He looked from face to face, but none would meet his eye. Eventually Brother Joseph replied to the question.
"We thought at first there would be a way of letting the yeast organisms grow while preventing the rod organisms from competing," he said, "But these results make that unlikely. The rod-bacteria grow so fast it may not be possible to stop them. Each of those colonies growing on the surface of the broth contains thousands, hundreds of thousands of bacteria all of which arose from a single progenitor in one day! Nothing we know of in nature grows that fast."
"So any wine that already has these rods within it, is doomed?" Napp asked, sensing the sentiment in the room. "And Herr Druer's wine already has these rods?"
"Unfortunately that is so," Mendel said reluctantly. The success of the last few days in isolating the rods and finding the cause of the souring process had given him a false sense of security. Until now he had felt sure that they would be able to find a way of fermenting the wine so that the yeast could grow but the bacteria could not. Now he was not so sure. The bacteria grew and reproduced so rapidly it did not look as if anything could stop them.
"So you cannot help him," Napp said, thinking of the unfortunate wine merchant. It was more of a statement than a question.
"It seems unlikely," Brother Matthew said, "If Herr Druer is to have this wine ready for Holy Saturday, we have to find an answer in the next two weeks, or it will be too late. But research is unpredictable and its fruits rarely ripen on demand. It is possible that a solution to the problem exists, but can we find it in time? It is impossible to say."
"But you will keep trying?" Napp could sense the draining away of confidence and wanted to halt the process before Mendel became too depressed. Time and again his favorite monk had ended up in a hospital bed after a failure or setback in his life. One of the easiest ways of preventing this from happening was to keep him busy with some scientific task, and in the winter his peas did not grow. "You must test these rods, and see if they can be killed or at least prevented from growing. Have you any ideas?"
At the end of the room, by the stove, Brother Matthew snorted. He was a tall, well built man, somewhat corpulent at this stage in his life, with a round face and receding, but still blondish hair. Even in a room this size, he tended to dominate the proceedings by the simple projection of his personality. It was, in Abbot Napp's opinion, a very great pity that Klacel was such a Czech nationalist or "Hussite" as the authorities called him. Had he shown more restraint, Klacel could have been a dominant force in local politics, a successful teacher or even an abbot. But the tension between his fervently held beliefs and those of the German dominated leaders in Brno had brought his once promising career to a complete halt.
"Heat," said Klacel, thumping the stove and making it rattle, "heat kills everything. If we heat up the wine to the point where it kills the rods and the yeast then add back fresh, uncontaminated yeast, we may yet save the brew."
"It is true what Brother Matthew says," said Mendel, "I did raise that possibility with Herr Teplicka, the wine master in Herr Druer's cellars, but he was of the opinion that heating the 'must', as he called it, would ruin the final product, even if we could get the yeast to ferment after such dramatic treatment." He scratched his head with the pen he was holding and left another blue streak across his scalp. "But ... Herr Teplicka did say something of interest."
All heads turned towards him. "It appears that Herr Druer, in order to save money, omitted an important stage in the preparation of the wine barrels. After they have been cleaned, it is considered vital that sticks of yellow sulfur are burned within the cask before the 'must' is added and fermentation started. Herr Druer did not do this, and his wine became contaminated with rods. There may be a connection."
"I don't see one," Klacel said, dismissively. "How can burning sulfur in an empty barrel stop these bacterial rods from growing in the liquid? It sounds more like black magic or superstition, not science."
"I'm not so sure. There could be a connection. Anyway, it is worth a try," Brother Gregory said.
"You mean we should start burning sulfur and chanting chants in the hope that the bacteria smell us or hear us and become so frightened they stop growing," Klacel grunted. A modernist, he had no faith in tradition.
But Mendel was not so easily put off by the scorn of his friend, and to Napp's delight, rose to the challenge.
"The sound of you singing would stop a charging rhino," he told Klacel with a laugh, "but I think we can be more subtle than that. What if we burn a tiny particle of sulfur in one of these bottles before we add the rods. We could then see if indeed something left in the air by the sulfur stops the bacteria from growing."
Well content, Abbot Napp crept quietly out of the store room. Behind him the three monks were starting to argue again and ideas were being tossed back and forth. As he climbed the stairs back to his rooms, the raised voices followed and carried with them the seeds of a solution to Herr Druer's problems. It did not occur to him until many weeks later, that, during his talk with Mendel and Klacel about bacteria and wine, he had completely forgotten about Brother Timothy and the incident with Monsignor Schrattenbach. It was a moment of forgetfulness that, of all people, Mendel would live to regret.