Authors: Penelope Fitzgerald
‘F
RITZ
!’
Erasmus caught up with his brother on the front door steps, racing after him up the right-hand flight, dislodging Lukas, the houseman, and his broom.
‘Fritz, I have seen her, yes, I’ve been to Gruningen! I talked to your Sophie and to a friend of hers, and to the family.’
Fritz stood as if turned to ice, and Erasmus called out, ‘Best of brothers, she won’t do!’
He threw his arms round his so much taller brother. ‘She won’t do at all, my Fritz. She is good-natured, yes, but she is not your intellectual equal. Great Fritz, you are a philosopher, you are a poet.’
Lukas disappeared with his broom, hastening to the kitchen door to repeat what he had heard.
‘Who gave you permission to present yourself at Gruningen?’ asked Fritz, so far almost calm.
‘Fritz, Sophie is stupid!’
‘Mad, Erasmus!’
‘No, I’m not mad, best of all Fritzes!’
‘I said, who gave you permission -‘
‘Her mind is empty -‘
‘Better silence - !’
‘Empty as a new jug, Fritz -‘
‘Silence!’
Erasmus clung on. And there, on the front steps of the house in the Kloster Gasse, the two of them were on show, and once again the people of Weissenfels, as they went by at a foot’s pace, were scandalised, as they had been by the Bernhard’s escapade on the banks of the river. There were the eldest of the Hardenberg boys, the Freiherr’s pride, almost at blows.
Erasmus was by far the more upset of the two. His breath steamed up like a kettle in the winter’s air. Without effort Fritz, trying for calm, pinned him against the iron handrail. ‘You mean well,
Junge
, I am sure you do. Your feelings are those of a brother. You think I have been taken in by a beautiful face.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Erasmus protested. ‘You are taken in, yes, but not by a beautiful face. Fritz, she is not beautiful, she is not even pretty. I say again this Sophie is empty-headed, moreover at twelve years old she has a double chin -‘
‘Gracious Freiin, your brothers are knocking each other’s teeth out on the front steps,’ announced Lukas. ‘Peace
and fellowship have been forgotten, indeed they are now at full length in the Kloster Gasse.’
‘I will go to them at once,’ said Sidonie.
‘Shall I inform the Freifrau?’
‘Don’t be a fool, Lukas.’
Erasmus had been warmly received on his entirely unannounced visit to Gruningen. He was welcome for his brother’s sake, and Frau Rockenthien had a special tenderness for small and insignificant young people, believing that they could be transformed, by giving them plenty to eat, into tall and stout ones. But Sophie herself, to his horror, he found was no more than a very noisy, very young girl, not at all like his own sisters. During the scant two hours of his visit she and a friend of hers, a Jette Goldacker, had invited him to walk with them down to the path by the River Helbe, since they must not go alone, and see the Hussars, who were quite drunk, and were toppling over on the ice, the Regimental Sergeant too, and everything was going flying pitsch! patsch! It was Jette, true, who had drawn attention to a corporal unbuttoning himself, but Sophie had not reproached her. For
morgen
, Sophie said
morchen
, for
spat
she said
spad
, for Hardenberg, ‘Hardenburch’. Well, Erasmus did not care a snap how she spoke. He did not set himself up as a teacher of elocution. But never had he met a young maiden of good family with so little restraint.
Fritz must have lost his senses. ‘You’re intoxicated. It’s a
Rausch
, think of yourself as
im Rausch
. It will wear off, in the course of nature it must.’
Because of the Christmas gathering and because the Freiherr might come back at any moment, no more could be said between them, and after all the quarrel arose not from enmity but from love, although that was not likely to make it easier to settle. A truce was called.
‘I know that I am receiving moral grace. How can that be intoxication?’ Fritz wrote.
Am I to be kept apart from her for ever?
Is the hope of being united
With what we recognised as our own
But could not quite possess completely
Is that too to be called intoxication?
All humanity will be, in time, what Sophie
Is now for me: human perfection - moral grace -
Life’s highest meaning will then no longer
Be mistaken for drunken dreams
.
‘W
HAT
are the boys saying?’ asked the Freifrau doubtfully. She had been permitted to move out of the large shabby marital bedroom and upstairs, with the baby, to somewhere much smaller, almost an attic, which was sometimes used for storing apples, so that, in spite of the cold, it never lost its lazy, bittersweet apple smell. Only the wet nurse and a lady’s maid who had come with her from her old home when she married, creaked up the stairs as far as this - Sidonie, too, of course, on flying feet.
‘Ah, Sidonie, my dear, I thought I heard their voices raised, though not so much to-day as yesterday … Tell me, what is Fritz talking about?’
‘About moral grace, mother.’
At this watchword of the Herrnhut the Freifrau sank back in relief against the starched pillows.
‘And you have got the library ready - you know your father likes to -‘
‘Of course, of course,’ said Sidonie.
‘Tell me whether you think little Christoph is any better.’
Sidonie, an expert, removed several layers of shawls and looked closely at her frail brother. He scowled at her manfully, she brightened. ‘Yes, truly, he is much better.’
‘Thank God, thank God, I should not say this, she is another Christian soul, but I do not at all like the wet nurse.’
‘I will speak to her at once,’ said Sidonie, ‘and send her back to Elsterdorf.’
‘And then -?’ Sidonie thought her mother was worrying about a replacement, but saw it was not so. ‘You are thinking about moving back to your bedroom downstairs. No, you are not well enough yet for that. I will send for your coffee.’
The Freiherr followed the old custom, which most of Weissenfels’ households had given up, of the Christmas reckoning. The mother spoke to her daughters, the father to his sons, and told them first what had displeased, then what had pleased most in their conduct during the past year. In addition, the young Hardenbergs were asked to make a clean breast of anything that they should have told their parents, but had not. The Freifrau would not be well enough to undertake this duty, and the Freiherr, it was thought, might arrive from Artern later than he
had calculated. But he arrived precisely at the time he had said.
Christmas Eve was bright and windless. All day the knocker of the kitchen door echoed through the yards. No-one who asked for charity at the Hardenbergs’ house was ever turned away empty-handed, but on this day they could expect something more substantial. At Oberwiederstadt the pressure had been much greater. The house had been very near the border, and many who had no permission to cross into Prussia, and indeed were not particularly welcome in any of the states - the vagrants, old soldiers, travelling theatrical companies, pedlars - all these silted up on the frontier like floating rubbish on a river’s banks. In Weissenfels there were only the town poor and the town mad, and later the girls with unwanted pregnancies, who could not afford the services of the Angel-maker, the back-street abortionist. These girls did not come to the kitchen door until it was quite dark.
In the library candles had been attached, waiting to blaze, on every sprig of the heaped-up fir branches. The tables were laid with white cloths, a table for each soul in the household. On each table was placed a name, made out of almond paste and baked brown. The presents themselves were not labelled. One must guess, or perhaps never know, who were the givers.
‘What are we expected to sing for Christmas Eve?’ Karl asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Sidonie. ‘Father likes Reichardt’s “Welcome to this Vale of Sorrow.”’
‘Bernhard,’ said Karl, ‘you are not to eat the almond-paste letters.’
The Bernhard was wounded. It had been almost two years now since he cared anything about sweets.
‘I dare say too that this is the last year I shall be called upon to sing a treble solo,’ he said. ‘Pubescence is at the door.’
‘What I want to know is this,’ cried Erasmus, ‘I want to know from you, our Fritz, what you will say when Father asks us to confess what we have done during the year. You know what I have already written to you, that you can rely upon me in everything. But are you going to tell him, as you have told me, not that you are in love, that needs no more apology than a bird needs an apology to fly, no, but that you have committed yourself to a little girl of twelve who laughs through her fingers to see a drunk in the snow?’
‘Of this you have told me nothing,’ said Karl reproachfully. Bernhard, although attached to Fritz, was in ecstasies, foreseeing embarrassments of all kinds.
‘I shall tell him nothing that is unworthy of Sophie,’ Fritz declared. ‘Her name means wisdom. She is my wisdom, she is my truth.’
‘Freiin, the lights,’ said Lukas, hurrying in. ‘Your gracious father is coming down to the library.’
‘Well, help me, then, Lukas.’ He had left the door open and they saw the household assembled outside, their aprons patches of white in the shadows of the hall. At Gruningen they would have been in uproar on a holiday like this, but not in the Kloster Gasse.
Inside the library the myriad fiery shining points of light threw vast shadows of the fir branches onto the high walls and even across the ceiling. In the warmth the room breathed even more deeply, more resinously, more greenly. On the tables the light sparkled across gold-painted walnuts, birds in cages, dormice in their nests, dolls made of white bread twisted into shape, hymnbooks, Fritz’s needle-cases and little bottles of
Kolnischwasser
, Sidonie’s embroidery, oddments made out of willow and birch, pocket-knives, scissors, pipes, wooden spoons with curious handles which made them almost unusable, religious prints mounted on brilliant sheets of tin. By contrast with this sparkle and display how worn, as he came in, how haggard in spite of its roundness, was the face of the Freiherr von Hardenberg. As he paused at the door to give some instructions to Lukas, Fritz said to Karl, ‘He is old, but I cannot bring myself to make things easy for him.’
The Freiherr came in, and quite against precedent, sat down in the elbow chair. His family looked at him in dismay. It had been his habit on Christmas Eve to stand behind the large leather-covered desk, always kept clear of presents and candles, in the very centre of the library.
‘Why does he do this?’ muttered Erasmus.
‘I don’t know,’ said Fritz. ‘Schlegel tells me that Goethe has bought one of these chairs, but when he sits in it he can’t think.’
As their father began to speak he beat his hand, as though marking time, on the embracing arm of the chair.
‘You expect me to consider your conduct for the past year, both the progress you have made and your backsliding. You expect me to question you about anything that has been concealed from me. You expect - indeed it would be your duty - to answer me truthfully. You expect these things, but you are mistaken. On this Christmas Eve, the Christmas Eve of the year 1794, I shall want no confessions, I shall make no interrogations. What is the reason for this? Well, in reality, while at Artern I received a letter from a very old friend, the Former Prediger of the Brethren at Neudietendorf. It was a Christmas letter, reminding me that I was fifty-six years of age and could not, in the nature of things, expect more than another few years on this earth. The Prediger instructed me for once not to reprove, but to remember only that this is a day of unspeakable joy, on which all men and women should be no more, and no less, than children. And therefore,’ he added, looking slowly round at the sparkling tables, the wooden spoons, the golden nuts, ‘I myself have become, during this sacred time, wholly a child.’
Anything less childlike than the leathery, seamed, broad, bald face of the Freiherr and his eyes, perplexed to the point of anguish under his strong eyebrows, could hardly be imagined. Probably the Prediger had not tried to imagine it. The Brethren were experienced in joy, and perhaps sometimes forgot what a difficult emotion it is, and how unfamiliar to many. Heavily the Freiherr von Hardenberg looked up from the desk.
‘Are we not to have music?’
The Bernhard, disappointed at his father’s strange mildness, but pleased to see his elders disconcerted, shinned up the library steps used for the highest shelves, and began to sing, in what was still a child’s voice of absolute purity, ‘He is born, let us love him.’ The angelic voice was taken as a signal for the patiently-waiting household to come in, bringing with them the two-year-old Amelie, who advanced with determination on anything that shone, and a bundle of wrappings, which was the infant Christoph. The candle-flames began to burn low and catch the evergreens, there was a snapping and hissing and trails of sweet smoke as they were calmly extinguished by Sidonie. The room was still, in alternate patches, brilliant and shadowy as everyone went to search for their own tables.
Erasmus stood close to Fritz. ‘What will you tell Father now?’