He passed a restless night and went next morning, despite misty and damp weather, for a long and lonely ride. Herr von Knobelsdorff had talked clearly and voluminously, had given and accepted facts; but, for the fusion, modelling, and working up of these multifarious raw products he had given only curt, aphoristic instructions, and Klaus Heinrich found himself doomed to some heavy thinking while he lay awake at night, and later when he went for a ride on Florian.
When he got back to the “Hermitage” he did a remarkable thing. He wrote with a pencil on a piece of paper an order, a certain commission, and sent Neumann, the valet, with it to the Academy Bookshop in the University Strasse: Neumann came back with a package of books, which Klaus Heinrich had set out in his room, and which he began at once to read.
They were works of a sober and school-bookish appearance, with glazed paper backs, ugly leather sides, and coarse paper, and the contents were divided up minutely into sections, main divisions, sub-divisions, and paragraphs. Their titles were not stimulating. They were manuals and hand-hooks of economy, abstracts and outlines of State finance, systematic treatises on political economy. The Prince shut himself up in his study with these books, and gave instructions that he wished on no account to be disturbed.
The autumn was damp, and Klaus Heinrich felt little tempted to leave the “Hermitage.” On Saturday he drove to the Old Schloss to give free audiences: otherwise his time was his own all this week, and he knew how to make use of it. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he sat in the warmth of the low stove at his small, old-fashioned, little-used desk, and pored over his books on finance, with his temples resting in his hands. He read about the State expenditure and what it always consisted of, about the receipts and whence they flowed in when things were going well; he ploughed through the whole subject of taxation in all its branches; he buried himself in the doctrine of the budget, of the balance, of the surplus, and particularly of the deficit; he lingered longest over, and went deepest into, the public debt and its varieties, into loans, and relation between interest and capital and liquidation, and from time to time he raised his head from the book and dreamed with a smile about what he had read, as if it had been the gayest poetry.
For the rest, he found that it was not hard to grasp it all, when one set one's mind to it. No, this really serious actuality, in which he now played a part, this simple and rude texture of interests, this system of down-right logical needs and necessities, which countless young men of ordinary birth had to stuff into their heads, to be able to pass examinations in it, it was by no means so difficult to get hold of as he in his Highness had thought. The rôle of representation, in his opinion, was harder. And much, much more ticklish and difficult were his gentle struggles with Imma Spoelmann on horseback and on foot. His studies made him warm and happy, he felt that his zeal was making his cheeks hot, like those of his brother-in-law zu Ried-Hohenried over his peat.
After thus giving the facts which he had learnt from Herr von Knobelsdorff a general academic basis, and also accomplishing a feat of hard thinking in bringing together inward connexions and weighing possibilities, he again presented himself at Delphinenort at tea-time. The lights in the candelabra with the lions' feet and the big crystal lustres were burning in the garden room. The ladies were alone.
Klaus Heinrich first asked after Mr. Spoelmann's health and Imma's indisposition. He upbraided her freely for her strange impetuosity, to which she answered with a pout that as far as she knew she was her own mistress, and could do as she liked with her health. The conversation then turned to the autumn, to the damp weather which forbade rides, to the advanced time of year, and the proximity of winter, and Klaus Heinrich suddenly mentioned the Court Ball in connexion with which it occurred to him to ask whether the ladies—if unfortunately Mr. Spoelmann were prevented by the state of his health—would not care to take part in one this time. But when Imma answered, “No, really, she had no wish to be rude, but she had absolutely not the faintest desire to go to a Court Ball,” he did not press the point, but postponed the question for the time.
What had he done these last few days?—Oh, he'd been very busy, he might say that he'd been chock-a-block with work.—Work? Doubtless he meant the Court Hunt at “Jägerpreis.”—The Court Hunt? No. He had gone in for real study which he had by no means got to the bottom of yet; on the contrary he was sticking deep in the literature on the subject…. And Klaus Heinrich began to talk about his ugly books, his peeps into financial science, and he spoke with such pleasure and respect of this discipline that Imma Spoelmann looked at him with her big eyes. But when—almost timidly—she questioned him as to the motive and impulse for this activity, he answered that it was living, only too burning, questions of the day which had brought him to it: circumstances and conditions which were certainly not well suited for a cheerful talk at tea. This remark obviously offended Imma Spoelmann.
“On what observations,” she asked sharply, wagging her head from side to side, “did he base his conviction that she was approachable only or preferably by way of cheerful conversation?” And she commanded him rather than asked him to be kind enough to explain about the burning questions of the day.
Then Klaus Heinrich explained what he had learnt from Herr von Knobelsdorff, and talked about the land and its state. He was well posted on every point at which the skinny index-finger had paused: he talked about the natural and the indebted, the general and the particular, the inherited and the intensifying misfortunes; he emphasized particularly the figures of the State debt, and the burden they laid on our national economy—they were six hundred millions—and he did not forget to mention the underfed peasants in the country-side.