The Blue Flower (12 page)

F
RITZ
did not risk taking the painter to the Kloster Gasse, where he would surely say something to his parents about Sophie. There was no alternative to seeing him off from the Wilde Mann when the diligence left for Koln.

He did not want to go straight home, but walked a little way out of the town and into a churchyard which he knew well. It was by now the very late afternoon, pale blue above clear yellow, with the burning clarity of the northern skies, growing more and more transparent, as though to end in revelation.

The entrance to the churchyard was a large iron gate, with gilt letters on it, intertwined. The municipality of Weissenfels had intended to run to an iron fence as well, but at the moment the gate was set in wooden palings which more or less served to keep the cows in the pastor’s front yard away from the graves. Knee-deep in the presbytery dungheap they watched the passers-by without curiosity. Fritz walked among the grass mounds which were now, with the green alleys between them, almost
disappearing in the rising mist. As in most graveyards, there were a number of objects left lying about - an iron ladder, a dinner basket and even a spade, as though work here were always in progress, and always liable to be interrupted. The crosses, iron and stone, appeared to grow out of the earth, the smaller ones struggling to get as tall as the others. Some had fallen. You could not say that the churchyard, which was a place for family walks on public holidays, was neglected, but neither was it well kept. There were weeds and a few geese. Stinging insects from the dungheaps and from God’s acre joined in triumphant clouds in the strong sickly air.

The creak and thump of the pastor’s cows could still be heard far into the burial ground where the graves and the still empty spaces, cut off from each other now by the mist, had become dark green islands, dark green chambers of meditation. On one of them, just a little ahead of him, a young man, still almost a boy, was standing in the half darkness, with his head bent, himself as white, still, and speechless as a memorial. The sight was consoling to Fritz, who knew that the young man, although living, was not human, but also that at the moment there was no boundary between them.

He said aloud, ‘The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe,
after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.’

When he got back to the Kloster Gasse, with the impulse to tell somebody about what he had seen, Sidonie immediately asked him who was that man who had been talking to him with so much feeling at the Wilde Mann - Gottfried had seen them - Oh, so it was the poor painter! - Why poor? Fritz asked - Gottfried had given it as his opinion that there were tears in his eyes. Well, Erasmus asked, has he done the portrait? No, Fritz said, he has not been successful. He had done his best to forgive Erasmus. They never, in the ordinary way of things, discussed Sophie. He regarded his brother as an obstinate heathen.

‘Are there no sketches?’ Sidonie asked.

‘Yes, a few,’ Fritz told her. ‘But they are a kind of notation only - a few lines, a cloud of hair. He declares she is undrawable. What distresses me is my ring, for it was to have a smaller version of the portrait inside it, when it was ready. Now I must content myself with that misbegotten miniature.’

‘You can’t leave that ring alone,’ said the Bernhard, who had come in, silent-footed, from school. ‘Always engraved and re-engraved. It would be much better plain.’

‘You have never seen it,’ said Sidonie. ‘None of us has ever seen it.’ She smiled at her eldest brother. ‘I daresay
after all that you are not sorry to think that your Sophie is undrawable.’

Sidonie was making anxious calculations about Gottfried. He might be asked about the stranger in the Wilde Mann, and it would be impossible for him, if asked, to do anything less than tell the truth to the Freiherr. But then, Gottfried did not know that the man he had seen was a painter, and Sidonie was reassured also by the thought that her father never gave his concentrated attention to more than one subject at a time. Lately, to her mother’s relief, he had once again allowed the
Leipziger Zeitung
into the house. At the moment he was anxious to hear how much Fritz had gathered from his visit to the salt-works and pan-houses of Artern, then he wished to discuss, or rather to give his opinions, on Buonaparte, who, on the whole, he thought, showed signs of competence. That should last them at least until tomorrow.

Fritz went in through the shabby darkly-polished house, where the sound of the early evening hymn-singing could be heard from behind the shut doors of the kitchen quarters. First to his mother and little Christoph, thin as a shadow with summer fever. ‘Are you well, Fritz? Is there anything you want? Are you happy?’ He would have liked to ask her to give him something, or to tell him something, but could think of nothing. She asked unexpectedly, ‘Are you concealing
anything from your father?’ Fritz took her hand. ‘You must trust me, mother! I shall tell him everything - that is, everything that -‘ With quite unaccustomed energy she cried, ‘No, in heaven’s name, whatever it is, don’t do that!’

B
EFORE
starting work in earnest, but having realised at Artern what it would be like when he did, Fritz went to see his friends at Jena. The Gaul could do the necessary thirty miles, though without enthusiasm. He had not been to see them, Caroline Schlegel had been saying, for centuries.

‘We shall hope to hear him talking, as he used to do, before he gets round the corner of Grammatische Strasse,’ said Dorothea Schlegel, ‘saying something about the Absolute.’

Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a guest in her house as so often, reminded her that Hardenberg could not be judged by any ordinary standards, not even the ordinary standards of Jena, where fifteen out of every twenty inhabitants were said to be Professors. ‘For him there is no real barrier between the unseen and the seen. The whole of existence dissolves itself into a myth.’

‘But that is the trouble,’ interrupted Caroline. ‘He used, of course, to say that every day the world was
drawing nearer to infinity. Now, we are told, he interests himself in the extraction and refinement of salt and brown coal, which can’t be dissolved into a myth, no matter how hard he tries.’

‘Goethe himself undertook to administer a silver mine for the Duke of Saxe-Weimar,’ said her husband.

‘Very unsuccessfully. Goethe’s mine went bankrupt. However, I believe that Hardenberg will manage his efficiently, and that is what I can’t forgive him.
Enfin
, he will become totally
merkantilistisch
. He will marry the niece of the Kreisamtmann and in good time he will become a Kreisamtmann himself.’

‘I am sorry that he allows himself to become an object of jest,’ said Ritter.

‘That is not on account of his philosophy, or even his mania for salt. It is because he has such large hands and feet,’ said Caroline. ‘We all love him.’

‘Dearly we love him,’ said Dorothea.

In Jena, in autumn, friends walked together in the pine woods above the little town, or in Paradise, Jena’s name for its towpath along the Saale. Sometimes Goethe, who often spent the summers here, was to be seen in Paradise, also walking, his hands clasped behind his back, in reverie. He was now forty-six years old, and was referred to by the Schlegel women as His Ancient and Divine Majesty. Goethe did not like to meet too many people at once.
As he advanced, groups dexterously broke up before he was obliged to meet them. Fritz hung back, not aspiring to the attention of so great a man.

‘And yet you have plenty to say,’ Caroline told him. ‘You could speak to him, as a young man, a coming poet, to one who seems almost indestructible.’

‘I have nothing good enough to show him.’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘You may talk to me, Hardenberg. Talk to me about salt.’

The musical evenings and
conversazione
at Jena were crowded, but not everyone said brilliant things, or indeed, anything at all. Some of the guests stood uneasily, certain that they had been invited, but not, now that they had arrived, that their names had been remembered.

‘Dietmahler!’

‘Hardenberg! I knew you as soon as you came into the room.’

‘How do I come into a room?’

Dietmahler scarcely liked to say, You still look ridiculous and everyone is still glad to see you. He felt, like a wound, the irrecoverable gap between student days and those that follow.

‘Are you a surgeon now?’ Fritz asked him.

‘Not quite, but soon. You see I have not moved far from Jena. When I qualify, I shall not do so badly. My mother is alive, but I have no younger brothers now and no sisters.’

‘
Gott sei Dank
, I have plenty of both,’ cried Fritz, on an impulse. ‘Come and stay with us in Weissenfels. Dear friend, pay us a visit.’

It was in this way that Dietmahler witnessed the Great Wash at Weissenfels, and told the Freiherr von Hardenberg, in all sincerity, that he knew nothing about his son’s entanglement with a young woman of the middle class, or, indeed, with any other woman.

A
T
Tennstedt, Karoline Just heard that the Rockenthiens had asked Fritz to stand godfather to Gunther, the new baby. She thought, ‘They are trying to bind him to them with links of iron.’

Erasmus, who wrote to her from Hubertusberg, was her only ally. ‘I am prepared to resign myself, as I explained to you, to taking a much smaller place in Fritz’s life,’ he told her, ‘at least, I tell myself that I am resigned. But not to having him taken away from us by a greedy infant. If Sophie von Kuhn is an infant, however, by the way, she will not stay constant, she will change her mind. And yet I don’t quite like the idea of that either.’

Fritz came back to Tennstedt, and went into the kitchen, saying he was too dusty from the summer’s roads for the front room. ‘Where is the Kreisamtmann? Where is Frau Rahel?’

What does it matter where they are? Karoline felt like answering. You have been away for so long, now is your opportunity to speak to someone who truly understands
you. Didn’t you say that we were like two watches, set to the same time? She said aloud, ‘They are in their garden-house. Yes! It is finished at last.’

‘That I must see,’ said Fritz. He was washing his face and hands under the pump, but as she put on her shawl he added, in a voice of great tenderness, ‘Dear Justen, you must not think I have forgotten the things we talked about not so long ago.’ Karoline did think he had forgotten all or most of it. Then as he dried himself he repeated, ‘Never does the heart sigh in vain, Justen,’ and she scarcely knew whether to be unhappy or not. In her mouth was something bitter, that tasted like the waters of death.

She would have twenty minutes alone with him on the walk down to the garden, which was in an area on the outskirts called the Runde. He would give her his arm. But they would have to stop and talk on the way to many neighbours and acquaintances, all of whom would say: ‘Ah, Freiherr, so you are back from Jena.’ ‘Yes, back from Jena.’ ‘We are glad that your health has been spared, we are glad to see you back from Jena.’ Many of these people would get up in Tennstedt, and go to bed again there at the end of the day, perhaps in all eighteen thousand or so times.

‘How good it is to be alive,’ several of them said, ‘in this warm weather.’

The Justs’ plot was small, and had no trees, but they
had bought it already cultivated and it was planted up with vegetables, honeysuckle and centifolia roses. The garden-house itself was one of an accepted pattern, which could be ordered from either of the two master carpenters in Tennstedt, and was handsomely framed in carved and gilded wood. Its name was conspicuous,
Der Garten Eden
.

The Justs sat in a cloud of smoke from the Kreisamtmann’s pipe, side by side on a new bench at the new entrance. There was no room for anyone else. This, too, was part of the accepted design of a garden-house. They looked happily outwards towards the Runde, half-asphyxiated by the fragrance of hop-vines, honeysuckle and tobacco. ‘Hail, ever-blessed pair!’ cried Fritz, from a distance.

Just, as he himself very well knew, had lately become almost absurdly absorbed by the details of design and installation. He had taken Fritz to Artern, as part of his apprenticeship, to listen to both sides in a disagreement between the different brotherhoods of salt workers. But although he had told Fritz to take careful notes, he had returned with impatience to the matter of the exact placing of the
Vorbau
, or porch, on the garden-house. At what angle would it receive most morning sun? Afternoon sun, of course, was to be avoided.

Even now, while Rahel was asking after her former friends in Jena (but without, Fritz thought, her old hint of sharpness), the Kreisamtmann once again introduced
the subject of the
Vorbau
. It had always seemed to Fritz that Coelestin Just knew what contentment was, but not passion, and could therefore be accounted a happy man. He saw now how mistaken he had been. It was discontent that, at last, was making Just truly happy. Although, short of dismantling and re-constructing the entire garden-house nothing could now be done about the
Vorbau
, he would never be quite satisfied with it, never cease to build and rebuild it in his mind. The universe, after all, is within us.