Anarchistbanjo's World

OD by Karl Hans Strobl and translated by Joe E Bandel

“Now only the Schuh with his pictures remains for us,” the baron growls grimly, “a stroke of luck that we still have him.”

The Schuh leans over there against the wall, legs crossed, head propped against his arm, in a challengingly picturesque pose. He takes no notice of the glances …drawing attention to himself, and when the people ask: “Who is that?” then one or the other will say: “Don’t you know him? That’s the Schuh, the Karl Schuh, the one with the gas microscope and the camera obscura, who’s making such a sensation in Vienna now. He gave demonstrations in the university hall and in the Theresianum in the Society of Physicians and even before the Imperial Family in Schönbrunn. The Baron von Reichenbach met him through the late Baron Jacquin, and he knows why he invited him. Just wait and see what we’ll get to see.”

“I beg you, dear Herr Schuh,” says the baron, “are you ready now to present your pictures?”

Karl Schuh bows: “Certainly, Herr Baron. But you promised that your gracious Fräulein daughter would sing. Everyone is tense, everyone full of joyful anticipation for a refined artistic enjoyment.”

Reichenbach makes a contemptuous hand gesture. “Hermine’s singing master has fallen ill, and there’s no one to accompany her.”

“Is that all?” says Schuh, as a modest self-confidence swells his chest, “I dare to take on the accompaniment.”

“Are you musical too, you jack-of-all-trades?” Reichenbach marvels.

“A little. As I said, if the gracious Fräulein will do me the honor…”

“Come,” and the baron pulls the young man by the hand toward Hermine, who is still desperately rummaging through the sheet music and doesn’t know how she should manage it, to retreat without causing a stir. “Here is the rescuer in need,” says Reichenbach, “Herr Schuh will accompany you.”

Hermine glances shyly up at the young man; this stranger is to accompany her, the risk only grows greater thereby, and a ghastly catastrophe will be the inevitable end. But the young man nods to Hermine with a laugh; he has a merry, good-natured, confident face; he winks roguishly, is not in the least intimidated by the crowd of people in the garden hall, and says: “It’ll be fine. What do you have there?”

A quick glance through the sheet music; “ta-ta … ta-ta-ta-ta,” he hums and takes a few grips on an invisible keyboard: “Well then, if you want to venture it… that’s no witchcraft at all.”

Something of his nonchalance and daring flows invigoratingly over to Hermine. It is no small thing to sing, worn down by the conversation with Doctor Eisenstein and the scene with her father, and in the uncertainty of whether she will find accord with this strange man.

But after the first bars, it becomes lighter in Hermine, a timid glimmering of hope for a happy outcome. At first she had sung as if in a stupor, the notes dancing before her eyes, scarcely hearing herself, crushed by the consciousness of having to sacrifice herself to the Moloch who sat there with fifty heads and gawked at her. But her accompanist masters the piano; he commands it more freely, less pedantically than her teacher, and yields to her in all things. Now Hermine sees the notes again and hears herself and overcomes her uncertainty and sings songs by a half-forgotten Viennese musician named Franz Schubert, of whom the old Meisenbiegel thinks highly.

The Moloch applauds, naturally, how could it do otherwise when the daughter of the house sings? There is no enthusiasm in it, however; this music goes too little into the ear—who is this Franz Schubert, after all?

But then the arias come. From Norma, from The Sleepwalker, there the audience roars, and the applause rages so genuinely and persistently that Hermine must encore “The White Lady.” It is a great success, almost as great as that of Dommeyr, and everyone claps, and Dommeyr embraces the singer, kisses her on the forehead, and says: “It is a crime, my child, if you do not go on the stage.”

Hermine stands radiant, and there is an infinite gratitude in her for the young man who has helped her to this triumph. She would gladly say a good word for him, but he is already away from the piano, for now he comes to his true domain.

The Baron von Reichenbach announces that Herr Karl Schuh will demonstrate his gas microscope and his camera obscura.

“Naturally, in the house of the scholar, science cannot be absent,” remarks the great Liebig to his neighbor, the dermatologist Hebra.

It turns out, however, to be more entertaining than most guests expect. Some preparations are necessary; a white screen is stretched, Schuh sets up an apparatus, and then the candles are extinguished.

Max Heiland uses the opportunity to lean over Dommeyr, as if whispering something in her ear, and kisses her bare shoulder.

The limelight hisses on, and then a bright circle appears on the stretched screen. Into it, the young man now conjures all sorts of strange things: the dotted canals of the conifers, the spiral air vessels of insect larvae, the Purkinje sweat canals, the vascular branchings on the hair bulb, the structure of bones, the enamel substance of the tooth, even the blood corpuscles of the frog.

A thoroughly serious matter, but Karl Schuh handles it wittily and entertainingly. He says: “So that the esteemed ladies know what their enchanting alabaster teeth really look like.”

Or: “Not just with beets and radishes, but also with the most beautiful women’s hair, it depends on healthy roots.”

They are all otherwise invisible things, unveiled secrets of nature, a penetration into the realm of the smallest and most inconspicuous, into a world of overwhelming wonders that the researcher alone normally enters, but which is here brought before all eyes.

No one, however, is so captivated by all of this as Hermine. She sits, surrounded by darkness, all eyes, spellbound by the light circle on the screen. What she wrests from nature through laborious work at the microscope is here laid out before her with seemingly playful ease. Everything this young man tackles seems to yield to him, to submit to his will; one has to do with a person whom life offers no resistances. It is sunshine over him, while one oneself sits on the shady side, oppressed by the heaviness of the blood, incapable of the élan and speed of existence. But there are bridges, airy bridges of double commonality between her and him, not only music, but also science.

And now Karl Schuh is finished and explains only that he is striving with all zeal to further perfect his apparatus and that it is merely a matter of producing an even more light-strong objective, upon which quite different results would then be showable.

And then he too reaps the applause of his very stimulated and satisfied audience. The professors Schrötter, Hebra, and Unger draw near in conversation; Count Coronini and Señor Cevallos y León, attaché at the Spanish embassy, express themselves very approvingly; even the great Liebig honors him with a few words.

Suddenly a commotion arises in the middle of the hall, an unrest, a pressing toward a point; a clump of people balls itself together. It has the appearance as if someone is unwell; certainly someone has become ill; yes, Frau Hofratin Reißnagel has just fainted from her chair.

The attending doctors busy themselves about her, but the young Doctor Eisenstein takes command: “It is nothing… I know it… the Frau Hofratin often suffers under such attacks… it is the heat, the many people, the closed windows… I beg you, make way.”

The Frau Hofrätin is carried into the Chinese room, where it is airier; she is laid on the sofa and washed with ether from Reichenbach’s laboratory. While she slowly revives, the guests depart; they have really stayed too long, and the way back to the city is far, but it has been an exceedingly beautiful evening, successful in every respect, except for the little incident with the Hofrätin, but now it is time to go.

Reichenbach shakes hands, smiles, and lets no one notice that he has a disappointment to overcome, because no one has come forward to point out in a little speech that this festival actually had a special occasion underlying it. It would have been fitting to say something comparable, for example, that one had gathered for the first time today in the house of a Freiherr von Reichenbach or something like that. In any case, it is his wish that no fuss be made of it; but it is certainly not his wish that the painter Heiland takes the Dommeyr’s cloak from the servant’s hand and drapes it over her shoulders himself, and that they then go off together, as if they were glad of their escape.

Karl Schuh stands before him and bows: “Will you be so kind as to have my apparatus returned to me tomorrow?”

“May I keep it for two more days? I would like to examine it more closely. In general, dear friend, I have much to discuss with you. You are a bright mind and a skilled practitioner, from whom even I can still learn a thing or two. And your piano playing—my utmost respect!”

“Won’t you occasionally make music with Hermine here and there? With the old Meisenbiegel, it’s no longer the right thing. Come, you will always be welcome to the father and the daughter.”

“If I may?” Karl Schuh beams with obvious delight, “Nothing could please me more.”

Now everything is gone; even the Frau Hofrätin has been stowed in the carriage and driven home with her husband and Eisenstein. The servants begin to clear up; Reichenbach wanders with hands clasped behind his back, sullenly through the discomfort of the ruins that remain after a festival. In front of the buffet in the rose room, Reinhold siphons remnants from the destroyed bowls and heaps them on a plate.

“Where were you?” asks Reichenbach, “I didn’t see you the whole evening?”

Reinhold startles at the sudden address. He hadn’t heard his father coming and had thought Reichenbach had already withdrawn. One is never safe from the father; he ambushes one often from behind, as if he were always lying in wait. It is vexing to feel caught and to stand there like a schoolboy.

“I could only come late,” says Reinhold with rising defiance, “Schuh was just showing his pictures.”

“Where were you?” asks Reichenbach, “it is strange that you seem to place no value on participating in your father’s gatherings. It was downright embarrassingly noticeable that you were absent.”

Naturally, no one noticed, but for educational reasons it is always appropriate to bring the criminal’s sin to his consciousness. “And I ask you,” the Freiherr continues, “put down the plate when you speak to me. It is not fitting that you stand there with the plate in your hand when you speak to your father.”

Reinhold folds and quickly sets the plate down among the cleared bowls. Yes, the father knows how to deal with budding disobedience in the twinkling of an eye.

“I was in the city,” Reinhold stammers, “in the Chemical Society. We have…”

“I will tell you where you were. You were with your big-mouth heroes, those students whose second word is freedom, those people’s benefactors who only stoke discontent and want to turn everything upside down. Those people are no company for you; remember that, you must take care that you are the son of the Freiherr von Reichenbach. A son of the Freiherr von Reichenbach must not associate with revolutionaries. Understood!”

Reinhold stands at attention, and after Reichenbach has sent a long, stern, threatening gaze after his words, he lets the chastened one go, to look once more at his silkworms before going to sleep.