“Kurt?”
“The Baron in line—the Baron’s son. Surely you know Kurt?”
“I don’t know the family,” mumbled Dirk. “I am a jack-of-all-trades, privy to no one’s attention but the overseer. I don’t know if I’ll be brought to Meersburg, or to Munich. Or perhaps I’ll be sent back to the village from which I came in the early summer.”
“See if you can get a job being manservant to Kurt,” said Felix. “You would like Wittenberg.”
“Why would I do that?”
“It’s full of music. You like music.”
“I’m not sure that I do. I’m not sure that I have any feeling for music at all. I’m just interested in what it . . . what it . . .” He paused.
“What it means?”
“What it—suggests.”
Felix grinned and leaned a little closer. “And what does it suggest? Are you suggestible?”
“I don’t know. It seems to indicate . . .” He waved his hand in the air, spilling a blob of mustard on Felix’s knee. “Otherness. I don’t know how to say it. An otherness, an apartness—like what we know, but transformed somehow.”
Felix leaned back in his chair, as if they were old companions. “Well, take it from me. You would enjoy Wittenberg. I could meet up with you there, too. You and I, I am guessing we are simpatico.”
“I don’t know what that means, either.”
Felix just smiled at his bread. Then he said, “The world is breaking free of smoky Roman superstition and glassy Lutheran rectitude. The heyday of the French rationalists, that, too, is gone, gone as Napoleon. A new attention is being paid to how things seem and how they feel. Have you read Goethe? The Sorrows of Young Werther? It’s been taken up by university scholars of my generation, it proposes passion in life, not hesitation. It proposes engagement, not detachment. We must live life, not merely regard it. A happy satisfaction at being alive. Unless you kill yourself, of course, the way Werther does. But please don’t. We must be brave and try to find our way. It may not be the way proposed to us in the past. Don’t you think?”
That was what Dirk had been attempting in the belfry of the abandoned Catholic chapel. His efforts hadn’t brokered a happy satisfaction at being alive.
Felix grabbed Dirk’s hand and clasped it in both of his. Dirk stiffened. “Simpatico, it’s Italian for ‘sympathetic.’ Hearts beating to the same pulse. That’s what music does for one, you know—I mean, for two. For more. It trains hearts to lean in the same direction. Sympathetically.”
Dirk pulled away. The lightning made a black-and-white image of Felix’s open face, his bed-tousled hair, the Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed the crust of bread. His skin from neck to the second button, for the first was open, was papery and slightly damp from the humidity in the summer kitchen.
“Well, look me up if you come to Wittenberg, or I’ll see you in the Munich house, I expect, or the Meersburg salons. I’m a longtime hanger-on to this family. They’re good to guests,” said Felix, relenting. “There’s some ale in the cold cupboard, I believe. Pull two glasses for us.”
Dirk pulled two steins of ale and set them both before Felix and turned away to climb the stairs in the darkness. The midnight lightning was over, the thunder receding. He could hear his heart. Whether it was sympathetic or not, he had no idea.
23.
He never did speak to Hannelore again, true, but that didn’t mean she had no effect on his life. Toward the latter part of the summer, in Meersburg, it became whispered loudly that the unmarried kitchen maid might be with child. Too early to show, but she was telling. The miller’s son, it seemed, had become a romantic casualty of the season and therefore he would accept no credit of paternity. Hannelore was keeping silent as to the identity of the father. When Baron von Koenig pressed the point, the overseer conducted interviews of the staff.
It became apparent that someone had seen Hannelore leaving the defunct chapel by the lake, carrying her shoes, looking disheveled.
Additionally, it was the opinion of many in the kitchens and stables that young Dirk Drosselmeier had been observed mooning about the girl from time to time.
But further questioning revealed that Felix, the bosom chum of Kurt von Koenig, family scion, had been rehearsing with his instrument in the chapel all summer.
A family retainer hastened to Wittenberg to resolve the matter. The advocate returned some days later with a statement. Felix had admitted the child to be his own, after all, and he supplied a settlement to be paid upon the unwed mother. Such things were done in that set, apparently.
Dirk pondered this as he collected his items—three shirts now, and a buttonhook, and a junky old knife that needed sharpening. He remembered the walking stick that had belonged to the old man in the forest, the woodcutter. It was more useful now that Dirk was no longer the slender slip of a kid, but a young man, and ready for a young man’s life. At least he hoped so.
For the first and only time, Dirk was called for an interview with the Baron. “Your last chance,” said Baron von Koenig, “to own up to your responsibility and to claim this child as your own.”
“I was given to understand that your houseguest Felix has already confessed to that?”
“Stahlbaum is a quixotic character. His motivations and his behavior are untrustworthy. Perhaps he was giving cover to you, as he could see for himself you are in no situation to take on a family. I understand from the maiden that he was friendly enough with you.”
“Hannelore hasn’t named me as the father,” replied Dirk. He’d learned a little about dignity. “I’m not a father. Neither of her child nor of any other.”
“Keep it like that, you’ll be a lot better off,” growled the Baron, who probably wasn’t such a bad sort, thought Dirk, but seemed to be tired of dealing with the progression of pregnancies that summertime at the lake perhaps provided all too regularly.
“Am I to proceed with the household to the autumn address?”
“I’d been inclined to bring you, but not now. Deserved or not, a shadow falls upon your reputation. We strive to be a strict Catholic household, at least in town. You wouldn’t think to return to your parsonage in Bavaria?”
“If a scandal attaches to me? It would dishonor Pfarrer Johannes. And I’ve been given no useful message to deliver to him. So, no, I don’t think I ought to return.”
“I supposed as much. Well, as it happens I was visiting a paper merchant in Meersburg to arrange for a volume of the scientific findings among some friends of mine. Adventures in atmospherics. The merchant mentioned he is in need of an assistant. I shall send you there with a letter of controlled enthusiasm. Maybe he’ll find you suitable. If not, God be with you upon your own road, if He can find you there.”
The Padlocked Garden
24.
Dirk was surprised to find how deeply he resented being let go from the retinue that served the von Koenigs. With only a letter of introduction in hand and some back pay in his pocket, he was turned out upon the dusty road in the direction of Meersburg. It wasn’t to be a long journey, but he found it grating to watch the family entourage wheel past him without acknowledging him. Salt and brine them all.