The Blue Flower (7 page)

H
ERR
Rockenthien never had quite the air of one to whom the big house at Gruningen - or indeed any house - belonged. At forty, he was large and loose, with impulses as benevolent and ill-directed as a badger-hound’s as he trundled through Schloss Gruningen’s long corridors.

In point of fact the place had been built fifty years earlier by the father of his wife’s first husband, Johann von Kuhn. Rockenthien, therefore, had only come into it in 1787, when he married. But he was not the kind of man whose behaviour would be affected by coming into property, or indeed by losing it, and he was not intimidated by finding himself responsible for a large number of other lives.

The district tax office had been established in a relatively small front room to the left of the main entrance. There Rockenthien, in principle, as inheritor of the
Rittergut
, presided, but, though far from a weak man, he was too restless to preside for long over anything.
Coelestin Just, with a clerk, rapidly got through the business.

Fritz told Just: ‘Something happened to me.’

Just replied that whatever it was, it must happen later, since his job, indeed his duty, was to come to the front office, where in former days the tenants of Schloss Gruningen had brought in their corn, their firewood and their geese, and now wrestled over their payments in compensation for the field work they no longer did for the Elector of Saxony.

‘We have arrived in good time, Hardenberg, but should start at once. It will take us certainly all this morning, then we may expect a good dinner, have no fear of that, then the
Nachtisch
, when we may all talk and express ourselves freely, and the after-dinner sleep, and we may expect to be at work again from four until six.’

‘Something has happened to me,’ Fritz repeated.

Fritz wrote immediately to Erasmus at the School of Forestry at Hubertusberg, sending the letter by mail coach. Erasmus replied: ‘I was at first amazed when I received your letter, but since they have done away with Robespierre in Paris I have become so used to extraordinary happenings that I soon recovered.

‘You tell me, that a quarter of an hour decided you. How can you understand a Maiden in a quarter of an hour? If you had said, a quarter of a year, I should have
admired your insight into the heart of a woman, but a quarter of an hour, just think of it!

‘You are young and fiery, the Maiden is only fourteen and also fiery. You are both sensual human beings and now a tender hour comes and you kiss one another for all you’re worth, and when that’s over you think, well, this was a Maiden, like other Maidens! But let’s suppose you get over all the obstacles, you get married. Then you can indulge as you never could before. But satisfaction makes for weariness, and you end up with what you’ve always so much dreaded, boredom.’

Fritz was obliged to admit to his brother, from whom he had never had any concealments, that Sophie was not fourteen, but only twelve, and that he hadn’t had a tender hour, only the quarter of an hour he had mentioned, surrounded by other people, standing at the great windows of the
Saal
at Schloss Gruningen.

‘I am Fritz von Hardenberg,’ he had said to her. ‘You are Fraulein Sophie von Kuhn. You are twelve years of age, I heard your gracious mother say so.’

Sophie put her hands to her hair. ‘Up, it should be up.’

‘In four years time you will have to consider what man would be fortunate enough to hope to be your husband. Don’t tell me that he would have to ask your stepfather! What do you say yourself?’

‘In four years time I don’t know what I shall be.’

‘You mean, you don’t know what you will become.’

‘I don’t want to become.’

‘Perhaps you are right.’

‘I want to be, and not to have to think about it.’

‘But you must not remain a child.’

‘I am not a child now.’

‘Sophie, I am a poet, but in four years I shall be an administrative official, receiving a salary. That is the time when we shall be married.’

‘I don’t know you!’

‘You have seen me. I am what you see.’

Sophie laughed.

‘Do you always laugh at your guests?’

‘No, but at Gruningen we don’t talk like this.’

‘But would you be content to live with me?’

Sophie hesitated, and then said:

‘Truly, I like you.’

Erasmus was not reassured. ‘Who can guarantee’, he wrote, ‘that if she is unspoiled now, she will stay unspoiled when she comes out into the world? A commonplace, you will tell me, but commonplaces aren’t always wrong. And how can you tell, since you say that she is so beautiful and is sure to be courted by many others, that she won’t be untrue to you? Girls act on instinct at thirteen (he still could not quite believe she was any younger), although at twenty-three they are
cleverer than we are. Remember what you have said to me so often on this subject - yes, even two months ago, in Weissenfels. Have you forgotten so soon?’

Erasmus went on to say that what had hurt him above all in Fritz’s letter was his ‘coldly determined manner’. But if he was determined to go ahead, then he could rely on Erasmus for help - his love for his brother was unchanging, its only limit was death. The Father was sure to prove difficult, ‘but then we have discussed so often the place of a father in the scheme of things.’

‘By the way,’ he added, ‘what has happened to your friendship with Karoline Just? Fare well! Your true friend and brother, Erasmus.’

F
RITZ
asked whether he might spend Christmas at Tennstedt. ‘That I am quite sure you can, if your own family will not be disappointed,’ said Karoline. ‘My uncle and aunt will make you heartily welcome, and we shall of course be killing the pig.’

‘Justen, something has happened to me.’

He was ill, she had always feared it. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’

‘Justen, people might say that we haven’t known each other for long, but your friendship - I cannot tell you - even when I am away I have such a clear remembrance of you that I feel as though you are still near me - we are like two watches set to the same time, and when we see one another again there has been no interval - we still strike together.’

She thought: But I could think of nothing to say after he read me the beginning of his Blue Flower. Thank God, he doesn’t remember that.

‘I have fallen in love, Justen.’

‘Not at Gruningen!’

She felt as though her body had been hollowed out. Fritz was perplexed. ‘Surely you know the family quite well. Herr von Rockenthien welcomed your uncle as his oldest friend.’

‘Surely I do know them. But none of the older girls are at home just now, only Sophgen.’ She had made this calculation already, when she had heard that her uncle was taking him to Gruningen.

Fritz looked at her steadily.

‘Sophie is my heart’s heart.’

‘But Hardenberg, she can’t be much more than …’ she struggled for moderation. ‘And she
laughs
.’

He said, ‘Justen, so far you have understood everything, you have listened to everything. But it would be wrong of me to ask too much of you. I see that there is one thing, the most important of all, unfortunately, that you don’t grasp, the nature of desire between a man and a woman.’

Karoline could not tell, either then or afterwards, why it was impossible for her to let this pass. Perhaps it was vanity - which was sinful - perhaps the cold fear of losing his confidence for ever.

‘Not everyone can speak about what they suffer,’ she said. ‘Some are separated from the only one they love, but are obliged to remain silent.’

That was not a lie. She had not mentioned herself.
But Fritz’s generous sympathy and instant rush of fellow-feeling was very painful to her. What strong force had spoken with her voice and told him something which, after all,
was
a lie and intended as a lie? As the dear Fritz talked on, gently but eagerly, about the obstacles to happiness (he would of course ask her nothing more, what she had told him was sacred) - the obstacles which drew them even more closely together - she saw that between them they had created out of nothing a new and most unwelcome entity. So that now there were four of them, the poet, the much-desired Sophie screaming with laughter, herself, the sober niece-housekeeper, and now her absent, secret, frustrated lover, doubtless a respectable minor official of more than thirty, probably - as Karoline increasingly clearly saw him - in sober clothes of hard-wearing material, almost certainly a married man, or he might, perhaps, be a pastor. He was so real at that moment that she could have put out a hand and touched him. And he had been born entirely from the wound that Hardenberg had dealt her, when he told her that she did not understand the nature of desire.

‘Words are given us to understand each other, even if not completely,’ Fritz went on in great excitement.

‘And to write poetry.’

‘Yes that’s so, Justen, but you mustn’t ask too much of language. Language refers only to itself, it is not the key
to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else.’

‘In that case it might as well be nonsense,’ objected Karoline.

‘Why not? Nonsense is only another language.’

B
UT
Fritz, after all, was obliged to spend Christmas at Weissenfels. Sidonie wrote to him that not only would the Bernhard be much disappointed if he did not come, but that he must see his new brother. In the warmth of the great curtained patriarchal goose-featherbed at Weissenfels Nature’s provisions continued, so that last year Amelie had been conceived and born, and this year, Christoph. The Bernhard had received the news without enthusiasm. ‘There are now two more younger than myself, it will be hard for me to attract sufficient attention.’

‘But you love little Christoph,’ said Sidonie patiently. ‘You are only a child yourself, Bernhard, you are still in your days of grace.’

‘On the whole, I hate little Christoph. When does Fritz come? Will he be here for Christmas Eve?’

At Tennstedt, Karoline and Rahel together saw to the cabbages buried in sand in the cellar, and the potatoes buried in earth in the yard. The surplus provisions were
arranged in a deep cupboard just inside the kitchen for distribution to the poor, together with double rations of schnaps which harboured in every coarse, consoling mouthful the memory of the heat of summer.

About Hardenberg they only remarked to each other that it was a pity, after all, that he could not spend Christmas with them.

On his way to Weissenfels, Fritz was somewhat delayed. He had arranged to call in for a few hours at Schloss Gruningen. But that evening, all over the administrative district of Thuringia and Saxony, it began to snow. The north-east wind outlined every twig, every cart-shaft, every cabbage-stump, with a rim of crystalline white. Then that disappeared and there was nothing but a white blindness that seemed at the same time to be rising from the ground and falling from the heavy sky.

While Karoline was helping to clear a path to the outside pump, a letter arrived from Hardenberg, from Gruningen. ‘So he has got no further!’ In it he told her, perhaps not very tactfully, that being marooned, he was sleeping and eating ‘in the most hospitable house in the world’. The snow was so deep, he alleged, that he couldn’t go out without danger, and to take pointless risks was unworthy of a responsible man. ‘I shall, I will, I must, I ought, I can stay here, who can do anything against Fate? I have decided that I am a Determinist. Fate might not be so kind another time.’

‘In that great house there must be someone who can clear the carriageway,’ Karoline told herself. ‘But he has always talked a great deal of nonsense. When he first came here, he said my hands were beautiful, also the tablecloth and the tea-tray.’

He had enclosed some verses, which ended,

Allow me a glimpse of the future, when our hearts

Are no longer full of anxiety and resignation, and Love

and Fortune

Reward us at last for our sacrifices, and far behind us

Roars youth’s wild ocean
.

Some day, in the noon-tide of life, we shall both sit at

table
,

Each of us will be married, with the one we love

beside us
,

Then we shall look back to how it was in the

morning
.

Who would have dreamed of this? Never does the

heart sigh in vain
!

Karoline knew that ‘Never does the heart sigh in vain!’ was the sort of thing that they printed on sweet papers. But the last verse caused her anguish. There he was, her non-existent admirer, the unloved
Verliebte
, conjured out of her own unhappiness, sitting at table with her, indeed, all four of them were there. But the poem, at least, was for her and her alone. The title was ‘Reply to Karoline’.
She put it in the drawer where she kept such things, and turned the key. Then she clasped her arms round her body as if to ward off the cold.