Elective Affinities (26 page)

Charlotte responded to this proposition with prudent affability. She said both she and Ottilie had long desired a return to the boarding-school, only at the present time she found so dear a friend and helper indispensable to her; later on, however, she would raise no objection if it was still Ottilie’s desire to go back for as long as was needed to complete what she had begun and follow through to the end what had been interrupted.

The schoolmaster joyfully accepted this offer; Ottilie could say nothing against it, although she shuddered at the mere thought. Charlotte, on the other hand, was thinking to gain time; she hoped that Eduard would meanwhile have returned as a happy father and then, she was convinced, all would be well and Ottilie too would somehow be taken care of.

After a weighty conversation which has given all the participants something to think over, there usually supervenes a pause or standstill which looks very much like general embarrassment. They wandered up and down the room, the schoolmaster browsed among the books, and eventually came upon the folio which had been left lying about since Luciane’s visit. When he saw it contained nothing but monkeys he at once slammed it again. This incident may
nonetheless have given rise to a conversation, the traces of which we find in Ottilie’s journal.

From Ottilie’s Journal

How can anyone bring himself to expend such care on depicting horrid monkeys! It is debasing simply to regard them as animals, but it is really more malicious to succumb to the temptation of seeking in them the likeness of people you know.

It positively requires a certain perverseness to want to devote one’s time to caricatures and grotesques. I have our good schoolmaster to thank that I have never been plagued with natural history; I could never take kindly to worms and beetles.

He has now admitted that he feels the same way. ‘We should know nothing of nature,’ he said, ‘except that of it with which we are in immediate living contact. With every tree around us which blossoms, bears leaves and brings forth fruit, with every shrub we pass by, with every blade of grass upon which we tread, we have a true relationship, they are our genuine compatriots. The birds which hop upon our branches and sing amid our foliage belong to us, they speak to us from our youth up and we learn to understand their language. Consider whether every strange creature torn from its natural surroundings does not produce in us an uneasy feeling, dulled only by familiarity. A variegated noisy life is needed to make monkeys, parrots and Moors endurable around you.’

Sometimes when I have been seized by curiosity to see such exotic things I have envied the traveller who can behold these wonders in an everyday living relationship with other wonders. But then he too suffers a change. You cannot walk among palm-trees with impunity, and your sentiments must surely alter in a land where elephants and tigers are at home.

Only that naturalist is worthy of respect who is capable of describing and depicting the strange and exotic together with its own locality, with all its environs, in its own proper element. How I should like to hear Humboldt
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on this subject.

A museum of natural history can seem like an Egyptian tomb where various animal and vegetable idols stand around embalmed. It may be very well for a priestly caste to tend such things in a mysterious twilight, but they ought not to be introduced into general education, the less so in that they can easily push aside more immediate and worthier things.

The teacher who can rouse our feelings by a single good deed, a single good work of art, achieves more than one who passes on to us in form and name whole rows of inferior natural creatures, for the only result of that is what we know anyway, namely that the human form bears uniquely the image of the divine.

The individual is free to occupy himself with whatever attracts him, with whatever gives him pleasure, with whatever seems to him useful: but the proper study of mankind is man.

CHAPTER EIGHT

F
EW
are capable of concerning themselves with the immediate past. Either the present holds us forcibly or we lose ourselves in the distant past and try to call back and restore the totally vanished, whatever it may have been. Even in great and wealthy families which owe a great deal to their ancestors it is usual to think more of the grandfather than the father.

Such were the reflections which thrust themselves upon our young schoolmaster as, on one of those beautiful days when departing winter deceives us that spring has already come, he had been walking through the ancient great walled garden and admiring the avenues of tall lime-trees and the formal plots which were the work of Eduard’s father. They had flourished wonderfully in the fashion desired by him who had planted them and, now they were ready to be appreciated and enjoyed, no one mentioned them any longer; they were hardly ever visited and all the enthusiasm and expenditure was directed another way, out into the unenclosed open country.

He remarked as much to Charlotte on his return, and she was inclined to agree with him. ‘As life draws us along,’ she replied, ‘we think we are acting of our own volition, ourselves choosing what we shall do and what we shall enjoy; but when we look more closely we see they are only the intentions and inclinations of the age which we are being compelled to comply with.’

‘To be sure,’ said the schoolmaster; ‘and who can withstand the current of his environment? Time moves on, and sentiments, opinions, prejudices and fancies move on with it. If a son’s youth happens to coincide with an age of transition, you may be sure he will have nothing in common with his father.
If the father lived in a period in which there was a desire to acquire property and to secure, limit and enclose it and to fortify one’s pleasure in it through seclusion from the world, then the son will try to expand, open out, spread abroad and unlock the gates.’

‘Whole ages are like this father and son you have described,’ said Charlotte. ‘We can scarcely imagine the days in which every little town had to have its walls and moats, every manor-house was built in the middle of a marsh, and the meanest castle was accessible only by a drawbridge. Even the bigger cities are now taking down their walls, the moats even of the castles of princes are being filled in, the towns are now only market-towns without defences, and when you travel around and see all this you might think universal peace had been established and the Golden Age to be at hand. If we are to enjoy our gardens they have to look like open country; there should be no evidence of art or constraint, we want to breathe the air in absolute freedom. Do you think, my friend, that we could go back from this state of things to another, earlier state?’

‘Why not?’ the schoolmaster replied. ‘Every state of things has its difficulties, the restricted as much as the free. The latter presupposes superfluity and leads to prodigality and waste. Let us stick to your example, which is a sufficiently striking one. As soon as shortages occur, self-restriction at once returns. Men who are compelled to make use of their land again erect walls around their gardens to secure to themselves its produce. Out of this there gradually arises a new outlook on things. Utility again gets the upper hand, and even he who possesses much finally comes to feel obliged to put everything he owns to use. Believe me, it is quite possible that your son will turn his back on all your parklands and retire again behind the grave walls and among the tall lime-trees of his grandfather.’

Charlotte was delighted to hear a son foretold her and
for the sake of that she pardoned the schoolmaster his somewhat unamiable prophecy of what might one day happen to her beloved park. She therefore replied: ‘Neither of us is old enough to have experienced such a conflict more than once; but if we think back to our early youth and remember what older people were then complaining about, and remember too the history of cities and nations, then what you say can hardly be gainsaid. But ought we not to do something to halt this natural process? Ought we not to be able to bring about some accord between father and son, parents and children? You have been kind enough to prophesy a son for me: does he have to stand opposed to his father, destroy what his parents have built up, instead of completing and enhancing it by continuing with it in their spirit?’

‘There is indeed a rational remedy for this,’ the schoolmaster replied, ‘although it is seldom applied. The father must raise his son to the status of partner, he must let him work and plant as an equal, and he must allow him the same freedom in harmless caprice as he allows himself. The activities of the one can be interwoven with those of the other instead of being patched on to them. A young shoot is easily grafted on to an old stem, a grown branch cannot be grafted at all.’

The schoolmaster was glad to have chanced to say something that pleased Charlotte and thus fortified her goodwill towards him at the moment when he saw he would have to be saying farewell. He had already been too long away from the school, but he could not bring himself to return there until he had become thoroughly convinced that Charlotte’s approaching confinement would first have to come and go before he could hope for any decision about Ottilie. He then accommodated himself to this state of things, and with these hopes and prospects in view took himself back to his headmistress.

Charlotte’s confinement drew near. She kept more to her own rooms, and her own private circle of women which had
collected about her kept her company. Ottilie looked after the household and scarcely dared think what she was doing. It is true she had resigned herself utterly; she desired to go on being as useful as she could to Charlotte, to the child, to Eduard; only she could not see how that was going to be possible. Only by doing her duty every day could she save herself from utter confusion.

A son was successfully brought into the world and the women all affirmed he was the image of his father. Ottilie alone could secretly see no resemblance when she went to congratulate the mother and to welcome the child with all her heart. Charlotte had already sorely missed the presence of her husband during the arrangements for her daughter’s wedding; now the father was not to be present at the birth of his son either, he was not to decide on the name by which the boy would be known.

The first of all their friends to put in an appearance to offer congratulations was Mittler, who had made special arrangements to be informed of the event as soon as it had happened. He entered upon the scene looking extremely pleased and complaisant. Far from concealing his triumph that Ottilie was still there, he proclaimed it to Charlotte, and assured her she need have no further worries about immediate problems and necessities, since he was the man to take care of them all. The baptism, he said, ought not to be long delayed. The ancient parson, who already had one foot in the grave, would with his blessing cement together past and future; the child ought to be called Otto: he could bear no other name than the name of his father and his father’s friend.

It required the determined importunity of this gentleman to set aside the hundred-and-one misgivings, objections, hesitations, falterings, knowings-better and knowings-otherwise, vacillatings, opinionizings and changings and re-changings of opinion that eventuated; since, on such occasions as this, when one misgiving arises, new misgivings keep arising out
of it, and by trying to satisfy everybody and settle everything you always annoy somebody and unsettle something.

Mittler took upon himself all the birth announcements and invitations to stand godparent; they were to be prepared immediately, for he was highly concerned to acquaint the rest of the world – including that part of it given to malicious gossip – with a happy occurrence he considered so significant for the family. And indeed the passionate events which had taken place had not eluded the notice of the public, which in any case lives in the conviction that everything that happens happens only so that it shall have something to talk about.

The baptismal solemnities were to be, although worthy of the occasion, brief and unostentatious. They assembled and Ottilie and Mittler were, as witnesses, to hold the child. The ancient clergyman, sustained by the sexton, advanced with slow tread. The prayers were spoken, the child was laid in Ottilie’s arms, and when she looked affectionately down at him she was not a little startled to see in his open eyes the very image of her own. Such a resemblance must have struck and surprised anyone who looked at them. Mittler, who next received the child, was likewise taken aback, but what he saw was an incredible similarity between its features and those of the Captain; he could not remember ever having seen anything of the kind before in the whole course of his experience.

The infirmity of the good old parson had prevented him from accompanying the baptism with anything more than the bare liturgy. But while this was going forward, Mittler, full of the occasion, had called to mind his own former sacerdotal functions, and he was in any event inclined on any occasion to start composing speeches in his head and to imagine himself delivering them. In the present circumstances he found it the harder to contain himself in that he was surrounded by a small congregation composed exclusively
of friends. Consequently, towards the conclusion of the proceedings he commenced complaisantly to substitute himself for the officiating clergyman and to expatiate in a hearty address on his duties as godfather and on the hopes he entertained for the child, upon which hopes and duties he dwelt all the longer in that he thought he saw in Charlotte’s contented expression a sign of her approval.

That the good old man would have very much liked to sit down escaped the tireless speaker, but what escaped him even more completely was that he was about to produce an even worse evil: for after he had impressively described the relationship of everyone present to the child, and had thereby put Ottilie’s self-control through something of a test, he finally turned to the ancient parson with the words: ‘And you, reverend elder, can now say with Simeon: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation of this house.’