The Blue Flower (13 page)

Sophie to Fritz - ‘… I have coughs and sneezes, but it seems to me that I feel quite well again when you are in my mind. Your Sophie.’

I
N
the autumn of 1795 Fritz plodded over to Gruningen to find Sophie without cares. She was playing with Gunther, whose experience of life must so far have been favourable, since he smiled at anything in human form. ‘He is stronger by far than our Christoph,’ said Fritz with a pang of regret. Gunther did nothing by halves. He had caught the household’s cough, but reserved it for the night-time, when it echoed, like a large dog barking, down the corridors.

‘Yes, he smiles and coughs at us all alike,’ said Fritz, ‘and yet I’m flattered when my turn comes. It is so much more pleasant to deceive oneself.’

‘Hardenberg, why have you not written to me?’ Sophie asked.

‘Dear, dear Sophgen, I wrote to you every day this
week. On Monday I wrote to explain to you that although God created the world it has no real existence until we apprehend it.’

‘So all this unholy muddle is our own doing,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘What a thing to tell a young girl!’

‘Things of the body aren’t our own doing,’ said Sophie. ‘I have a pain in my left side, and that is not my own doing.’

‘Well, let us all complain to each other,’ said Fritz, but the Mandelsloh declared that she was always well. ‘Did you not know that? It is generally agreed that I was born to be always well. My husband is quite sure of it, and so is everyone in this house.’

‘Why did you not come earlier, Hardenburch?’ asked Sophie.

‘I have to work very seriously now,’ he told her. ‘If we are ever to get married, I must apply myself. I sit up late at night, reading.’

‘But why do you do all this reading? You are not a student any more.’

‘He would not read if he was,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘Students do not read, they drink.’

‘Why do they drink?’ Sophie asked.

‘Because they desire to know the whole truth,’ said Fritz, ‘and that makes them desperate.’

Gunther, who had been half asleep, came to, and protested.

‘What would it cost them,’ Sophie asked, ‘to know the whole truth?’

‘They can’t reckon that,’ said Fritz, ‘but they know they can get drunk for three groschen.’

She is thirteen, she will be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. It takes time. One would say that God has stopped his clock.

But she is cold, cold through and through.

A
T
Gruningen, when Fritz was gone, the Mandelsloh asked why Sophie had mentioned the pain in her left side. ‘You told me we were not to say anything about it.’

‘He is not to know,’ said Sophie earnestly.

‘Then why did you speak of it?’

‘Just for the pleasure of talking about it while he was there. He took no notice, you know, Frieke, I laughed and so he did not notice it.’

The pain was no better by the beginning of November. It was Sophie’s first serious illness, the first illness in fact that she had ever had. At first they thought it better not to notify Fritz, but on the 14th of November, when he went back to the Justs’ house at mid-day, the maid Christel, when she brought him his coffee, told him that there was a messenger waiting for him. The messenger was from Gruningen. Christel’s feelings about this were mixed, for she wanted at all costs to keep the young Freiherr in the house. He had come to them, and she considered him theirs, and indeed hers.

‘I was not too frightened at first,’ Fritz wrote to Karl, ‘but when I heard that she was ill - my Philosophy was ill - I notified Just (we had been starting on the year’s accounts) and without any further enquiry left for Gruningen.’

‘What am I to tell Fraulein Karoline?’ Christel had asked. ‘She has gone to the market.’

‘Tell her what you told me, she will feel exactly the same as I do,’ he had said.

Sophie’s pain was the first symptom of a tumour on her hip related to tuberculosis. Such pains can disappear, it is said, of their own accord. The doctor, Hofrat Friedrich Ebhard, relied a good deal on this possibility, and a good deal on experience. Of Brownismus he had never had the opportunity to learn anything.

In his
Elementa Medicinae
Brown gives a Table of Excitability for the main disorders, the correct balance being indicated by the figure 40. Phthisis, the early stage of consumption, is shown in his table as coming well below 40. Brown, therefore, in cases of phthisis, would prescribe that the wish to go on living should be supported by electric shocks, alcohol, camphor and rich soups.

None of these things suggested themselves to Ebhard, but he made no mistake in his diagnosis. This was not surprising, since one in four of his patients died of consumption. Fraulein von Kuhn was young, but youth in these cases was not always on the patient’s side. He had
never had the chance to hear the opening of
The Blue Flower
, but if he had done so he could have said immediately what he thought it meant.

S
OPHIE’S
cough soon put Gunther’s into the shade. It came with an immense draught of breath which reminded her of laughing, so that in fact she would have been hard put to it, except for the pain, not to laugh.

What if there were no such thing as pain? When they were all children at Gruningen, Friederike, not yet the Mandelsloh, but already on duty, used to collect them together after the evening service to tell them a Sunday story.

‘There was a certain honest shopkeeper,’ she said, ‘who unlike the rest of us, felt no pain. He had never felt any since he was born, so that when he reached the age of forty-five he was quite unaware that he was ill and never thought to call the doctor, until one night he heard the sound of the door opening, and sitting up in his bed saw in the bright moonlight that someone he did not know had come into his room, and that this was Death.’

Sophie had been unable to grasp the point of the story.

‘He was so lucky, Frieke.’

‘Not at all. The pain would have been a warning to him that he was ill, and as it was he had no warning.’

‘We don’t want any warnings,’ the children told her. ‘We get into enough trouble as it is.’

‘But he had no time to consider how he had spent his life, and to repent.’

‘Repentance is for old women and arse-holes,’ shouted George.

‘George, no-one can tolerate you,’ said Friederike. ‘They ought to whip you at school.’

‘They do whip me at school,’ said George.

The Hofrat ordered the application of linseed poultices to Sophie’s hip, which were so scalding hot that they marked the skin for good. The linseed smelled of the open forest, of solid furniture, of the night-watchman’s heavy oiled boots, specially issued to him by the town councillors because he had to patrol the streets in all weathers, of pine trees and green spruce. Unmistakeably, Sophie began to get better.

‘
Liebster, bester Freund
,’ Rockenthien wrote to Fritz. ‘How are you? Here it is the same old story. Sophgen dances, jumps, sings, demands to be taken to the fair at Greussen, eats like a woodcutter, sleeps like a rat, walks straight as a fir-tree, has given up whey and medicine, has to take two baths a day by way of treatment, and is as happy as a fish in water.’

‘Sometimes, I wish that I were the Hausherr,’ Fritz wrote to Karl from Tennstedt, ‘the world is not a problem to him, and yet this time what he says is true. My dear, treasured Philosophy had had sleepless nights, burning fever, had been bled twice, was too feeble to move. The Hofrat - by the way, it is possible that he is a fool - spoke of inflammation of the liver. And now, since the 20th of November, we are told and indeed we can see with our own eyes that all danger is past.’ He asked Karl to send, by a good messenger, two hundred oysters - these to go straight to Gruningen, as a delicacy for the invalid - and to Tennstedt, Fritz’s winter trousers, his woollen stockings, his
santes
(the comforters that went under the waistcoat), material for a green jacket, white cashmere for a waistcoat and trousers, a hat, and the loan of Karl’s gold epaulettes. He would explain later why he wanted these things, and he would come to Weissenfels and settle up while
der Alte
was meeting old friends, as he did once a year, at the fair in Dresden.

E
VEN
Tennstedt had its fair, specialising in
Kesselfleisch
- the ears, snout and strips of fat from the pig’s neck boiled with peppermint schnaps. Great iron kettles dispersed the odours of pig sties and peppermint. There was music of sorts, and the stall-keepers, who had come in from the country, danced with each other to keep warm. Karoline had been accustomed to go to the fair at first with her uncle, then with her uncle and step-aunt, and she did so again this year. - A fine young woman still, what a pity she has no affianced to treat her to a pig’s nostril!

Her uncle said, ‘You will want to call at Schloss Gruningen, to congratulate them on their daughter’s renewed health. Why do you not come with me next week, when I have to see Rockenthien on business?’

Karoline had never asked him, and did not now ask, what he thought of Hardenberg’s engagement, although he must surely know about it, and how he felt about the Freiherr being kept so long in the dark. She was sure
that it must give him pain to conceal anything from his old friend, and in this case the Freiherr had trusted him, after all, to supervise his eldest son. But she knew also that her uncle, like most men, believed that what had not been put into words, and indeed into written words, was not of great importance.

For their visit to the Rockenthiens, Coelestin had hired a horse and trap. They broke their journey at Gebesee, where the manor house belonged, he told Karoline, to the von Oldershausen family - the family, that was, of the Freiherr’s long dead first wife. ‘The property is now in ruins. They have not been fortunate.’

At the Black Boy, he sent out for schnaps, and looked at his niece attentively for the first time for months, since though he was no less fond of her than ever, her health and well-being could now fairly be left to Rahel. He felt that he should, perhaps, be sorry about something.

‘My dear, you must be very tired of hearing about my garden and my garden-house.’

She smiled. That was not the trouble, then, Just thought to himself. Try again. At different ages, women had different troubles, but always there was something. ‘I had meant to tell you that in Treffurt, a few weeks ago, I saw your cousin Carl August.’

She gave the same smile.

‘And my sister, your Aunt Luisa, and I …’

‘You thought the two of us might make a respectable
match. But, you know, I haven’t seen Carl August for years, and he is younger than I am.’

‘One would never think it, Karolinchen. You are always rather pale, but …’

Karoline put a lump of sugar and a small amount of hot water in her glass. ‘Don’t make any arrangements for me with Tante Luisa, Uncle. Wait until all hope is gone, until behind me roars youth’s wild ocean.’

‘Is that from some poem or other?’ asked Just doubtfully.

‘Yes, from some poem or other. To tell you the truth, I don’t like my cousin.’

‘My dear, you said yourself you hadn’t seen him for some time. I think I can tell you exactly when.’

In one of the top inside pockets of his winter coat, Just kept his minutely written diary for the last five years, and he began now to pat the outside of his pocket, as though expecting it to call out to him in response.

‘My cousin was very irritating then, and he will be very irritating now,’ Karoline went on. ‘I am sure he prides himself on his consistency.’

‘You must not let yourself become too difficult, my Karoline,’ said her uncle, in some distress, and she reflected that he was being a little more frank than he had no doubt intended, and that she must not let him worry, as he would probably soon begin to do, that he had hurt her feelings. But it was never difficult to distract
him. ‘I daresay Hardenberg has spoiled me,’ she said. ‘I daresay talking to a poet has turned my head.’

At Schloss Gruningen she was relieved to find that Rockenthien had already gone to his office. The Kreisamtmann followed him there. Karoline paid her respects to the tranquil mistress of the house, and admired Gunther, to whom she had sent an ivory teething ring, with a porcelain sweet-box for Sophie, marzipan and
pfefferkuchen
for Mimi and Rudi, and a brace of hares for the household.

‘You are a good, generous girl,’ said Frau Rockenthien. ‘Your lodger, Hardenberg, is here, you know, and his brother Erasmus, yes, Erasmus this time. He often brings one of his brothers with him.’

Karoline’s heart seemed to open and shut.

‘I expect Hardenberg will return with us to Tennstedt this evening,’ she said.

‘Ach, well, they are in the morning room now. All are welcome, it is no matter and it is no trouble, whoever comes,’ said Frau Rockenthien, and indeed for her it was not. ‘I don’t know, however, why Hardenberg has sent quite so many oysters. Do you care for oysters, my dear? Of course, they do not keep for ever.’

The morning room. Hardenberg, Erasmus, Friederike Mandelsloh, George trying, apparently for the first time, to play the flute, a pack of little dogs, Sophie in a pale
pink dress. When Karoline had last seen her she had thought of her as one of the children. She still thought of her as one of the children. Every night she prayed that she might be spared to have children of her own, though not, perhaps, children quite like Sophie.

Hardenberg stayed beside his Philosophy, with his large feet stowed away under his chair. Erasmus came over at once to Karoline, delighted, not having expected to see her. Sophie was in raptures, absolutely genuine, over her sweet-box; she was going to give up chewing tobacco altogether, only sweets from now on.

‘They will give you colic,’ said the Mandelsloh.

‘Ach, I have colic already. I tell Hardenburch he must call me his little wind-bag.’

Karoline turned to Erasmus, as though to another survivor from drowning. ‘This is really all I need,’ she thought, ‘one moment only with someone who feels as I do.’ And Erasmus took her hand in his warm one, and seemed about to say something, but in another moment he had turned back towards Sophie with an indulgent smile, half-senseless, like a drunken man.

Karoline perceived that Erasmus also had fallen in love with Sophie von Kuhn.