“I’m hoping for a pay increase soon, because I have connections and acquaintances,” I now said, although I should rather have answered, “I’m afraid of losing even this job I have.”
“It’s difficult to base such an important decision as marriage merely on hopes,” he said. “I am a poor man, but I do have a greater income than you and I am completely free of debt now; yet my grandchild finds it necessary to earn a living. If she were to marry you, then, in order to get by somehow, she would have to start earning twice or three times as much. Firstly, there is nowhere to get such a position, or if there were, then love or health would not sustain you for a long time, quite apart from the fact that my grandchild’s health is not of the strongest. You can draw your own conclusions from all that.”
“But Herr Baron, you are forgetting the main thing – love,” I said.
“Quite the contrary, I was just emphasising that given the circumstances, love would not sustain you for long,” he said. “And if you really love my grandchild, and honour her as well, then you shouldn’t get her into a situation, with her youth and inexperience, that would be a heavy trial not only for her, but also for yourself. You, as a corporation member, should understand that more easily than anyone else, because you belong to a circle where it is thought that each nationality should have its special and chosen stratum or rank, with a natural right to hope for easier opportunities than the great mass or hoi polloi –”
“Herr Baron, you are wrong there, or at least you’re exaggerating,” I said.
“Where am I wrong?” he interjected impatiently. “That you don’t believe in, desire or want or hope for an elected or higher position? Now listen, young man, you don’t have to try to prove anything to me, an old Baltic German. Our corporations were not only for drinking and singing, and you had to keep quite pure from women. The corporations made men into what they had to be in later life, and therein was their main significance. If in your own corporations you have forgotten that single thing, which used to entitle them to drink, then I am very sorry that that fine old institution has slipped to such a low level. But tell me, young man, do you really need corporations in order to drink and sing together? If that is so, then I had better change my decision about you completely and give up, on any account, granting permission to my grandchild to marry you, since at the moment the only major obstacles to it are economic ones.”
“Sir Baron, I am in great perplexity,” I said, “as your grandchild, Miss Erika, suggested to me at the beginning of our acquaintance that I am too much of a Korporant, but you want to accuse me of not being enough of one; I can see no way out of this dilemma, even if I were richer than I am.”
“I understand my grandchild very well,” said the old gentleman. “In getting to know you she had hoped to find a simple and well-educated young Estonian, but now she has met a Korporant, who one way or another was supposed to continue the same thing that has become a stumbling block perhaps even to us. Naturally this disappointed her somewhat. But believe me, Mr Studious, my disappointment is even greater and deeper if I hear from your own lips that you are not continuing anything at all, but you only drink and sing. Or you don’t drink, do you?”
“Herr Baron, how am I supposed to take this?” I stammered, a little embarrassed.
“Well, anyway,” he said. “Of course, it cannot be otherwise, that is natural. But let me ask you directly and openly: so you don’t do anything else when you meet but drink and sing? Forgive me, an old man, but I’m interested in the development and progress of my homeland.“ And he said in Estonian, “I luff this Estonian nation, that’s why I want to know. I understands: you comes together, you drinks and sings, and if you gets enough drink and sing, then you starts this dear Estonian nation to lead and rule, because it be one stronk nation, as I myself with own ear hears. But how lonk you thinks to sing and drink so and to rule this Estonian nation? My heart gets heavy when I so thinks, because I luff this Estonian nation, I vill luff him with own old heart, until it stops.” In his big armchair he seemed completely hunched as if from extreme exhaustion; only his shiny white hair and almost identical hands, supported from the elbows on the arms of the chair, glimmered clearly in the gloom. After a little while he continued in his own language: “And my heart is pained for my own dear grandchild, who is the only worry and joy of my old age, because it seems to me that she has given her young love away to a man who doesn’t really know the seriousness of life, for he is a member of a society that only drinks and sings.”
“For the sake of my love I am ready for anything, even to leave the Korporation,” I said, trying to save whatever could be saved.
“That only makes the matter worse,” he replied.
“Herr Baron, I don’t understand you,” I exclaimed. “I’m in the Korporation, and that’s bad; I leave it, and that’s even worse.”
“Exactly!” he affirmed. “Even worse! For that only goes to prove it: you lack seriousness in life. You take steps and you take on obligations that you are prepared to give up at the drop of a hat. For me and my contemporaries the corporation and its colour were a shrine, and will be until I die; it was the same with my marriage: I intended that to be a lifelong one. But of course, I am old, the former sanctities are vanishing; even wives are exchanged like shirts these days, as if they needed laundering.”
“When I came to you, Sir Baron, it was only to ask you for Miss Erika’s hand for all her life. And by all that’s holy, I swear…”
“But what is actually holy these days?” he asked. “What do you regard as holy? Tell me, for example: do you believe in God, the source of all that’s holy? Do you believe in him in any form at all? Do you feel in your heart anything eternal and limitlessly great, before which you want, once a day, a week, a month, even a year to sink to the ground with all your being, repent of your mistakes in all seriousness, trying to become a better person in the future? Don’t think I’m asking you for my own sake; I’m not much interested any more in the people of today and their gods and sanctities. Some things that have come from the past are much more alive to me than the people of today and their gods. I am only asking for the sake of her whose hand you are asking me and whom you say you love above all things in the world. So answer me with the voice of your heart’s blood, as you would answer her: do you have any basis for holiness, as I explained it to you? Do you ever fall to the ground before it?”
“Not quite that, but…“ I made to reply.
“So you don’t!” he intervened. “With you and God it’s the same story as with you and the corporation: he does exist and he doesn’t. But by what holy thing do you want to swear that you’re asking for Erika’s hand for life? Your parents’ god is dead for you, your forefathers’ idols have become indifferent and their traditions ridiculous. Of course your forefathers did have traditions, I know that – but what will you have to support you, what do you have to hold on to? How will you convince me that I should entrust you with the fate of the one who’s dearest to me?”
“Herr Baron, you’re asking more of me for the hand of your grandchild than any young man of today can promise you, if he is as honest and open with you as I am. I’m sure that the same change is going on among your young people, the same development, the same ruination, if you want to call it that, as you tried to find in me, but you wouldn’t refuse the hand of your grandchild to a young man in your own circle.”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” he replied with an obvious lack of hesitation.
“So the basic reason for your objection is that I’m an Estonian, then?” I concluded.
“That is so, and yet it isn’t,” he said. “Your conclusion is off the mark, because, apart from the love that you keep praising, you think more of yourself than of your beloved. Have you ever really tried to imagine what would happen if you married my grandchild? Perhaps you’ll forgive me, but now finally I come to things that maybe we should pass over in silence. But the question is important to both you and me, so let us say everything there is to say now. If you marry my grandchild, you can’t be unaware that you’re marrying a baroness, can you? You love her not only as a young girl, but as a baroness, although that title is forbidden by law. Perhaps you are emphasising to me, an old man, my baronial status not so much for myself as for yourself, because it is not a matter of indifference to you whether you ask for your sweetheart’s hand from an old farmer or a former lord of a manor.”