The Blue Flower (14 page)

I
N
his poem for her thirteenth birthday Fritz wrote that he could hardly credit that there had been a time when he had not known Sophie and when he was ‘the man of yesterday,’ careless, irresponsible, and so forth. The man of yesterday was now set, once and forever, on the right path. ‘But he has been hateful to me,’ Sophie told the Mandelsloh, ‘we have quarrelled, it is all over.’

This was all the more unjust because she had looked forward to her first quarrel, having been told by her friend, Jette Goldacker, that she and Hardenberg certainly ought to have one. It was the right thing for lovers to do, the Goldacker had said, and afterwards the ties between them would be strengthened. But what can we quarrel about? Sophie asked. About any little thing, it seemed, the more unimportant the better. But after they had been sitting together talking for about half an hour, perhaps not quite so long, her Hardenberg broke out, as though something in him had been overstretched and worked ruinously loose: ‘Sophie, you are thirteen years
old. How have you spent your time so far? Your first year was passed, I suppose, in smiling and sucking, as little Gunther does now. During your second year, as girls are more forward than boys, you learned to speak. Your first words - what were they? “I want!” At three you became still greedier, and finished off the sweet wine from the grown-ups’ glasses. At four you began to laugh, and finding that pleasant, you laughed at everything and everybody. At five years old they started to try to educate you. At eleven, having learned nothing, you discovered you had become a woman. You were frightened, I daresay, and went to your gracious mother, who told you not to disturb yourself. Then it came to you that those succulent looks of yours, not quite blonde, not quite brunette, made it unnecessary for you to know, still less to say, anything rational. And now, of course, you’re crying, sensibility itself, I suppose, let us see how long you can cry for, my Philosophy -‘

He had no manners, Sophie had wept. That was what they said to her when she was in disgrace, the strongest reproach she knew. Fritz replied that he had been to the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, and knew somewhat more about manners than a thing of thirteen.

‘A thing of thirteen, Frieke! Can you believe that, can you explain that?’

‘How did he explain it himself?’

‘He said I was a torment to him.’

In his next letters to Sophie, Fritz called himself inexcusable, uncultivated, ungracious, impolite, incorrect, intolerable, impertinent and inhuman.

The Mandelsloh advised him to stop it. ‘Whatever the cause of the trouble was, she has forgotten it.’

‘There was no cause,’ Fritz told her.

‘That makes it more difficult, still, she has forgotten it.’

He set about applying to Prince Friedrich August III, in Dresden, for consideration as a salaried salt mine inspector designate in the Electorate of Saxony.

I
T
was still Fritz’s business to take the minutes and pick up what he could, in silence, at the meetings of the Direction Committee, which were held at the Salt Offices in Weissenfels. Freiherr von Hardenberg presided, assisted by Salt Mine Director Bergrath Heun and Salt Mine Inspector Bergrath Senf. The Bernhard delighted in this name - Salt Mine Inspector Mustard! - and he alone - although everybody knew about it - referred openly to the unfortunate episode when, as a result of falsifying the receipts for official building work and sending unauthorised sums on his own private house, Senf had been sentenced to two years in the common convicts’ jail, subsequently reduced to eight weeks’ normal imprisonment. ‘That was a pity,’ said the Bernhard. ‘We could have chatted to him about it, it would have been interesting to know what it was like to live on bread and water.’ ‘You may make the experiment here at home, at any time you like,’ said Sidonie.

Heun was of a very different character from Senf. Only
a few years older than his two colleagues, he seemed ancient, and referred to himself as ‘old Heun, the living archive of the salt mines’. In his long coat of coarse stuff, in which dust seemed to be incorporated, he suggested one of those elementals of the caves and passages of the inner earth, who emerge only reluctantly, and not with good omen, into daylight. The idea partly arose from his blanched skin and frequent blinking and creaking. ‘The living archive has, perhaps, a touch of the rheumatismus.’ Heun, given time, could answer on every point. He consulted the ledgers only to see that they confirmed the details and figures he had given. ‘They would not dare to do otherwise,’ thought Fritz.

Senf, on the other hand, smouldered with the suppressed energy of a very intelligent man who, as the result of a foolish miscalculation, was never likely to be able to profit from his intelligence again. At certain fixed intervals everyone connected with the mines and the salt works was permitted to submit their suggestions for improvements in writing. In an elaborate scheme, to which he still hoped his name would be one day attached, Senf had proposed that the salt of Thuringia and Saxony should no longer be evaporated in iron pans over wood fires at eighty degrees centigrade, but by the sun’s warmth only. Very many fewer salt workers would be needed and there would be no necessity for them to have houses on the premises. His projects for solar power passed
over, Senf put forward a new proposal for doubling the number of wheels on the pulleys which drew the salt water to the surface. ‘When the Director, Freiherr von Hardenberg, had considered this scheme,’ Fritz wrote in his minutes, ‘his comment was,
Quod potest fieri per pauca, non debet fieri per plura
(Manage with as little as you can).’ Salt Mine Inspector Senf replied with much warmth that this was not the way forward, and that these mean economies led rather to inertia and stagnation. In any case, with the coming of the nineteenth century, a time when, as Kant had foreseen, men would at last have learned to govern themselves, pulleys and tread wheels would in all probability have no place. Salt Mine Director Heun remarked that in that event, they need not waste more time in discussing them. Inspector Senf said that he was obliged to accept the Director’s decision, but could not pretend that he felt satisfied.

‘I have applied myself to everything you asked for,’ Fritz told his father, ‘and I shall do so even more earnestly in the future. You cannot expect me, in a few months, to become like old Heun.’

‘Unfortunately I cannot and do not,’ said the Freiherr. ‘Even if you are granted a long life, I do not think you will ever resemble Wilhelm Heun.’

Formerly when he rode across country Fritz had admired the ancient mountains. Now he looked at the foothills and the coal-bearing ranges with a prospector’s
eye for copper, silver, and lignite. He intended to be a practical engineer and went, as often as he could manage it, down the shafts of the
Bergwerke
, wearing a miner’s grey jacket and trousers.

‘Your son would like to live underground,’ Just told the Freiherr. ‘Only reluctantly he returns to the light of day … I warned him, of course, that he must not shake hands with the miners, as they would consider that it brought bad luck. This disappointed him.’

‘Fritz covered sheet after sheet of paper with schemes for discovering new lignite beds and improving the supervision of tile-kilns and lime-kilns, with meteorological records which might help to bring the refinement of brine to a higher standard, and with notes on the legal aspect of salt manufacture. But he also saw himself as a geognost, a natural scientist, who, as he put it, had come ‘to an entirely new land, and dark stars’. The mining industry, it seemed to him, was not a science, but an art. Could anyone but an artist, a poet, understand the relationship between the rocks and the constellations? The mountain ranges, and the foothills with their burden of precious metals, coal and rock salt, were perhaps no more than traces of the former paths of stars and planets, who once trod this earth.

‘What has been, must be again,’ he wrote. ‘At what point in history will they return to walk among us as they once did?’

Patiently Karoline Just listened to everything he had learned and therefore needed to repeat to another intelligence. She continued to sew while Fritz ploughed through a
Continuation of the Report on the Purchase of Coal-bearing Plots of Land at Mertendorf
. ‘When these data are correlated, one cannot be in any doubt as to the future scheme of acquisition, in the course of which we freely confess that the peasants, by all accounts, will make, in relation to the old prices, fairly high demands …’

‘Of course they will,’ said Karoline, ‘but when did you make this report?’

‘I did not make it, it was made some time ago. I have to train myself by making reports on reports. That, after all, is what your uncle taught me to do.’

‘You have been his best pupil. Indeed, I don’t think that he will ever want another one.’

‘And yet I don’t think that as yet my father takes me seriously.’

‘You don’t take him seriously,’ said Karoline.

‘It is my father who must make the application to the administration to consider me for a salaried post. I might hope in the first instance to receive 400 thaler.’ She had paused to rethread her needle. ‘Justen, how often you must have tried to calculate whether
you
and
he
could keep house on such a sum!’

She realised that his imagination had sped on far ahead of her own, and that the cruel separation between herself
and the Unwanted had now become a question of money. The Unwanted, evidently, had no salaried post. This vexed her. Bitterly though she had regretted the whole pretence from its very first moment, it was nevertheless hers. She had created, even if she hadn’t meant to, the Unwanted, and she resented his being made into a failure (for he must be more than thirty), and unable to support her as a wife. She felt he had been slighted. She had an impulse to disconcert Hardenberg.

Usually that was easy enough. She told him now - quite truthfully - that although she wished him well, from the bottom of her heart, in his search for a post, she must admit to some doubts about the profession itself. Erasmus was to be a forestry official, well and good, if he ever finished at St Hubertusberg. Karl and Anton were to be soldiers and about that she knew nothing and had nothing to say, but mining, the extraction of minerals and salts from the earth - well, she had been more than once to the salt-refineries at Halle and Artern, and she had seen, and smelled, the clouds of dark yellowish smoke from the amalgam works near Freiberg, and she could not help thinking of them as an offence against Nature, which could never create such ugliness. ‘So often, Hardenberg, we have spoken of Nature. Only on Wednesday evening you were saying at table that although human culture and industry may grow, Nature remains the same, and our first duty is to consider what she asks
of us.’ Taking a risk which she had forbidden herself, she went on, ‘You have spoken of Sophie as Nature herself.’

Karoline shut her eyes for a moment as she said this, not being anxious to see the effect. Fritz cried - ‘No, Justen, you have not understood. The mining industry is not a violation of Nature’s secrets, but a release. You must imagine that in the mines you reach the primal sons of Mother Earth, the age-old life, trapped in the ground beneath your feet. I have seen this process as a meeting with the King of Metals, who waits underground, listening in hope for the first sounds of the pick, while the miner struggles through hardships to bring him up to the light of day. Release, Justen! What must the King of Metals feel when he turns his face to the sunlight for the first time?’

She meant to say, ‘I wonder if you have mentioned these ideas to the Direction Committee’ - but she could not bring herself to it. She recognised the voice in which he had read to her the opening chapter of
The Blue Flower
. Meanwhile he had opened his file again, and taken out another page of his delicate crocketed writing, another report on a report, this time a summary, in tabular form, of the boiling-points of cooking-salt and salt fertilisers.

T
WO
days before Sophie’s fourteenth birthday, on the 15th of March 1796, the anniversary of his engagement - still not authorised, and indeed not discussed so far, with his father - Fritz went to the jewellers in Tennstedt to have yet another alteration to his ring. It was to contain a tiny likeness of Sophie, he explained, taken from the miniature which had disappointed everybody - that couldn’t be helped. Her startled, eager expression was there at least, and her mixture of darkness and brightness. On the reverse, he told them to engrave the words -
Sophie sey mein schuz geist
- Sophie be my guardian spirit. In her birthday poem he wrote:
What I looked for, I have found
:

What I found, has looked for me
.

In the June of 1796 Fritz wrote to both his father and his mother.

Dear Father,

Not without great unease do I send this letter which I have dreaded for so long. Long ago I would have sent it, if unfavourable circumstances had not arisen. All my hopes depend on your friendliness and sympathy. There is nothing wrong with what lies in my heart, but it is a subject on which parents and children often do not understand each other. I know that you always want to be a patron and friend to your children, but you are a Father, and often fatherly love contradicts the son’s inclination.

I have chosen a maiden. She has little wealth, and although she is equal to the nobility, she is not of ancient lineage. She is Fraulein von Kuhn. Her parents, of whom the mother is the property owner, lie in Gruningen. I got to know her on an official visit to her stepfather’s house. I enjoy the friendship and confidence of the whole family. But Sophie’s answering choice long remained doubtful.

Long since would I have sought your confidence and consent, but at the beginning of November Sophie became grievously ill, and even now she is only recovering slowly. You can give back my peace. I beg from you consent and authorisation of my choice.

More by word of mouth. It all depends on you, to make this the happiest period of my life. True, my sphere of activity would be reduced by this match,
but I rely for my future on industry, faith and economy, and on Sophie’s intelligence and good management. She has not been grandly brought up - she is content with little - I need only what she needs. God bless this important, so anxious, so difficult-to-pass-through hour. It is good to speak out and say what you mean, but you can make me happy only through your consenting Father’s voice.

Fritz

Dear little Mother,

I will wait for you at nine in the evening on Wednesday two weeks from now, alone in our garden at Weissenfels. I do not need to ask for anything more, for I know your tender heart.

Fritz

It was true that Hofrat Ebhard had not much idea what to do next, but he was quite used to this. It did strike him that at Schloss Gruningen his patient had too much company, too much excitement, too many little dogs and cage birds, too many visits from the wildly-talking Hardenberg. He sent her for a few days to a rest-home in which he had a part interest, at Weissensee. It was unfortunately damper and much less airy than Schloss Gruningen. ‘The house is deserted,’ complained Rockenthien, for George also, just as he was beginning to turn into a decent shot, was to be sent away to school in
Leipzig. There would be only twenty-six people left at home. His worries he shoved to the back of his mind, as one puts a rat-trap on a shelf, when, for the time being at least, it is no longer needed.

‘Well, what does he say, the Freiherr?’ asked the Mandelsloh.

‘I have written to him,’ said Fritz, ‘and to my mother, and I have explained to them -‘

‘- what they certainly know already. You have told me that even when your friend from Jena, Assistant Practitioner Dietmahler, came to stay with you, your father questioned him on the subject. It’s only Sophgen’s name perhaps, that he won’t know until he gets your letter.’

‘There is something I have to ask you,’ said Fritz urgently. ‘Let us speak heart to heart. Suppose my father were to refuse his permission. Suppose that he tries to separate me from my Philosophy, my heart’s blood. Living here in this paradise you scarcely know what unjust authority means.’

‘I know what it is to be separated,’ said the Mandelsloh.

‘My father himself has been married twice. I am twenty-four years old and there is no law that can be invoked against me in the Electorate of Saxony if I marry without his permission, or indeed against my Sophie, as soon as she reaches her fourteenth birthday. Would she
come with me, Friederike, do you think she would defy the world and want no more of it in order to be with me?’

‘On what would you support yourself?’

‘I would earn the little we need as a soldier, a copying-clerk, a journalist, a night-watchman.’

‘These occupations are all forbidden to the nobility.’

‘Under another name -‘

‘- and, I suppose, in another country, if you could get your papers - would you not want to go south?’

‘Ah, Frieke, the south, do you know it?’

‘Far from it,’ said the Mandelsloh, ‘who would ever take me there? I shall have to wait until the Regiment is posted to the land where the lemon-trees flower.’

‘Well, but you have not answered me.’

‘You want her to leave her home, where for as long as she can remember - for God’s sake …’

‘You don’t think, then, that she has the courage?’

‘Courage when you don’t understand what it is that you have to face is no better than ignorance.’

‘Treason, Frieke! Courage is more than endurance, it is the power to create your own life in the face of all that man or God can inflict, so that every day and every night is what you imagine it. Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.’

‘But it would not make Sophgen into a competent house-keeper,’ said the Mandelsloh. Fritz ignored this and
repeated wildly, ‘Would she come with me? Could she bear the parting? - my love would make that easy - would she come?’

‘God forgive me, I’m afraid she might.’

‘Why are you afraid?’

‘I forbid you to ask her.’

‘You forbid me -‘

‘- if I don’t, another will.’

‘But who could that be?’

‘Is it possible that you don’t know?’