The Blue Flower (6 page)

K
AROLINE
was in charge (Rahel having divided up the responsibilities with watchful tact) of the household accounts, which included collecting Fritz’s weekly payment for board and lodging, also for stabling the Gaul, who had arrived from Weissenfels. On the very first Saturday, however, there was confusion. ‘Fraulein Karoline, my father’s cashier is due at Tennstedt to bring me my allowance from now until the end of November, but he has perhaps made a mistake and gone straight to Oberwiederstadt. I shall have to ask you I am afraid to wait for what is owing.’

‘I don’t think we can wait,’ Karoline told him, ‘but I will make it up, for the time being, from the housekeeping.’ She had changed colour - which she scarcely ever did - at the idea of his embarrassment. ‘How will he manage?’ she asked Rahel. Rahel said, ‘I dare say that in spite of attending three universities he has not been taught how to manage. He is the eldest son, and has not been protected from himself.’

Although the cashier arrived the next day, Karoline felt as if she had made some kind of a stand, but in reality she had no defences against Hardenberg, because, from the evening of the poetry-reading onwards he asked so much from her. He gave her his entire confidence, he laid the weight of it upon her. She was his friend - Karoline did not contradict this - and although he could live without love, he told her, he could not live without friendship. All was confessed, he talked perpetually. Neither the sewing nor the forewinter sausage-chopping deterred him. As she chopped, Karoline learned that the world is tending day by day not towards destruction, but towards infinity. She was told where Fichte’s philosophy fell short, and that Hardenberg had a demon of a little brother of whom he was fond, and a monstrous uncle who disputed with his father, but then, so did they all.

‘Your mother also?’

‘No, no.’

‘I am sorry you are not happy at home,’ said Karoline.

Fritz was startled. ‘I have given you the wrong idea, there is love in our home, we would give our lives for each other.’

His mother was young enough too, he added, to bear more children; it was his absolute duty to start earning as soon as possible. Then he returned to the subject of Fichte, fetching his lecture notes to show to Karoline - page after page of triadic patterns. ‘Yes, these are some
of Fichte’s triads, but I will tell you what has suddenly struck me since I came to Tennstedt. You might look at them as representing the two of us. You are the thesis, tranquil, pale, finite, self-contained. I am the antithesis, uneasy, contradictory, passionate, reaching out beyond myself. Now we must question whether the synthesis will be harmony between us or whether it will lead to a new impossibility which we have never dreamed of.’

Karoline replied that she did not dream very much.

About Dr Brown, whom he spoke of next, she did know something, but she had not realised that Brownismus was an improvement on all previous medical systems, or that Dr Brown himself had lectured with a glass of whisky and a glass of laudanum in front of him, sipping from each in turn, to demonstrate the perfect balance. She did not even know what whisky was.

Fritz also told her that women are children of nature, so that nature, in a sense, is their art. ‘Karoline, you must read
Wilhelm Meister
.’

‘Of course I have read
Wilhelm Meister
,’ she said.

Fritz was disconcerted for a few seconds, so that she had time to add, ‘I found Mignon very irritating.’

‘She is only a child,’ cried Fritz, ‘a spirit, or a spirit-seer, more than a child. She dies because the world is not holy enough to contain her.’

‘She dies because Goethe couldn’t think what to do
with her next. If he had made her marry Wilhelm Meister, that would have served both of them right.’

‘You are very severe in your judgments,’ said Fritz. He sat down to write a few verses on the subject. Karoline, with the kitchen-maid, was putting lengths of string through dried rings of apple. ‘But Hardenberg, you have written about my eyebrows!’

Karoline Just has dark eyebrows

And from the movements of her eyebrows

I can gather good advice
.

‘I shall give you a pet-name,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got one?’ Most Carolines and Karolines (and it was the commonest name in North Germany) were called Line, Lili, Lollie or Karolinchen. She shook her head. ‘No, I have never had one.’

‘I shall call you Justen,’ he said.

T
ENNSTEDT
had the advantage, from Just’s point of view, of being over fifty miles from Jena. Young Hardenberg still had many friendships there, but, in Just’s opinion, would be better off without them. For example, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter - if that was what he was - should probably be committed, for his own good, to an asylum. But Ritter was an innocent. What struck Just in particular was the behaviour of the Jena women. Friedrich Schlegel, one of Hardenberg’s earliest friends, was a great admirer of his brother August’s wife, Caroline. This same wife had been the lover of George Forster, the librarian. Forster’s wife Therese had left him for a journalist, complaining that when their baby died of smallpox, Forster had not consoled her but had simply ‘taken strenuous steps to replace it’. Again, Friedrich Schlegel lived with a woman ten years older than himself. She was Dorothea, daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a kind and motherly woman, apparently, but she had a husband
already, a banker, whose name Just couldn’t remember. Whoever he was, he was well out of it.

They were all intelligent, all revolutionaries, but since each of them had a different plan, none of it would come to anything. They talked continually of going to Prussia, to Berlin, but they stayed in Jena. As Just saw it, this was because Jena was so much cheaper.

To the Jena circle Fritz was a kind of phenomenon, a country boy, perhaps still growing, capable in his enthusiasm of breaking things, tall and awkward. Friedrich Schlegel stuck to it that he was a genius. ‘You must see him,’ they told their acquaintances. ‘Whatever you read of Hardenberg’s you won’t understand him nearly as well as if you take tea with him once.’

‘When you write to him,’ said the wild Caroline Schlegel to her sister-in-law Dorothea, ‘tell him to come at once, and we will all
fichtisieren
and symphilosophise and
sympoetisieren
until the dawn breaks.’

‘Yes,’ said Dorothea, ‘we must have the whole congregation together again in my front sitting room. I shall not be content until I see this. But in any case, why is our Hardenberg dragging round like a clerk under the orders of some tedious Kreisamtmann?’

‘Oh, but the Kreisamtmann has a niece,’ said Caroline.

‘How old is she?’ asked Dorothea.

N
OW
that the Gaul was in the Justs’ stable, Fritz would be able to accompany the Kreisamtmann on circuit. There he was to act as his legal clerk, and to pick up business methods, as his father had specified, as he went.

In spite of his sober clothes, bought at second hand, Fritz did not look quite right, not quite like a clerk of any kind, and the Gaul also struck a jarring note. But the Kreisamtmann, from the moment he first saw Fritz, had taken him to his heart. The only precaution he thought necessary before they set out together on official business was to ask him whether he still felt as Just understood he once had about the sequence of events in France?

‘The Revolution in France has not produced the effects once hoped for,’ was how he put it to Fritz. ‘It has not resulted in a golden age.’

‘No, they’ve made a butcher’s shop of it, I grant you that,’ said Fritz. ‘But the spirit of the Revolution, as we first heard of it, as it first came to us, could be preserved
here in Germany. It could be transferred to the world of the imagination, and administered by poets.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Just, ‘that as soon as you are settled into your profession, you would be well advised to take up politics.’

‘Politics are the last thing that we need. This at least I learned with the Brethren at Neudietendorf. The state should be one family, bound by love.’

‘That does not sound much like Prussia,’ said the Kreisamtmann.

To the Freiherr von Hardenberg he wrote that the whole relationship between himself and the son who had been entrusted to him was extremely successful. Friedrich was showing much application. Who would have guessed that he, the poet, would spare no pains to turn himself into a businessman, to do the same piece of work two or three times over, to go over the resemblances and differences in the words of newspaper articles about business matters so as to be sure he had judged them correctly, and all this as diligently as he read his poetry, science and philosophy. ‘Of course, your son learns very quickly, twice as fast as other earthly mortals.’

‘It is a curious thing that although I am supposed to be instructing him,’ Just’s letter went on, ‘and
am
instructing him, he is teaching
me
even more, matters to which I never paid attention before, and in the process I am losing the narrow-mindedness of an old man. He
has advised me to read
Robinson Crusoe
and
Wilhelm Meister
. I told him that up till this time I had never felt the least temptation to read a work of fiction.’

‘What are these matters,’ the Freiherr wrote back to him, ‘to which you never paid attention before? Be good enough to give me one example.’ Just replied that Fritz Hardenberg had spoken to him of a fable, which he had found, so far as Just could remember, in the works of the Dutch philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis - it had been about the problem of universal language, a time when plants, stars and stones talked on equal terms with animals and with man. For example, the sun communicates with the stone as it warms it. Once we knew the words of this language, and we shall do so again, since history always repeats itself. ‘- I told him, that is of course always a possibility, if God disposes.’

The Freiherr replied that his son would not need a different language from German to conduct his duties as a future salt mine inspector.

Since winter often left the roads impassable, Coelestin Just and his probationary clerk did as much of their travelling as possible before the end of the forewinter. ‘But there is something else which I have written and which I want to read to you while I still have time,’ Fritz told Karoline. ‘It will not truly exist until you have heard it.’

‘Is it then poetry?’

‘It is poetry, but not verse.’

‘Then it is a story?’ asked Karoline, who dreaded the reappearance of Fichte’s triads.

‘It is the beginning of a story.’

‘Well, we will wait until my Aunt Rahel comes back from the evening service.’

‘No, it is for you only,’ said Fritz.

‘His father and mother were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall ticked with a monotonous beat, the wind whistled outside the rattling window-pane. From time to time the room grew brighter when the moonlight shone in. The young man lay restlessly on his bed and remembered the stranger and his stories. “It was not the thought of the treasure which stirred up such unspeakable longings in me,” he said to himself. “I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers? Such a wild passion for a flower was never heard of there. But where could this stranger have come from? None of us had ever seen such a man before. And yet I don’t know how it was that I alone was truly caught and held by what he told us. Everyone else heard what I did, and yet none of them paid him serious attention.”’

‘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.’

I
N
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.’