Authors: Penelope Fitzgerald
O
NCE
he had got rid of the Uncle and his travelling entourage of body-servants and cooks, who had been infesting the kitchen quarters, Freiherr von Hardenberg summoned his eldest son and told him that after his year at Leipzig and a further year at Wittenberg to study chemistry, geology and law he would be ready to take his first steps as a trainee clerk in the Directorate of Salt Mines. Erasmus would be sent from Leipzig to Hubertusberg, where he would enrol in the School of Forestry, a wholesome, open-air life for which so far he had shown no inclination whatsoever. Karl had already seen action, at the age of sixteen. He had been with his regiment when the French were driven out of Mainz. He expected to come home frequently. It was not at all difficult to get army leave. Officers on leave were not paid, so that until they reported back, the regiment was able to save money.
If Fritz sometimes took the diligence, or walked long distances, it was because he rarely had a decent horse to
ride. If ever he managed to hire or borrow one, he noted it down in his diary. His own horse, known only as the Gaul (the Crock), he could remember at Oberwiederstadt, although he had been too young to ride him until they moved to Weissenfels. How old was the Gaul? Age had brought him cunning, rather than wisdom, and he had arrived with his master at an elaborate creaturely bargain as to place and time - when he might slow down, when he might stop, when consent to go on. Fritz did not disturb himself about his own appearance, or about the shabbiness of his horse, as long as they could get from one point to another.
From the age of seventeen he had been in almost perpetual motion, or the Gaul’s unhurried version of it, back and forth, though not over a wide area. His life was lived in the ‘golden hollow’ in the Holy Roman Empire, bounded by the Harz Mountains and the deep forest, crossed by rivers - the Saale, the Unstrut, the Helme, the Elster, the Wipper - proceeding in gracious though seemingly quite unnecessary bends and sweeps past mine-workings, salt-houses, timber-mills, waterside inns where the customers sat placidly hour after hour, waiting for the fish to be caught from the river and broiled. Scores of miles of rolling country, uncomplainingly bringing forth potatoes and turnips and the great whiteheart pickling cabbages which had to be sliced with a saw, lay between hometown and hometown, each with its ownness,
but also its welcome likeness to the last one. The hometowns were reassuring to the traveller, who fixed his sights from a distance on the wooden roof of the old church, the cupola of the new one, and came at length to the streets of small houses drawn up in order, each with its pig sty, its prune oven and bread oven and sometimes its wooden garden-house, where the master, in the cool of the evening, sat smoking in total blankness of mind, under a carved motto:
ALL HAPPINESS IS HERE
or
CONTENTMENT IS WEALTH
. Sometimes, though not often, a woman, also, found time to sit in the garden-house.
When Fritz rode back southwards from Wittenberg at the end of his year’s studies, it was a day in a thousand, crystal-clear, heavenly blue. They were just beginning the potato-lifting, with which he had so often helped, willingly enough, as a child with the Brethren at Neudietendorf.
Between Rippach and Lutzen he stopped where a stream crossed the road, to let the Gaul have a drink, although the horse usually had to wait for this until the end of the day. As Fritz loosened the girths, the Gaul breathed in enormously, as though he had scarcely known until that moment what air was. Fritz’s valise, tied to the crupper, rose and fell with a sound like a drum on his broad quarters. Then, deflating little by little, he lowered his head to the water to find the warmest and
muddiest part, sank his jaws to a line just below the nostrils, and began to drink with an alarming energy which he had never displayed on the journey from Wittenberg.
Fritz sat by the empty roadside, on the damp Saxon earth which he loved, and with nothing in view except a convoy of potato-wagons and the line of alders which marked the course of the Elster. His education was now almost at an end. What had he learned? Fichtean philosophy, geology, chemistry, combinatorial mathematics, Saxon commercial law. One of his greatest friends in Jena, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, had tried to show him that the ultimate explanation of life was galvanism, and that every exchange of energy between the mind and the body must be accompanied by an electric charge. Electricity was sometimes visible as light, but not all light was visible, indeed most of it was not. ‘We must never judge by what we see.’ Ritter was almost penniless. He had never attended a university, never in fact been to school. A glass of wine was immeasurable encouragement to him. After that, lying in his wretched lodgings, he could see the laws of electricity written in cloudy hieroglyphs on the whole surface of the universe, and on the face of the waters, where the Holy Spirit still moved.
- My teachers did not agree with each other, my friends did not agree with my teachers, Fritz thought,
but that is only on a superficial level, they were men of intellect and passion, let me believe in them all.
The children of large families hardly ever learn to talk to themselves aloud, that is one of the arts of solitude, but they often keep diaries. Fritz took out his pocket journal. Certain words came readily to him -
weaknesses, faults, urges, striving for fame, striving against the crushing, wretched, bourgeois conditions of everyday life, youth, despair
. Then he wrote, ‘But I have, I can’t deny it, a certain inexpressible sense of immortality.’
‘Y
OU
have heard me speak of Kreisamtmann Coelestin Just of Tennstedt,’ said the Freiherr. Fritz thought that he had. ‘He is of course the local presiding magistrate, but also, which is not always the case, supervisor of the tax collection for his district. I have arranged for you to study with him at Tennstedt in order to learn administration and practical office management, of which you know nothing.’ Fritz asked if he should take lodgings. ‘No, you will lodge with the Justs themselves. The Kreisamtmann has a niece, Karoline, a very steady young woman who keeps house for him, and in addition he has married, at the age of forty-six, the widow of Christian Nurnberger, the late Professor of Anatomy and Botany at Wittenberg. Very likely you may have met her there, during the past year.’
In the University towns it might be different, but no woman in Weissenfels, Tennstedt, Gruningen or Langensalza tried to look younger than they were or knew of
any way of doing so. They accepted what the years sent.
Karoline Just saw, when she looked in her glass, the face of a woman of twenty-seven, uniformly smooth and pale, with noticeably dark eyebrows. She had been housekeeping for her Uncle Coelestin Just at his house in Tennstedt for four years. It had not been thought that her uncle would ever marry, but only six months ago he had done so. ‘My dear, you will be glad for me and for yourself,’ he had said. ‘If at any time now the question arises of your making a home of your own, you will be able to be sure that you are not deserting me.’
‘The question has not arisen,’ said Karoline.
That Karoline had nowhere else to go, except back to Merseburg (where her father was Pronotary of the Cathedral Seminary) did not strike Just as a difficulty. In either place she was truly welcome. Meanwhile he congratulated himself that his Rahel was not only that most eligible of German women, a Professor’s widow, but also, at thirty-nine, most likely past the age of childbearing. The three of them could live peaceably together without unwelcome change or disturbance.
In Tennstedt they said - Now he has two women under one roof. Well, there’s a proverb … Who, then, is going to give the orders and spend the Kreisamtmann’s money? - About the expected lodger - expected because the servants were talking about him, and because an extra
bedstead had been purchased - they knew that he was said to be twenty-two years of age.
At the Universities the professors often arranged for their daughters to marry their likeliest pupil. Everywhere master carpenters, printers and bakers were satisfied when a daughter, or a niece, married one of their apprentices. The Kreisamtmann was neither a professor nor a skilled craftsman, he was a magistrate and an area tax-inspector, and such an arrangement might never have occurred to him, but now that he was a married man, they said, he had someone else to do the thinking for him.
Fritz arrived on foot, a day after he was expected, and at a time when Coelestin Just was at his office. ‘The Long-Expected is here,’ said Rahel to Karoline. She herself remembered him very well from Wittenberg, but was distressed to see him so dishevelled. ‘You find the exercise healthy, Hardenberg?’ she asked anxiously as she brought him into the house. Fritz looked at her vaguely, but with a radiant smile. ‘I don’t know, Frau Rahel. I hadn’t thought about it, but I will think about it.’ Once in the parlour, he looked round him as though at a revelation. ‘It is beautiful, beautiful.’
‘It’s not beautiful at all,’ said Rahel. ‘You are more than welcome here, I hope that you will learn a great deal and you are free, of course, to form whatever opinions you like, but this parlour is not beautiful.’
Fritz continued to gaze around him.
‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’
Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.
‘You are beautiful, gracious Fraulein,’ said Fritz.
‘We expected you yesterday,’ said Rahel, dryly, ‘but you see, we are patient people.’ When Karoline had gone out, as she very soon did, to the kitchen, she added, ‘I am going to take the privilege of someone who met you so often when you were a student, and welcomed you, you remember, to our Shakespeare evenings, and tell you that you ought not to speak to Karoline quite like that. You did not mean it, and she is not used to it.’
‘But I did mean it,’ said Fritz. ‘When I came into your home, everything, the wine-decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’
‘They are as usual. I did not buy this furniture myself, but -‘
Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul.
Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did
not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedtime as a sedative, if his mind was too active - only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.
F
RITZ’S
luggage arrived a day later on the diligence. It consisted largely of books. Here were the hundred and thirty-three necessary titles, the earlier ones mostly poetry, plays and folktales, later on the study of plants, minerals, medicine, anatomy, theories of heat, sound and electricity, Mathematics, the Analysis of Infinite Numbers. They are all one, said Fritz aloud, warming his hands over a candle in his cold attic bedroom at Tennstedt. All human knowledge is one. Mathematics is the linking principle, just as Ritter told me that electricity is the link between body and mind. Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language. And if all knowledge was to be expressed through symbols, then he must set to work to write down every possible way the operation could be performed.
‘
Triumph
!’ exclaimed Fritz in his icy room (but he had never in his life - nor had anyone he knew - worked
or slept in a room that was not exceedingly cold).
His second load of books began with Franz Ludwig Cancrinus’
Foundations of Mining and Saltworks
, Volume 1. Part 1: In What Mineralogy Consists. Part 2: In What the Art of Experiment Consists. Part 3: In What the Specification of Aboveground Earth Consists. Part 4: In What the Specification of Belowground Earth Consists. Part 5: In What the Art of Mine Construction Consists. Part 6: In What Arithmetic, Geometry and Ordinary Trigonometry Consists. Part 7, Section 1: In What Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Aerometrics and Hydraulics Consists, Section 2: In What the Construction of Mountain Machinery Consists. Part 8, Section 1: In What the Smelting and Precipitation of Metals from Ore Consists, Section 2: In What the Smelting of Half-metals Consists, Section 3: In What the Preparation of Sulphur Consists. Part 9, Section 1: In What the Examination of Salt and the Geological Description of Salt-Bearing Mountains Consists, Section 2: In What the Art of Salt-Boiling and the Construction of New Saltworks Consists. Volume 2, What is Understood by Mining and Salt Law.
The servants reported to Rahel that the young Freiherr was talking aloud to himself in his room. ‘He goes up there immediately after breakfast,’ Rahel told her husband, ‘and you have seen that he also studies after dinner.’ Just asked Karoline whether they could not have a little
music one evening, as a relaxation. ‘You must take pity’, he suggested, ‘on the unfortunate young man.’
‘I know nothing about his trouble,’ said Karoline. She found herself very busy with the work of the forewinter - sausage-making, beating flax for the winter spinning, killing the geese (who had already been plucked alive twice) for their third and last crop of down. After this it was necessary to eat baked goose for a week. But she took her place that evening in the parlour when Fritz, appealed to by Rahel, came downstairs, carrying a book - he had been persuaded to read aloud to them - or no, it was not a book, but a folder of manuscripts.
‘You must not think that this was written to anyone in particular. I was at Jena. I was younger than I am now.
Accept my book, accept my little rhymes
,
Care for them if you can and let them go
Do you want more? My heart, perhaps, my life?
Those you had long ago
.’
He looked up - ‘That would be very suitable to copy out in a young lady’s album,’ said Rahel. ‘I’m afraid however we don’t have anything of the sort in the house.’
Fritz tore the sheet of paper in half. Karoline put down the pillow-case she was mending. ‘Please read more, read on.’ Her Uncle Coelestin looked quietly at the glow from the stove, whose doors were slightly ajar. He had been told that young Hardenberg was a poet, but had only
just realised that he intended to read his verses aloud. He could not pretend to be a judge of them. Singing was a different matter. Like everyone else he knew, Just sang himself, belonged to two singing clubs, and listened to singing indoors in winter and in summer in the open air, the woods, the mountains and the streets. Yes, and a friend of Karoline’s, a high soprano, had possessed such a beautiful voice that at her wedding dinner, when all the notables of Tennstedt were present, Coelestin himself had been cajoled into appearing as an old bird-seller, with an armful of empty cages painted to represent gold, and into singing a comical country song, imploring the bridegroom ‘not to take away their nightingale’. Yes, that was Else Wangel, only three years ago, three years since her wedding, and she was broad enough nowadays to fill a doorway.
Karoline was speaking to him reproachfully. ‘Why are you talking of Else Wangel?’
‘My dear, I did not know I was speaking aloud. All of you must pardon an old man.’
Just was forty-six. The melancholy of approaching mortality had been one of his reasons, first, for sending for his niece, then, in good time, for his marriage.
‘Uncle, you have not been listening, you understood nothing.’