The Blue Flower (16 page)

P
ERHAPS
there would never be another evening quite like this in Weissenfels. The guests were waiting, although they were not accustomed to it: even in this great airy room, most of their faces had turned a comfortable fruit-red, but they were unable to settle down to their familiar inspection of each other’s costume, followed by discussion, slight advance, slight retreat, circulation, repetition, deep and thick gossip, then indulgence in pickled goose legs, black ham, fruit liqueurs, sweet cakes, more spirits, an amiable progress home, an uncertain climb up to bed. Tonight they could not quite count on anything. Uncertainty and expectancy moved among the guests like the first warning of fever, touching even the most stolid.

Still no Rockenthiens, still no Affianced. In the kitchen, the cook induced the protesting stable-boy, who felt that he was held in some way to blame, to kneel down and pray for his employers’ safe arrival.

‘They will come,’ he blubbered, ‘but Fraulein Sophie cannot be hurried, she has been ill.’

The Freiherr was unperturbed, for it had never crossed his mind, since the day when he had agreed to the engagement, to alter any of the arrangements he had made. In fifteen minutes they would all go upstairs to hear the piano, then supper, at which he would not take his place at the head of one of the tables, but would move about, pausing now at one chair, now at another, while Fritz and his Intended sat side by side, then music, and if Sophie’s health permitted it, dancing. There were six-and-a-half minutes to go until they adjourned to the music room; he allowed himself a short visit to his old friend Schweinitz und Krain, who was still half-slumbering where Gottfried had left him.

‘Hardenberg, what is this I am drinking? Is this what they call punch?’

‘Yes, I am told Fritz mixed it up himself.’

‘It has to be mixed up?’

‘Yes, it seems so.’

‘Time wasted, Hardenberg.’

‘I will get them to bring you something else.’

‘Hardenberg, who are these Rockenthiens?’

The Freiherr shook his head.

‘Alas! my old friend!’ said the Count.

They had all been swept up the great central staircase, all were seated on faded and tattered chairs brought from all over the house. Most of the candles had been extinguished. Anton, still only fourteen, with raw wrists
protruding from his first cadet’s uniform, sat down at the Zumpe, where the brightest light fell.

‘I will begin with something by Johann Friedrich Reichardt,’ he announced boldly. ‘I will play one of his revolutionary songs.’

‘What is that, boy?’ called out the Freiherr.

‘Anton, you will start with some religious music,’ cried the mother, with the authority of anguish. ‘You will play “Wie sie so sanft ruhn”.’

Anton turned towards her and nodded. Then the piano lifted its voice, so peaceable, so clear.

The gentle air continued, cut off from any noise in the Kloster Gasse. But then the doors of the music room were thrown open, and light poured in from the broad passage-way outside. Gottfried, although clearly in doubt as to the interruption, introduced Frau von Rockenthien, beautiful but sleepy-looking in a pale violet dress, the Hausherr, a chastened George. But where is She?

‘They gave me orders to go ahead,’ bellowed Rockenthien. ‘My stepdaughter is resting for the moment at the bottom of your stairs.’ He advanced on his hosts, huge, weather-beaten, clapping his hands.

‘He might be scaring rooks,’ muttered Louise Brachmann. ‘Heaven help us, they’re like a troop of farmhands come up for the hiring fair.’

The Freiherr received the party with faultless courtesy, making a sign to Gottfried, who set about relighting the
candles. Anton, at the end of the next phrase, stopped short, and folded his hands. Where was the Affianced? The elder guests murmured in pity and rank curiosity. She would be carried in, she was debilitated.

But Sophie, quietly followed by the Mandelsloh, came almost running across the room with her old impatience, pale, yes that’s true, but eager and high-pitched as ever, transparently ready to enjoy herself. She was dressed in embroidered silk - Chinese silk, they thought - where would that have come from? Her hair was hidden under a white cap, quite appropriate for an Affianced. She wore a single white rose.

‘Hardenburch!’

He was there.

‘They said I must not come -‘

Everyone had thought that this would be the end of young Anton’s recital, but the Mandelsloh, who had decided on her tactics as soon as she entered the house, singled out the Freifrau and persuaded her that they must all of them hear it to the very end. The front rows of chairs emptied and shifted to make place for the newcomers. Anton nodded, and continued with a setting of some of Zinzendorf’s hymns for the Brethren, passing on to the airs from two or three
Singspiele
and the, what was the piece that he played after that? - that very beautiful piece, I did not know it, could Anton have improvised it himself?

No-one admitted to knowing it, but all half-closed their eyes in pleasure.

He ended with Johann Sebastian Bach’s
Capriccio on the Departure of His Brother
. Deeply the audience sighed.

Some of them at least, too, had expected at the supper to see an exchange of rings, after which the father of the future bridegroom, as host, might declare what he intended to give in the way of furniture, feather beds &c. &c., with, perhaps, a list of property. But the Hardenbergs did not do things in that way. The Freiherr only rose to his feet to halt the determined eating and drinking for a few moments, to announce his own happiness and that of his wife’s, to welcome them all, and to ask them to join him in a short prayer.

It had also been thought that after the supper, on account of Fraulein Sophie’s recent illness, there would be no dancing. But Sophie begged for the musicians.

The Mandelsloh reminded her that Dr Ebhard, perhaps relieved to have something definite to say, had forbidden dancing absolutely.

‘I wish I had him here,’ cried Sophie. ‘I’d make him waltz till his brains boiled.’

She sat between her own mother and Hardenberg’s mother, the Freifrau. Frau Rockenthien, as almost always, smiled. She wished Anton was still playing, particularly that piece, rather towards the end, whose name she had been sure she once knew, and she wished she had the
baby with her. She was not embarrassed by her husband’s loud voice - her first husband had also been very noisy, and neither of them had had any more effect on her than windy weather.

The Freifrau, meanwhile, struggled alone with the demon of timidity. The single glass of arrack which she had taken had not helped her at all. In her heart - although she was afraid this might be a sin of thought - she was terribly disappointed in her future daughter-in-law’s appearance. Sophie had a certain touching, bright eagerness but it was a child’s brightness. Perhaps because she had never been much to look at herself, Auguste attached great importance to dignity, to height, and to regal beauty. Perhaps Sophie might look better if she let her hair down. Fritz had told her that it was dark.

Since his Intended must not dance, Fritz brought forward the dignitaries of Weissenfels, one by one, to introduce them to her, and among them the younger ones, his own friends. ‘I have the happiness to present you to Fraulein von Kuhn, who has done me the honour … This is Sophie, this is my true Philosophy … This is Sophie, this is my spirit’s guide in all things …’

‘O, you must not mind him,’ she replied to their congratulations. She was constraining herself not to tap her feet. The music seemed to pass into them and upwards through her whole body: she felt like a bottle
of soda-water. A faint rose colour had come at last into her face.

‘O, you must not mind him … when he says such things I laugh.’ And she did laugh.

On the whole, Sophie impressed favourably. She was not at all the kind of wife they would have expected for a Hardenberg. But she was artless, and that pleased. Nature always pleases.

How much money would she bring with her? they asked each other.

George, nearly choked by his first high collar and frill, intended to join the dancing as soon as convenient, but did not feel that he had had quite enough to eat to keep his strength up. Downstairs in the half-darkened dining room, which had not yet been cleared, he came across a boy a couple of years younger than himself with the appearance (irritating to George) of an angel. George silently helped himself to cold pigeon-pie, doubling up his left fist in his pocket in case it came to a matter of best man wins, and it was necessary to give the angel a hacking. He said loudly, ‘Don’t you think my sister Sophie is pretty?’

‘You are George von Kuhn?’ asked the angel.

‘That’s my business.’

‘You are hungry?’

‘At home we get more to eat than this … I asked
you whether you think my sister, who is going to marry your brother Fritz, is pretty?’

‘To that I can’t give you an answer. I don’t know whether she is pretty. I’m not old enough to judge of these things. But I think she is ill.’

George, cramming in more pastry, was disconcerted. ‘Oh, there’s always someone ill in every house.’ The Bernhard said, ‘Don’t you think my brother Anton played the piano well?’

‘The hymns?’

‘They were not all hymns.’

‘Yes, he played well,’ George admitted. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going out to walk by the river in the darkness. That is the effect the music has had on me.’

George drank off a glass of brandy, as nearly as possible in his stepfather’s manner, and staggered upstairs to join the dancing.

The Mandelsloh, against all expectations, was an exquisite dancer, the best, in fact, in the room. But because her husband was not with her, and on account of Sophie, she would not dance that evening, not even with young George, to whom a year or so earlier, she had painfully taught the steps. ‘Don’t ask me!’ she said to Erasmus, when he came trustingly up to her.

‘I am not going to ask you to dance, I know I mustn’t
aspire to that honour, I am going to ask you to help me.’

‘What do you want?’

Erasmus said, ‘A lock of Sophie’s hair.’

The Mandelsloh slowly turned her head and looked hard at him. ‘You too!’

‘A very small quantity, to put in my pocket book, close to my heart … You know, I did not understand her at first, but suddenly it came to me why my brother had the words “Sophie be my spirit’s guide” engraved on his ring …’

She said again: ‘You too!’

‘A lock of hair, as a souvenir, is surely not so very much, not such a great thing … I had thought of asking Karoline Just to speak to Sophie, but you, of course, are the right person. Will you have a word with her?’

‘No,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘If that is what you want, you must ask her yourself.’

Erasmus chose his time carefully. Possibly our times are always chosen for us. The violins in the music room, where the dancing was, struck up a
Schottische
, and he had a curious sensation of not quite understanding what they were, or why they were playing. He seemed to himself to belong to two worlds, of which one was of no possible importance.

Now he was standing next to Sophie’s chair, within a
few inches of her delicate body, which smelled a little of sickness. She looked brightly up at him.

‘You have hardly spoken to me all evening, Erasmus.’

‘I have been making up my mind how to put what I wanted to say.’ He stammered it out - of course he was only asking for one curl, one small quantity, not like the
Ringellocke
which Fritz had shown him in the early spring, and which he knew was going to be plaited and set in a locket, or a watch-case. ‘A watch-case,’ he repeated, ‘but of course, not at all like that …’ Sophie laughed. She had been laughing, it was true, most of the evening, but not with such enjoyment as she did now.

Erasmus, retreating in humiliation, was confronted by the Mandelsloh. ‘God in heaven, surely you did not ask her!’

‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘You told me - I had thought of you as frank and open …’

‘Did you expect her to take off her cap?’

He had not thought about it at all.

‘Little by little it came away,’ the Mandelsloh told him ‘on account of the illness. For two months now, quite bald …’

She looked at him steadily, without a hint of forgiveness. ‘You Hardenbergs shed tears easily,’ she said. ‘I have had occasion to notice this before.’

‘But why did she laugh?’ asked poor Erasmus.

F
RITZ
knew that Sophie was bald, but was confident that her dark hair would return. He knew that Sophie could not die. ‘What a man wills himself to do, he can do,’ he told Coelestin Just, ‘still more can a woman.’ But they must not let time slip. Sophie needed better advice, indeed the best. She must go to Jena.

‘They are coming to consult Stark. But with whom can they stay?’ asked Friedrich Schlegel. ‘Hardenberg used to have an aunt here in Jena, but she died, I think about a year ago. The Philosophy, I believe, will be in the charge of her sister, an officer’s wife.’

‘And Hardenberg’s father,
der Alte
, may well, I suppose, be in and out,’ said Caroline Schlegel. ‘He will be anxious as to our beliefs and our moral life. Woe to the free, woe to the unprayed-over!’

The Jena circle, though not charitable, was hospitable. But the academic year was over, the town was beginning to swelter, the yellow clay soil would soon bake dry, the spire of the Staatskirche seemed to vibrate in the
summer’s heat. Soon they would all be on vacation, except for poor Ritter, who retreated to his attic and made himself invisible.

Sophie and the Mandelsloh, however, had already moved into lodgings in the Schaufelgasse. The rooms were small, and there were three flights of stairs, but the house was recommended to them because the landlady, Frau Winkler, was used to invalid young ladies. It was clear, indeed, from the first that she had the temperament which is attracted to illness and everything to do with it. This was irritating, but meant that she would bring up jugs of hot water at any time, by night and by day. ‘It’s part of the attendance, gracious lady,’ said Frau Winkler.

At least, the Mandelsloh had thought, reassuring herself, there will be no formality here - not that there was ever much at Gruningen - and poor Sophie can feel as though in her own dolls’ house, with the patterned earthenware jugs waiting humbly on the crowded dresser. In truth, though, she was somewhat doubtful about her choice and had to summon up her courage to open her first letter from the Freiherr. She could not know that the Uncle Wilhelm, arriving uninvited at Weissenfels to give his advice, had declared that there were no lodgings in Jena (except perhaps the former palace, where Goethe usually stayed) which were in any way suitable for the Affianced of his eldest nephew.

‘The rooms let out by the inhabitants are all at the
top of the house, and are fit only for breeding pigeons. I know the town, better, in all probability, than any of you. This elder sister, take it from me, will have settled for a couple of garrets. Women are always satisfied with too little.’

The Freiherr immediately wrote to Frau Leutnant Mandelsloh that he hoped to come and see her as soon as possible, and that meantime he was entirely assured that she had chosen wisely.