain in prose – to ‘cash in’ as Therese mercilessly called it – but also to follow in the hero’s footsteps, to sail again to the Pacific – without Vati, without Therese.
The prospect offered by Captain Mulovskii filled both the Forsters with a joy which was almost unseemly. They had never been like this with one another before. What had weighed, so horribly, was the knowledge that there was no way of escape. Therese’s letters home from Poland, her graphic complaints to her father that George had been violent with her, forced himself upon her, provoked merely paternal denunciations, and a short, infuriating note from the stepmother – did Therese not know what was expected of a wife, and with a little care and practice – oh how odious that word was – it was the duty of a wife to please her husband and to give him children. Did she know how very angry her letters made her father? Georgine must ask her to desist from sending them.
Separation, then, could only be achieved by death, or by a miracle. (They both, silently, severally, hoped for the same death – George’s, for Therese’s grasp of life was too total for it to be entirely possible to imagine the planet without herself upon it.) And George could never shake off the instincts – thoughts would be too definite a term – of Sturm und Drang, Liebestod and the Romantic sense that life should be short and intense. Only when the Russian offer had been made did either of them realize quite how unhappy they had been, quite how desperately they both yearned for the mistake – their marriage – to be . . . not set aside, for they knew that it could not be quite undone; but . . . They wanted to be able to live. Ever since their going away to Poland this burden, their mistake, their inability to be happy, had hovered over them. It had wasted so much time! They had escaped, they were resourceful people, into the narcotics of literature, work, even a little society when they found German-speakers. The minute, however, that the narcotic had worn off, when the volume of Rousseau had been placed on Therese’s table, or when George laid down his pen and stopped writing sentences about the Captain, the waves of misery would return.
Now, however, with furniture, books and clothes packed, with a tearful Marie taken leave of, with a post-chaise heaving lumberously to Warsaw, they could almost have been mistaken, by other passengers, for a little Trinity of love, the parents and the gurgling Rosechen. The plan was for Therese to reside at Göttingen with their daughter during George’s year at sea. Either she would find an apartment of her own or she would reside with Caroline Michaelis – now married to the district medical officer, Böhmer. In Göttingen, she would be free, with Caroline, to lead an intellectual life. She would have the run of the University library. She would be surrounded by like minds. Nor did she object, with the prospect of separation so imminent, to basking a little in her husband’s fame: for Mulovskii’s offer, the Empress Catherine’s offer – to enable the young man who had sailed with Cook to take again to the high seas – made George’s fame universal. At Warsaw, he dined not once but twice with the King. Stanislas was an intelligent man who asked in detail about the state of the faculties in Vilnius, about the chemical discoveries of Mr Priestley and M. Lavoisier, about electricity and Mr Franklin.
The journey out in ’84 had been unendurably slow. The journey home, with its changes of horses and coaches and the same inns no less uncomfortable, was all positively enjoyable.
—We’ll be going through Halle?
Her question was natural enough. Six years had passed since he had seen Reinhold. He could not quite articulate to himself, still less to her, why he would not. He dreaded his father’s envy of this new voyage? He could not endure the advice which would stream from Reinhold’s mouth? Of these things he was sharply aware. Beneath their crystalline surface, however, was a feeling, having penned the final paragraph of Cook the Discoverer, and crowned the Captain on Mount Olympus, he had also enthroned him in his heart, finding a father for whom no apology need be made, a father for whom pietas was unmingled.
—Let’s go through Weimar. We can make the pilgrimage!
There was no need for him to name Goethe. Perhaps, in suggesting that they actually visit the author, he hoped to lay to rest the demons who flew out during their first strained conversation about Werther. Both of them had met the great man before – indeed, Therese’s father is actually mentioned in the novel when, in its early, sun-filled pages, before the Sorrows begin, Werther meets a young student who was reading, among other things, notes taken during a lecture by Professor Heyne, on the Primitive Ordering of Society in the Homeric Poems.
But, delightful as it was to see Weimar – Goethe was not there. He had started on his Italian Journeys. They dined instead with Knebel – who was the tutor to the young Prince – and with Herder the Moderator (Generalsuperintendant) – and talked of Homer, of folk-songs, of Philosophy (of which Herder was writing an enormous history). Herder expanded on his theme, that human civilizations like human individuals have births, maturities and deaths.
—And what of us, smiled Therese, are we in our maturity or on our death bed?
—We? When I talk with you – you are what? Twenty something? And I am forty-two. I think you are the future, waiting to be born! But if you mean is the Holy Roman Empire on its death bed? Is our broken, fragmented Germany with its Grand Duchies and Prince Bishoprics and Electorates, with its Cardinals and Princesses – if you mean is that on its death bed – dear woman! It has already died. It died the moment America sent the English packing.
—You think there will be a Revolution in Europe? she asked.
And George, just as eagerly,
—That we will overthrow thrones and altars?
So it was not to the old Göttingen that they returned the day after next. It was to a new world of infinitely exciting prospects.
She renewed her giggling flirtations with Meyer almost as soon as she stepped into her father’s house – there he was, Assad, the mysteriously annoying collusion between him and Therese instantaneously resurrected. George had had no choice – had he? – but to accept her old assurances that her ‘love’ for Assad was innocent – the sort of ‘love’ her mother had encouraged in her visitors.
—Look at the way my father behaves! Even to greet us, when we’ve been gone two years, he scarcely comes out of his study. Poor Mummy never saw him, she loved him—
Yes, but you don’t love me, was the sentence George left unspoken.
—It’s only like you and Sömmerring – you and Captain Cook.
—It’s not like Sömmerring – none of my friends said . . .
He could not finish the sentence, ‘say they are in love with me.’ No one had ever said they were in love with him and as far as he knew only one person ever had been in love with him – that with disastrous results. But there was no time any more to mind. Mulovskii wanted to accompany him to Copenhagen to look at ships. There was a whole team to assemble. Bayly – astronomer on the Adventure when Wales was the astronomer on the Resolution – had been enlisted. In Denmark they met a number of artists, botanists, cartographers and philosophers who wished to be involved. Mulovskii went on to London alone. George came slowly home to his wife, preparing to take leave not only of her but also of Germany. He came through Lübeck with its many-masted harbours and wooden-gabled houses. He stopped in Hannover and saw one of his sisters and he spent New Year in Charlotte Kestner’s house – she’d had several long marvellous letters from Goethe in Italy. Yes, Herder was right, the old world was on its death bed, a new one was waiting to be born. It was a palpable feeling – you could almost see it in people’s faces, as the bells rang and 1788 began.
Nothing prepared him for what would be awaiting him in Göttingen: a letter from Mulovskii in London. The previous August, Russia had declared war on Turkey. —This won’t affect things – our expedition? George had asked, and the Russian’s reply had been —I do not see why it should.
Now, the state of things had changed. The letter was in French
. Tout à fait désolé . . . l’Impératrice s’interesse beaucoup en les recherches de M. Forster . . . But war was war. All expenditure must be devoted to the defeat of the enemy. Until hostilities ceased, the expedition must be regarded as cancelled.
George stood in the panelled hallway of his father-in-law’s house as he read this letter. His hat was on the marble-topped table. He had not even removed his travelling coat as he stood there with the paper in his hand. Therese and Rosechen had come out to greet ‘Daddy’ but while he looked at his mail and removed his outer garments and read the letter, they had gone back into the little green parlour with its silhouettes – made by Therese – of her mother and father, brother and sister, on either side of the little chimney piece. Caroline, with her thick shock of hair falling loosely over her shoulders, was there – and the ridiculous Meyer. When he came into the room, Caroline said,
—Your face! You’ve seen a ghost!
—The Captain’s? asked Meyer, and the three of them all laughed.
He tried to suppress his hurt and his fury by falling to his knees to kiss Rosechen – but shy, not having seen her father for two weeks, she hid her face in her mother’s skirts.
Then he told them what was in the Russian’s letter.
The implications of it did not sink in all at once. All that had been making them happy for the last months had now been removed from them. Irrational anger with one another surfaced: it was somehow not bearable that they would have to take up the struggle of married life with the prospect of the limitless future.
One weekend, when he heard her taking leave of Meyer and calling him ‘Darling’, George’s temper snapped.
—This cannot go on.
—I don’t know what you are talking about.
—You know perfectly well.
—You have your friends.
—You know this is different. Why do you always like to argue with the use of false analogy?
—There’s nothing false. I have not hidden my feelings for Assad. It was you who invited him to come on our wedding journey. Assad—
—God damn it. I won’t continue with this Assad nonsense. He’s bloody Meyer and I won’t have it – do you hear?
This had never quite happened between them. They had had rows. In the bedroom he had on a number of occasions tried to force himself on her, and though penetration against her will had proved impossible they had physically wrestled. That had been behind closed doors, however, only overheard by Marie. But now they were wrestling in one of the public rooms of her father’s house. He had grabbed her shoulder and was shaking her. She pummelled his chest. She was weeping with frustration and rage.
—O you are a tyrant – I have no freedom—
—You mean you take liberties – liberties no man could allow his wife.
—Oh God, oh God, God, God!
—What in the name of Heaven are you fighting about?
The Professor had appeared at the door.
—I will not—
George was still so beside himself with rage that he could not release her and continued to shake her shoulders.
—O Daddy. Daddy, you see – now you see . . .
And her sobs were uncontrolled.
—Yes I do, said the Professor quietly.
George released her. He could not look Heyne in the face.
—I think you should leave now, sir.
—I shall go to my room, mumbled George.
—I mean, I think you should leave this house.
While he packed his belongings, the house seemed numb as if the doors and walls had been blockaded with bolsters. Then, now and again he could hear muffled voices. His stepmother saying,
—but you wrote such happy letters from Vilnius . . .
and Therese muttering something in reply, and Heyne saying,
—My poor child.
George had no real idea where to go. When, after an hour or so, he had packed, he went in search of the nurserymaid, Beata.
—Where is Rosechen?
—I think she’s curled up with her mother.
The maid spoke in the thickest of Westphalian voices. She looked at him reproachfully as though he had been beating both his wife and his child.
—I am going away.
—So oi ears – surr.
—I want to say goodbye to my child . . . to my—
He did not need to justify himself to a nurse, but her stares made him stammer with shyness.
—The worst thing, Therese said a month later, was your not even bothering to say goodbye. Just walking out. I can understand your being angry with me – but not even wanting to see your child before you went to Berlin.
Berlin had seemed the obvious place to go. His brother was still there, working as a publisher. There might even be work to be found. Besides, natural curiosity made George want to see the Prussian capital with its new King – Friedrich Wilhelm was a very different fellow from his militaristic genius-uncle Frederick the Great.
He and Therese had sensed something different about Prussia on their journey home. There had been road works everywhere, and now, as he showed his Westphalian passport at the border, he could see not only the construction of a new highway, but what seemed to be a trench.
—Canal, isn’t it? the customs officer replied, to his question. England has ’em – we’re moving with the times.
As he approached the outskirts of Berlin he could see that the old wall, with the little gate on the Brandenburg road, had been demolished: three-quarters constructed, the new Brandenburg Gate’s great neo-classical pillars soared confidently to the skies.
His old Kassel friend, Samuel Sömmerring, was paying a visit to the University to give a series of lectures on human origins. The pair had not had a chance of a proper conversation since they had been colleagues together. George had not known Sömmerring was going to be there – they met by luck in the scientific faculty building where George had gone to leave his card, in the hope of meeting some of the professors – perhaps – who knew – finding work?
Goldhagen, the Professor of Natural Sciences, had lately died, and even if George stood no chance of succeeding him, he might pick up a more junior post in the general all-change brought about by Goldhagen’s departure. Seeing on a noticeboard that Sömmerring was to lecture that afternoon, George simply joined the crowds on the assembled benches. George loved Sömmerring, who was a year younger than himself, but at the same time the reunion awoke feelings which he had put to one side – suppressed from sheer embarrassment. Recognizing his friend’s long intelligent face, sharp nose, fleshy lips was to be reminded of the episode in his life of which George was most ashamed. The reason he had left Kassel and gone into Polish exile. It was in Sömmerring’s company that he had given free rein to the side of his nature which was the least becoming, the most absurd, so that to set eyes upon his friend, in his formal dark cutaway coat from which a medal was suspended on a ribbon, and its crisp frill of shirt front and white cravat, was not to see what the rows of students saw – an embodiment of scientific reason. George, by contrast, felt as if he were seeing a man with whom he had been on an especially shaming debauch. He and Sömmerring were upright men: they did not drink to excess or visit bawdy houses, but George, looking back upon his last year at Kassel, was to create embarrassment of the same potency as might possess the soul of a respectable citizen when he looked back with incredulity at an evening of excess. What? Did I do that?
George and Reinhold, when in London, had been admitted to a Lodge of Freemasons, and although it never crossed Reinhold’s mind that such professional success as he enjoyed was owing to anything but his own talents, the son felt that much of their British success derived from their Masonic connections. Freemasonry for George was not primarily connections by a collective of networking and self-promotion. Nor was it a branch of arcane knowledge. He saw each Lodge as a beacon of hope for the earth, a place where men of different backgrounds and faiths could meet as equals, where privilege based on rank
counted for nothing, where humanity in future might use reason to create a fair and just political system as they had done in America. Dann ist die Erd’ ein Himmelreich und Sterbliche den Göttern gleich – then is the Earth a Heavenly Kingdom and mortals like the gods. In Kassel, as he had taken up his job as a Professor, the Head of the Faculty had greeted him with the secret handshake. Just as for some men the erotic impulse or a taste for alcohol cannot be held in check and, once indulged, leads on to orgiastic intemperance, George had a weakness for mumbo-jumbo. In the embarrassed years since Kassel, in the moments of recollection when he had been able to confront what he had done, he had asked himself whether the observation – the bent towards fanaticism – was not precisely a side-effect of his intense devotion to the life of the mind; whether, precisely because he had devoted ninety-five per cent of his life to rational discipline, his mind did not crave, as a sort of intellectual equivalent of Mardi Gras, five per cent of sheer silliness.
He and Sömmerring, whose friendship at Kassel had begun as a shared passion for botany, astronomy, anatomy, the new chemistry, joined the Rosicrucian Order which had been assembled by some of their Masonic cronies. Now you could not imagine a truly sensible person, such as that embodiment of sense, Captain Cook, being taken in for five seconds by the ‘secret knowledge’ supposedly handed down from the medieval figure of Christian Rosenkreuz – with its muddling of magic and mathematics, with its childish and obviously modern ‘traditional’ rituals, and its strange mingling of the wisdom of old Egypt and crackpot scientific theory. Perhaps the battiest Rosicrucian of them all, in George’s lifetime, was an English doctor called James Price who revived the age-old fantasy of the Philosopher’s Stone which could turn base metal into gold.
