Elderflowers

A Recollection of the “House of Life”

by Wilhelm Raabe

Table of Contents part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

part 1

I am a doctor, a general practitioner of long standing and a medical officer of health. Four years ago I was decorated with the Order of the Red Eagle (Third Class) and, having been born some years prior to the turn of the century, am therefore quite near to the end of my biblical lifespan. I used to be married. My children have done well for themselves. My sons are all standing on their own two feet and my daughter has found herself a good husband.

I cannot complain of my heart and my nerves as they are robust and have often held out when other people’s, not without good reason, would have failed. We doctors become, as it were, both inwardly and outwardly thick-skinned, and, as we become immune to epidemic viruses, so nothing can prevent us from assuming roles as loyal and imperturbable counsellors to unadulterated grief and inarticulate despair.

Every man should do his duty, and I hope that I always do mine to the best of my ability. Doctors who think that their task is over once they have marked with a cross or some other symbol the name of a dead patient on their list are bad doctors. Very often our hardest task is only just beginning then. We, whose skill and knowledge have been shown to be so powerless, who are so often not seen by the friends and relatives of our patients in the most favourable and equitable of lights, should still do our best to find words of consolation for those relatives and friends. The hours we must spend with those left behind and the visits we must pay after the coffin has been taken out of the house are much more painful than those we passed at the bedside of the hopeless case.

All this has nothing to do, of course, with the observations that follow. I merely want to show, by means of an example, what a wonderful thing the human soul is. Not without good reason have I entitled these personal memoirs “Elderflowers.” The reader will presently appreciate just what an influence Syringa vulgaris has had on me.

* * *

It was a clear, cold day in January. The sun was shining, and packed snow crackled underfoot as people went past while the wheels of carts made a shrill, squealing sound as they turned. The weather was healthy and invigorating, and I filled my lungs once more with a deep breath before ringing, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the doorbell of one of the stateliest mansions in one of the stateliest streets in the town.

I knew what I was doing when I strove to take with me into that elegant home as much human warmth as I possibly could. And yet nobody was lying inside critically ill, and there was no corpse there. My scalpel would be superfluous, and I would not even need to make out a prescription.

I did not have long to wait at the door. An old servant with a careworn face opened up to me and bowed his head in silent greeting. I walked through the long and cold entrance hall and slowly ascended the wide staircase one step at a time.

I had of late climbed these stairs on numerous occasions, at all hours of the day and night. Upstairs, near a bend in the banister, stood a fine plaster cast of a pensive muse who, gracefully enshrouded by her veils, had been given the attitude of leaning her chin on her hand.

When the great city slept, when the light of the lamp, which the old servant carried in front of me, deep into the night, came to rest on that pure, white shape, I gazed upon it steadily in passing and tried to take with me something of the bust’s lovely and eternal tranquility behind that fateful door where... but that was all over with now; the fever had won, and the coffin with the young virgin’s head cradled on a white satin headrest had been taken downstairs past this self-same statue.

The coffin had then been taken through the hallway and outside through the streets of the town. Three weeks had gone by, time enough for the grave to be covered with snow and for the cold winter sun now to be shining on it.

I walked on through well-ordered rooms where beautiful pictures were hanging on the walls and flowers were arranged in window-boxes and the floor was overlaid by soft carpets. But every room I entered I found cold and uninhabitable.

Door after door I opened and closed gently till I found myself standing in front of the last one leading to the last remaining room in that part of the house, a corner bedroom already well-known to me. I stood outside the door to listen for a moment as somebody inside the bedroom moved about.

I knew what I was going to find in that bedroom, but I felt, nevertheless, a cold, clammy sweat breaking out on my forehead and all the nerve-endings on my skin ever so slightly beginning to tingle. Even the most case-hardened doctor is never quite hardened enough, and today I was to learn the truth of that all over again.

It was a warm and cheerful, comfortable room into which I now entered. Here, sunlight inundated everything, reflected by the room’s big mirrors. And here too, on the window sill, pretty flowers were in evidence and, somewhere in amongst them, was a finely wrought birdcage with two songbirds in it.

Over here was a piano with the lid up and, in front of it, a piano stool, the seat of which had been embroidered. A songbook lay open on the music holder. Everything in that room pointed to the fact that a woman and, moreover, a young woman, lived there... or, rather, had lived there. Everything bore the hallmark of a single young lady’s delicacy: a married woman or an old maid would not have had the same taste in interior design.

The pale-looking woman, dressed in black, whom I greeted wordlessly and who, kneeling on the carpet in front of an open drawer, looked up at me with eyes terribly sad, drained absolutely dry of tears, came here every day to drink in every minute of this fading brilliance and fragrance: the fragrance and the brilliance, alas, of what had been and nevermore would be.

After exchanging greetings, we spoke but little. The bereaved mother addressed me as usual with the words: “Thank you for coming, dear friend!” and then I sat down on the embroidered stool in front of the piano, resting my head in my hand, watching this woman as she stooped to do things.

She was busy ordering the little treasures that her daughter had left behind after her brief stay on earth. Each day she would imbibe another bitter draught from that chalice of memory which all those who have lost a loved one clutch at so tightly.

Now it was up to her to sort out letters from school friends, old birthday presents, items of personal jewellery and a hundred and one other curiosities of a manifold and colourful multiplicity which art and craft, full of hidden meanings, bestow on their favourites in this world. Everything that came to hand was treated by this poor woman as a sentient, living thing. She lingered over it, talked to it and called it to mind, remembering just when it had first come into the house to give pleasure to or perhaps, in some cases, to slightly unsettle the woman’s now dead daughter.

Here, for instance, was a smashed shepherdess in porcelain, and thereby hung a tale, and this proud mother told it to herself, to me and to the multi-coloured gilded ornament with all its twists and turns, exactly as it had happened. Then, as my hands wandered absent-mindedly over the piano keys behind me, a look of jealousy flashed across the face of that much-to-be-pitied narrator: would the hand of a stranger dare to play again those notes that had once belonged to the deceased?

As the woman once more cast her livid face downwards, my glance chanced to fall on the songbook lying open on the music-holder. The song contained therein was a sad one. Was it just a coincidence that the songbook lay open at that particular place or had the dead girl, somewhat ominously, turned to it herself? It read as follows:

Should fate bestow on you a precious gift,
Needs must you lose some other dear advantage.
Pain, like success, is gathered bit by bit,
And what you long for most will do most damage.

A human hand is like a childish hand
That grabs at life, then wantonly destroys it.
It ruins what it cannot understand
And clings to something, though it ne’er enjoys it.

A human hand is like a childish hand,
Man’s heart a childish heart, full of childish fears.
Never lose your grip! ... Life’s a burning brand
And laughter, soon or late, for aye changed to tears.

Should fate bestow on you a garland wreath,
You needs must pluck away its finest flower.
You to yourself destruction will bequeath
And over scattered petals cry and cower.

With this song came the first reminder of a bygone age to which, however, a further reminder would need to be added before the series of thoughts and impressions recorded in these pages finally developed.

The sky outside was cold and blue over the roofs opposite. The sun was still shining through the high casement windows, but the ice crystal patterns thereon, which had melted slightly in the heat of the noonday sun, were already re-forming. I had picked up from a sewing table an ornamental ballroom spray of artificial flowers, and the sun also shone on this bouquet.

It was an artful and delicate concoction of white and blue elderflowers and leaves and a single strand of long blonde hair had got mixed up in it when the girl who was now dead had taken it out of her hair after the ball that had been held the night before her fatal fever started.

There are many kinds of laurel wreaths in the world and just as many ways of running after them to win them or to lose them. Is not every life an attempt to weave a garland by and for oneself? We all set about the work to the best of our strength and ability and are all more or less successful in completing it.

Often very fine work is produced, but then again hopelessly botched jobs as well come to light. Many a wreath is destroyed before completion and many a proud garland, having adorned the head of some elevated personage, eventually falls into the hands of a total stranger who, while holding it, examines it and tears it apart leaf by leaf as an austere winter sun, ill-disposed to all borrowed plumes and tinsel, looks on impassively.

The decorative spray I was holding in my hand just then was not, of course, destined to suffer that fate. It consisted for the most part of elder blossoms and, though it was only an artificial, trumped-up thing, its heart-warming vivacity was such that, old as I was, with white hairs on my head that had not sprung up there overnight, I was plunged into the contemplation of increasingly remote and wild blue yonders. Memories awoke in me that had, at bottom, little to do with the deceased youngster’s ballroom favour.

Blame those elder blossoms for the deep and bitter seriousness with which I now thought of the wreath that had twisted itself around my own life, in part due to the efforts of my own hands, and the two ends of which would soon now make contact with each other.

The song lying open on top of the piano had been written more for me than for the young dead girl who had now, after a short and happy sojourn on earth, fallen softly, painlessly and quietly asleep, having worn this little wreath of fair spring flowers on an even fairer head as a lovely symbol of her life and her success in plaiting garlands.

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Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 1863 by Wilhelm Raabe
Translation copyright © 2023 by Michael E. Wooff