The Blue Flower (20 page)

A
T
Weissenfels they talked about the Neutrality Conference which had very nearly been held in the town but in the end, to the dismay of the tradespeople, hadn’t been, about the Prussian disasters, about the death of the old whore of Babylon in St Petersburg, and about Hardenberg’s Intended. But Fritz himself no longer saw his old friends, not the Brachmanns, not even Frederick Severin. ‘You cannot expect him to be good company,’ Sidonie told them. ‘As soon as he has finished his office work for the day he goes up to his room. You can knock, and knock, but he doesn’t answer. He has withdrawn to the kingdom of the mind.’ Severin replied that the mind had many kingdoms. ‘Fritz is studying algebra,’ said Sidonie.

‘Algebra, like laudanum, deadens pain,’ Fritz wrote. ‘But the study of algebra has confirmed for me that philosophy and mathematics, like mathematics and music, speak the same language. That, of course, is not enough. I shall see my way in time. Patience, the key will turn.

‘We think we know the laws that govern our existence. We get glimpses, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime, of a totally different system at work behind them. One day when I was reading between Rippach and Lutzen, I felt the certainty of immortality, like the touch of a hand. - When I first went to the Justs’ house in Tennstedt, the house seemed radiant to me, even the green tablecloth, yes, even the bowl of sugar. - When I first met Sophie, a quarter of an hour decided me. - Rahel reproved me, Erasmus reproached me, but they were wrong, both of them wrong. - In the churchyard at Weissenfels I saw a boy, not quite grown into a man, standing with his head bowed in meditation on a green space not yet dug up, a consoling sight in the half darkness. These were the truly important moments of my life, even though it ends tomorrow.

‘As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say, this is animate, but that is inanimate. I am a Salt Inspector, that is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.

‘I love Sophie more because she is ill. Illness, helplessness, is in itself a claim on love. We could not feel love for God Himself if he did not need our help. - But those who are well, and have to stand by and do nothing, also need help, perhaps even more than the sick.’

S
OPHIE’S
bedroom was crowded: the air was thick as wine. Noisy, too, with the little ones competing on their highest pitch, George’s voice imitating someone - it was the voice he used for imitations - the shrieking and rattling of the cage-birds, witless barking.

‘I cannot conduct a class among such disorder,’ exclaimed the Magister, as a servant showed him in. ‘Kindly remove the five dogs, at least, from the room. Where is Frau Leutnant Mandelsloh?’

‘My stepfather begged her to come down and put things straight in his office,’ said George.

‘Ah, George. I have not seen you for some time.’

Sophie was lying among shawls on a little day-bed.

‘Ach, dear Magister, George was giving - he was giving a little -‘

‘He was giving an impersonation of myself. That I could make out quite well as I approached.’

George, who had been left in charge, a grown boy on Christmas leave from his
Internat
, turned crimson. The cage-birds sank into resentful twittering.

‘Fraulein, I offer you my condolences on all you have gone through, and must still go through,’ said the old man, and then, turning to the little ones, ‘Don’t you give a thought to your step-sister? Can’t you see that she looks very different now from formerly?’

‘We thought so at first,’ said Mimi, ‘but now we can’t remember what she looked like before.’

They are fortunate, thought Kegel.

‘Let them stay, they must stay,’ Sophie cried. ‘Ach, you don’t know how dull we were, except just at first, in Jena. And now that I am back home -‘

‘You do not expect Hardenberg?’

‘We can’t tell about his coming and going,’ said George. He is one of the family, he does not need to give us notice.’

The Magister signed to the nursemaid to take Mimi and Rudolf away. He himself put one of the shawls over the birds, still flustered and faintly muttering in their cages. Then he sat down in the chair at the foot of the day-bed, and took out a book.

‘Ach, Magister, my old
Fibel
!’ shrieked Sophie.

‘No, this is for more advanced pupils,’ he said. ‘These are passages which tell us what the ancient Romans, or some of them, wrote on the subject of friendship.’

‘It is so good of you to come …’ Sophie managed to say. ‘I want you to pardon me … I couldn’t bear to hurt you … I am not laughing now, or not nearly so much.’

‘My feelings do not matter in the slightest degree. If they did, I should not have become a teacher.’

The Mandelsloh was at the door. ‘Did you not know that on no account must Sophie laugh or cry until the wound is healed completely?’

‘I swear I did not know that,’ cried George in great distress.

‘I am sure you did not,’ said the Magister.

‘I am so foolish,’ said Sophie suddenly. ‘I am not of much use in this world.’

Rockenthien had blundered in after the Mandelsloh. ‘I have come to hear the lesson,’ he called over her shoulder, adapting his voice, as he thought, to the sick room. ‘I hope to benefit from it.’

‘All who listen will benefit,’ said Kegel. ‘But half an hour will be sufficient for Fraulein Sophie.’

‘That is what I have told them,’ said Rockenthien.

‘Of whom are you speaking?’

Of all of them, it seemed - everyone he had been able to gather together on the way up from his office - Mimi and Rudi once again, with their nursemaid, a young footman, two orphan girls who had been given work, for charity’s sake, in the linen room and whose names nobody knew, the goats’-milk boy, who in ordinary circumstances never came into the house. Some hung back, but the Hausherr generously urged them on, telling them not to lose an opportunity which might come but once. ‘I myself am not quite sure what Cicero said about friendship.’
Sophie held out her arms to them all. In the racket her laughter and coughing could scarcely be heard. The little dogs, each desperate to be first, bounded back, with flattened ears, onto the bed to lick her face.

The Magister Kegel closed his book. ‘After all, these people were born for joy,’ he thought.

At the beginning of March 1797 Fritz had ten days official leave, which he spent at Gruningen. He asked Sophie: ‘My dearest Philosophy, do you sleep well?’

‘Oh, yes. They give me something.’

‘The night is a dark power,’ he said.

‘Oh, I am not afraid of the night.’

On the evening of the 10th of March he said to the Mandelsloh, ‘Should I stay here?’

‘You must judge of that for yourself.’

‘May I see her?’

‘No, not now.’

‘But later?’

The Mandelsloh, who appeared to have come to some sort of decision, said, ‘At the moment, there is no healing. We were told yesterday to keep the wound open.’

‘How?’

‘With silk thread.’

‘And for how long?’

‘I don’t know for how long.’

He asked once again:

‘Should I stay here?’ This time he got no answer and he cried out, ‘Dear God, why does there have to be a bully like you, a lance-corporal masquerading as a woman, between me and my Sophgen?’

‘You would not look at the wound,’ said the Mandelsloh, ‘but I don’t hold that against you.’

‘I don’t want to hear about the things you don’t hold against me. Am I to go or to stay?’

‘We have talked about courage before,’ the Mandelsloh reminded him.

‘We agreed that it couldn’t be measured absolutely,’ Fritz said. ‘The Bernhard was courageous when he ran away from us down to the river. The mother, in her way, was courageous when she met me in the garden -‘

‘What garden?’

‘- Karl was under fire with his regiment at Mainz. And you, too, you were present at the three operations. And my Sophgen -‘

‘This is not a competition,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘Anyway, it is of no use looking back. What can you do for her? That is all you have to ask yourself in this house.’

‘If they would allow me to nurse her, although you may not believe me, I could do that,’ said Fritz. ‘Yes, about that I do know a little.’

‘If you stayed here, you would not be wanted as a nurse,’ the Mandelsloh replied. ‘You would be wanted as a liar.’

Fritz raised his heavy head.

‘What then should I say?’

‘God help us, from day to day you would have to say to her - “You look a little better this morning, Sophgen. Yes, I think a little better. Soon you will be able to go out into the garden. Nothing is needed but some warmer weather.”’

She spoke the words as players do at a first rehearsal, without emotion. Fritz looked at her with horror.

‘And if I could not say that, would you think of me as a coward?’

‘My idea of cowardice is very simple,’ said the Mandelsloh.

After a moment Fritz cried out, ‘I could not lie to her, any more than I could lie to myself.’

‘I don’t know to what extent a poet lies to himself.’

‘She is my spirit’s guide. She knows that.’

The Mandelsloh did not answer.

‘Shall I stay?’

Still she said nothing, and Fritz went abruptly out of the room. Where will he go? the Mandelsloh wondered. That is so much simpler for a man. If a woman has something that is not easy to decide, where can she go to be alone?

Sophie was disappointed when she heard that Hardenberg had gone back to Weissenfels, but not excessively. Quite
often before he had had to leave at a time when she was not well enough to see him. If she was awake, she could listen for the sound of his horse being brought round from the stable-yard to the front of the house, although he no longer rode the Gaul, whose dragging steps she had always been able to recognise. Sometimes he would be on the point of leaving and then dismount and run back again across the hall, up the two staircases which were nothing to him, into her room to say to her once again, ‘Sophie, you are my heart’s heart.’

This evening that was not the case, and he did not come back.

Three hours and three quarters to Weissenfels, with a stop at Freyburg. Outside Weissenfels the vegetable plots lay bare, except for the stalks of the winter cabbage, in the moonlight. The town gates were shut. Fritz paid the fine which was collected from latecomers, and rode slowly down to his father’s house.

It was the first week in Lent, and only a few lights shone in the windows of the Kloster Gasse. At the house, his father and mother were already in bed. Erasmus was the only one of the family still up.

‘I could not stay -‘ Fritz told him.

‘Best of brothers -‘