Anarchistbanjo's World

OD by Karl Hans Strobl and translated by Joe E Bandel

Chapter 7

The carriage stopped, and Reichenbach ordered the coachman to drive up the road to Kobenzl; he himself took to the forest paths.

He had been with Liebig at the naturalists’ convention in Graz, had accompanied the famous friend to Munich, had been able to convince himself everywhere that his reputation held not only among specialist colleagues but had also penetrated into the consciousness of the other contemporaries, insofar as they concerned themselves with science at all. One could have spoken of a height of life; the sum of what had been achieved was great. One was a Freiherr, people looked up to one, intellectual Vienna streamed to Reichenbach’s evenings, everyone considered himself fortunate to be invited, one had really become something like the successor to Baron Jacquin, that ambitious wish too had been fulfilled; one had one’s hands in a dozen enterprises, one scattered inspirations in abundance, the working power was equal to the unheard-of demands on capacity, resistances were crushed with unrelenting force.

The Freiherr climbed the forest path upward, the foot sank into autumn leaves, the October day rejoiced in colorfulness; gold-gilded, the unfolded landscape stretched out to the one looking back.

He had made the journey from Linz by steamboat, the carriage had waited in Nussdorf, and now Reichenbach walked through his forest, after which he had longed and which now denied him the longed-for.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, one could be satisfied; one ruled fate, people were subjects, and another might have been content to know his barns were full. But Reichenbach was incapable of stopping, of basking, of resting; an insatiable urge drove him forward; it all lay so plainly, on the plain of ordinariness; emptiness yawned at him. He feared this feeling of desolation and loneliness amid the tumult of work. A friend was lacking, as the late Altgraf had been one. A woman might still have been found, not a Friederike Luise to be sure, but something living, something sparkling with mood, that would have brought a different movement into the monotony of his existence, other than the rise and fall of burden and relief.

Blows resounded through the forest, then came the cracking of branches and a crash that shook the ground. Somewhere trees were being felled; Reichenbach followed the sound, broke through a thicket, and came to a clearing. Trunks lay crisscross; the woodcutters were at work, and on a beech sat the steward Ruf, smoking his pipe. It was a new, silver-mounted pipe; Ruf went to great expense with pipes—he might have about fifty, by rough estimate, which Friederike had to clean and maintain.

He had soon after Reichenbach’s departure given up his position in the Salm service and followed Reichenbach to his estate Reisenberg. Moved by his devotion, Reichenbach had made him steward. That was a different sphere of influence than in Blansko, where the The young prince counted the trees and went after the old women if they gathered kindling in the forest. Here one could act with great liberality and had a free hand in everything. They had done Reichenbach a favor; he made no secret of his pleasure at being able to employ a deserter from the enemy’s camp. He would gladly have taken the old Johann too, but he was probably long since driving some heavenly cloud chariot.

When the steward Ruf saw the Freiherr climbing over the tree trunks, he tucked the pipe into his pocket, stood up, and took a few steps toward him: “The Herr Baron…” he said, “the Herr Baron is back already?”

His eyes glittered moistly in somewhat swollen lids; a faint, sweetish smell hung about the man. And on top of that, he smelled of pipe, and Reichenbach detested the dirty and vulgar habit of smoking.

“You yourself sent the carriage to Nussdorf, Ruf! I came on foot through the forest.”

“Certainly, Herr Baron!” said Ruf, showing an uncertain smile.

“Are the trees here already ripe for felling?” The Freiherr did not recall having heard that felling was to take place here. He gave his steward free rein, but he wanted to know what was going on in his forest.

“Ripe for felling,” said the steward, striking one of the trunks with his stick; indeed, they were ripe for felling—not all, but most of them; the forest was, in this spot, namely too dense, much too dense; it was necessary to thin it.

“And who buys the wood then?”

Well, the wood is bought by Morris Hirschel, a timber merchant; the Herr Baron had surely heard of him—he had trees felled all over the Vienna Woods, even in the state forests, but he paid decent prices.

Reichenbach walked on. This position had clearly gone to Ruf’s head; he perhaps led a somewhat too lively life, he had little friends with whom he played cards through the nights; recently, Reichenbach had seen him down in Grinzing, a woman on the left, a woman on the right, and in an advanced tipsy mood. This Vienna—how had that always grumpy Grillparzer called it! Capua of the spirits. The best principles wavered, and if one didn’t keep a firm hand on the purse, the money slipped away. Was it really for this reason that the girl, Friederike, sometimes had tearful eyes? But apart from that, Ruf was still a capable fellow and knew his business.

On the terrace, Ottane and Hermine were waiting and greeted their father, and then Ottane said that the father should go straight to his study, where Doctor Semmelweis was sitting. She had told him that the father wouldn’t be long.

“The Semmelweis? What does he want?”

Ottane didn’t know, but he had been there twice already, and she hadn’t wanted to send him away again today.

Doctor Semmelweis had taken a book from the cupboard and was leafing through it. When Reichenbach entered, he pushed it back and said: “Your treatise in the last Yearbook for Chemistry and Physics is excellent! If only I could write like that!”

Reichenbach acknowledged the praise with a dismissive hand gesture; oh, such things were really of no importance, one wrote them down in a few hours when the material was ready in one’s head. And wouldn’t the doctor like to have a cup of coffee with him? Perhaps over there with the children.

“Forgive me… I forgot, you’re coming from a journey. No, not over there… rather here, if it suits you. I’m troubling you… but it’s an urgent matter.”

Reichenbach pulled the embroidered cord of the bell and ordered coffee from Severin.

Semmelweis had thrown himself into a chair so forcefully that it rolled back a piece and bumped against a table, on which a rack of reagent vials teetered with a clinking sway. He noticed none of it; his gaze went out the window, his fingers drumming a stormy general march on the armrest.

“The scoundrels won’t let me get ahead,” he muttered to himself.

At the time when Reichenbach had met Doctor Semmelweis in the salon of Baron Jacquin, the young physician had been a self-satisfied, balanced man. Now he was consumed by bitterness and sorrow, like by a malignant ulcer; his soul was filled with .the leprosy of bitterness had struck, and the wrinkles of misanthropy were etched into his face.

“Tell me yourself,” Semmelweis continued, “aren’t those criminals who resist saving people? Doctors who would rather let thousands of women die than admit that Doctor Semmelweis is right. Blockheads, fools who refuse to see the proof that lies plain before them!”

Reichenbach knew something of the battle that Doctor Semmelweis was waging, but not enough to take any definite stance on it. It was some kind of feud among the doctors at the university and the clinics; this German-Hungarian Semmelweis had caused an uproar, and Hebra had hinted at something about it.

Cautiously probing, Reichenbach said: “One always has the closed majority against oneself when one dares something new. I know that well—they came down on me when I dealt with the meteorite fall in Hungary—”

Flushing red with anger up to his thinning hair, Semmelweis interrupted the Freiherr: “Oh, come off it. Meteorites… that squabbling could go on for ten years; here it’s about living people, about putting an end to a crime against poor women!”

Reichenbach grew somewhat stiff and aloof; after all, the cosmic origin of meteorites was not such a completely trivial matter. Somewhat coolly, he watched as his agitated visitor sprang from the chair and paced between the tables and apparatus. There wasn’t much space for it, and there was a danger that he might knock something over.

“There the women,” Semmelweis continued, “are being carried off like flies by childbed fever on our obstetric clinics. Sometimes the mortality is terrifying; entire rows of beds next to each other empty out within a few days. And do you know what the cause of childbed fever is?”

Now Reichenbach recalled that this was the discovery about which Hebra had spoken as a great matter. It suddenly occurred to him that the poor Frau Ruf had also lost her life to this disease back then. He gave no answer, but he looked at Semmelweis intently; yes, if he had really figured out how to protect the young mothers from it!

Semmelweis stopped in front of Reichenbach and fixed his gaze on him threateningly. “Do you know what the cause is? Corpse poison! The cadaver particles sticking to the hands of the doctors. But also filth from living organisms. Why is the mortality so high at the first obstetric clinic and so low at the second? Because at the first, the women are examined by young doctors who come from the dissection rooms and other patients, and at the second only by midwife trainees who have nothing to do with corpses. And why do even the women who are surprised by labor on the street or in house entrances come through happily? They come through happily if they are taken home, and they die on us at the clinic.”

“Yes, if it is so,” Reichenbach said hesitantly. “It is so, you can rely on it. It’s as clear as day. I had a friend, a professor of state medicine; a doctor cut him with a scalpel during a dissection, and my friend died of corpse poisoning. And it’s the same finding as with childbed fever. Why? Because the cause is the same.