The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

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 andmuddiest 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