Читать книгу The Blue Flower - Candia McWilliam, Penelope Fitzgerald - Страница 17

IN the Michaelmas of 1791 Fritz began the second stage of his university education, at Leipzig. He was nineteen, and Leipzig, with fifty thousand inhabitants, was the largest town he had ever lived in. He found it impossible to manage on the allowance that could be spared for him.

‘I must speak to Father,’ he told Erasmus.

‘He will be displeased.’

‘How many people are pleased when they are asked for money?’

‘What have you done with it, Fritz?’

‘Well, I have spent what I had on the necessities of life. There is the soul, and there is the flesh. But the old one too, when he was a student, must have had these necessities.’

‘That would be before he was awakened,’ said Erasmus gloomily. ‘You cannot expect sympathy from him now. Nineteen years should have taught you that much.’

On his next return to Weissenfels, Fritz said: ‘Father, I am young, and, speaking with due respect, I cannot live like an old man. I have kept myself under extreme restraint in Leipzig, I have ordered one pair of shoes only since I have been there. I have grown my hair long to avoid expense at the barber. In the evening I eat only bread …’

‘In what respects do you find that you cannot live like an old man?’ asked the Freiherr.

Fritz shifted his ground.

‘Father, there is not a student in Leipzig who does not owe money. I cannot manage on what you allow me at the moment. There are six of us still at home, I know, but we still have estates at Oberwiederstadt, and at Schlöben.’

‘Did you think I had forgotten them?’ asked the Freiherr.

He passed his hand over his face.

‘Go to Oberwiederstadt, and see Steinbrecher. I will give you a letter to him.’

Steinbrecher was the revenue steward.

‘But isn’t he at Schlöben?’

‘He deals now with all our properties. This month he is at Oberwiederstadt.’

Fritz took a place in the diligence, which left the Stag in Weissenfels at four in the morning, and went by way of Halle and Eisleben. The German diligence was the slowest in Europe, since all the luggage, which was loaded onto a kind of creaking extension of the floor extending over the back axle, had to be unloaded and re-loaded every time a passenger got in or out. While the conductor supervised this work the driver fed himself and his horses, on loaves of coarse brown bread.

At the Black Boy at Eisleben a farm servant was sitting on the bench outside, waiting for him.

‘Grüss dich, Joseph,’ said Fritz, remembering him from seven years back. ‘Let us go into the grocer’s and take a glass of schnaps.’ In Saxony the inns were not allowed to sell spirits.

‘I should be sorry to see your father’s son diverting himself in such a way,’ Joseph replied.