The Blue Flower
Authors: Penelope Fitzgerald
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’
F. von Hardenberg, later Novalis,
Fragmente und Studien, 1799-1800
5 THE HISTORY OF FREIHERR HEINRICH VON HARDENBERG
7 THE FREIHERR AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
27 ERASMUS CALLS ON KAROLINE JUST
35 SOPHIE IS COLD THROUGH AND THROUGH
47 HOW PROFESSOR STARK MANAGED
Washday
J
ACOB
Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday. They should not have arrived anywhere, certainly not at this great house, the largest but two in Weissenfels, at such a time. Dietmahler’s own mother supervised the washing three times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here, at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse, he could tell from the great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard, where grave-looking servants, both men and women, were receiving them into giant baskets, that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth, in fact he knew that in this case it didn’t, but it was certainly an indication of long standing. A numerous family, also. The underwear of children and young persons, as well as the larger
sizes, fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight.
‘Fritz, I’m afraid you have brought me here at an inconvenient moment. You should have let me know. Here I am, a stranger to your honoured family, knee deep in your smallclothes.’
‘How can I tell when they’re going to wash?’ said Fritz. ‘Anyway, you’re a thousand times welcome at all times.’
‘The Freiherr is trampling on the unsorted garments,’ said the housekeeper, leaning out of one of the first-floor windows.
‘Fritz, how many are there in your family?’ asked Dietmahler. ‘So many things?’ Then he shouted suddenly: ‘There is no such concept as a thing in itself!’
Fritz, leading the way across the courtyard, stopped, looked round and then in a voice of authority shouted back: ‘Gentlemen! Look at the washbasket! Let your thought be the washbasket! Have you thought the washbasket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on
that
that thought the washbasket!’
Inside the house the dogs began to bark. Fritz called out to one of the basket-holding servants: ‘Are my father and mother at home?’ But it was not worth it, the mother was always at home. There came out into the courtyard a short, unfinished looking young man, even younger than Fritz, and a fair-haired girl. ‘Here, at any rate, are
my brother Erasmus and my sister Sidonie. Nothing else is wanted while they are here.’
Both threw themselves on Fritz. ‘How many are there of you altogether?’ asked Dietmahler again. Sidonie gave him her hand, and smiled.
‘Here among the table-linen, I am disturbed by Fritz Hardenberg’s young sister,’ thought Dietmahler. ‘This is the sort of thing I meant to avoid.’
She said, ‘Karl will be somewhere, and Anton, and the Bernhard, but of course there are more of us.’ In the house, seeming of less substance even than the shadows, was Freifrau von Hardenberg. ‘Mother,’ said Fritz, ‘this is Jacob Dietmahler, who studied in Jena at the same time as myself and Erasmus, and now he is a Deputy Assistant to the Professor of Medicine.’
‘Not quite yet,’ said Dietmahler. ‘I hope, one day.’
‘You know I have been in Jena to look up my friends,’ went on Fritz. ‘Well, I have asked him to stay a few days with us.’ The Freifrau looked at him with what seemed to be a gleam of terror, a hare’s wild look. ‘Dietmahler needs a little brandy, just to keep him alive for a few hours.’
‘He is not well?’ asked the Freifrau in dismay. ‘I will send for the housekeeper.’ ‘But we ‘don’t need her,’ said Erasmus. ‘You have your own keys to the dining room surely.’ ‘Surely I have,’ she said, looking at him imploringly. ‘No, I have them,’ said Sidonie. ‘I have had them
ever since my sister was married. I will take you all to the pantry, think no more about it.’ The Freifrau, recollecting herself, welcomed her son’s friend to the house. ‘My husband cannot receive you just at this moment, he is at prayer.’ Relieved that the ordeal was over, she did not accompany them through the shabby rooms and even shabbier corridors, full of plain old workmanlike furniture. On the plum-coloured walls were discoloured rectangles where pictures must once have hung. In the pantry Sidonie poured the cognac and Erasmus proposed the toast to Jena. ‘
Stosst an! Jena lebe hoch! Hurra
!’
‘What the Hurra is for I don’t know,’ said Sidonie. ‘Jena is a place where Fritz and Asmus wasted money, caught lice, and listened to nonsense from philosophers.’ She gave the pantry keys to her brothers and went back to her mother, who was standing at the precise spot where she had been left, staring out at the preparations for the great wash. ‘Mother, I want you to entrust me with a little money, let us say five or six thaler, so that I can make some further arrangements for our guest.’ ‘My dear, what arrangements? There is already a bed in the room he is to have.’ ‘Yes, but the servants store the candles there, and they read the Bible there during their free hour.’ ‘But my dear, why should this man want to go to his room during the day?’ Sidonie thought that he might want to do some writing. ‘Some writing!’ repeated her mother, in utter bewilderment. ‘Yes, and for that he
should have a table.’ Sidonie pressed home her advantage. ‘And, in case he should like to wash, a jug of water and a basin, yes, and a slop-pail.’ ‘But Sidonie, will he not know how to wash under the pump? Your brothers all wash so.’ ‘And there is no chair in the room, where he might put his clothes at night.’ ‘His clothes! It is still far too cold to undress at night. ‘I have not undressed myself at night, even in summer, for I think twelve years.’ ‘And yet you’ve given birth to eight of us!’ cried Sidonie. ‘God in heaven spare me a marriage like yours!’
The Freifrau scarcely heeded her. ‘And there is another thing, you have not thought - the Father may raise his voice.’ This did not perturb Sidonie. ‘This Dietmahler must get used to the Father, and to the way we do things, otherwise let him pack up and go straight home.’
‘But in that case, cannot he get used to our guest-rooms? Fritz should have told him that we lead a plain, God-fearing life.’
‘Why is it God-fearing not to have a slop-pail?’ asked Sidonie.
‘What are these words? Are you ashamed of your home, Sidonie?’
‘Yes, I am.’ She was fifteen, burning like a flame. Impatience, translated into spiritual energy, raced through all the young Hardenbergs. Fritz now wished to take his friend down to the river to walk up the towpath and talk of poetry and the vocation of man. ‘This we
could have done anywhere,’ said Dietmahler. ‘But I want you to see my home,’ Fritz told him. ‘It is old-fashioned, we are old-fashioned in Weissenfels, but we have peace, it is
heimisch
.’ One of the servants who had been in the courtyard, dressed now in a dark cloth coat, appeared in the doorway and said that the Master would be glad to see his son’s guest in the study, before dinner.
‘The old enemy is in his lair,’ shouted Erasmus.
Dietmahler felt a certain awkwardness. ‘I shall be honoured to meet your father,’ he told Fritz.
The Study
I
T
was Erasmus who must take after his father, for the Freiherr, politely rising to his feet in the semi-darkness of his study, was unexpectedly a small stout man wearing a flannel nightcap against the draughts. Where then did Fritz - since his mother was no more than a shred - get his awkward leanness from, and his height? But the Freiherr had this in common with his eldest son, that he started talking immediately, his thoughts seizing the opportunity to become words.
‘Gracious sir, I have come to your house,’ Dietmahler began nervously, but the Freiherr interrupted, ‘This is not my house. It is true I bought it from the widow of von Pilsach to accommodate my family when I was appointed Director of the Salt Mining Administration of Saxony, which necessitated my living in Weissenfels. But the Hardenberg property, our true home and lands, are in Oberwiederstadt, in the county of Mansfeld.’ Dietmahler said politely that he wished he had been fortunate enough to go to Oberwiederstadt. ‘You would have seen
nothing but ruins,’ said the Freiherr, ‘and insufficiently fed cattle. But they are ancestral lands, and it is for this reason that it is important to know, and I am now taking the opportunity of asking you, whether it is true that my eldest son, Friedrich, has entangled himself with a young woman of the middle classes.’
‘I’ve heard nothing about his entangling himself with anyone,’ said Dietmahler indignantly, ‘but in any case, I doubt if he can be judged by ordinary standards, he is a poet and a philosopher.’
‘He will earn his living as an Assistant Inspector of Salt Mines,’ said the Freiherr, ‘but I see that it is not right to interrogate you. I welcome you as a guest, therefore as another son, and you will not mind my finding out a little more about you. What is your age, and what do you intend to do in life?’
‘I am two and twenty and I am training to become a surgeon.’
‘And are you dutiful to your father?’
‘My father is dead, Freiherr. He was a plasterer.’
‘I did not ask you that. Have you known what it was to have sad losses in your family life?’
‘Yes, sir, I have lost two little brothers from scarlet fever and a sister from consumption, in the course of one year.’
The Freiherr took off his nightcap, apparently out of respect. ‘A word of advice. If, as a young man, a student,
you are tormented by a desire for women, it is best to get out into the fresh air as much as possible.’ He took a turn round the room, which was lined with book-cases, some with empty shelves. ‘Meanwhile, how much would you expect to spend in a week on spirits, hey? How much on books - not books of devotion, mind you? How much on a new black coat, without any explanation as to how the old one has ceased to be wearable? How much, hey?’
‘Freiherr, you are asking me these questions as a criticism of your son. Yet you have just said that you were not going to interrogate me.’
Hardenberg was not really an old man - he was between fifty and sixty - but he stared at Jacob Dietmahler with an old man’s drooping neck and lowered head. ‘You are right, quite right. I took the opportunity. Opportunity, after all, is only another word for temptation.’
He put his hand on his guest’s shoulder. Dietmahler, alarmed, did not know whether he was being pushed down or whether the Freiherr was leaning on him, perhaps both. Certainly he must be used to entrusting his weight to someone more competent, perhaps to his strong sons, perhaps even to his daughter. Dietmahler felt his clavicle giving way. I am cutting a mean figure, he thought, but at least he was on his knees, while Hardenberg, annoyed at his own weakness, steadied himself as he sank down by grasping first at the corner of the solid oak table, then at one of its legs. The door
opened and the same servant returned, but this time in carpet slippers.
‘Does the Freiherr wish the stove to be made up?’
‘Kneel with us, Gottfried.’
Down creaked the old man by the master. They looked like an old married couple nodding over their household accounts together, even more so when the Freiherr exclaimed, ‘Where are the little ones?’
‘The servants’ children, Excellency?’
‘Certainly, and the Bernhard.’