Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, an Ordinary Life

by Karel Čapek

  “Did I? I was hardly aware.” He glanced thoughtfully sideways. “You see, that also gives space … such a strange spaciousness. On one side those old Spanish families, aristocracy, sir, a world to itself, tradition and respectability, mantillas and crinolines; or American naval officers—how these worlds clash. How many races and riff-raff… down to those negroes in the clearing who tear to pieces a live chicken with their teeth, voodoo, voodoo—the bellowing and flopping of the mating frogs; the clatter of the wooden mill crushing the sugar-cane; the shrieks and guffaws of the mulattos kicking with their legs in the clasp of lust; teeth and shiny bodies—what a heat, what a heat,” he murmured, soaking with sweat so much that his limp pyjamas stuck to his back. “The drone of a moth which crackles as it flies into the fire. And overhead the Southern Cross like a chemical formula, and thousands of starry constellations which outline in the sky the formulae of unknown and strongly smelling compounds.”

  “And again,” he waved with his erect finger, “it was beyond him, and in him at the same time: laziness and hypertrophy—a blind creative force, and that drowsy lethargy, two fevers, a fire dying and fecund. In him, in him, everything was in him. Again those frogs which mate together out of infinite boredom, a wooden mill of routine, animals roaring, bare fleet flopping in the dark in search of vain and sweaty satisfaction—and terribly flaming stars, and the man in the universe pinned down to the earth like a mounted beede; and again the ship tossing at anchor, and rocking sluggishly in the slimy water of the harbour, an impatient desire to run away from those frogs, and from that mill; the feeling that everything ought to be different, but that it is not worth while. Pieces of the world, or lumps of the soul; there’s no difference. It’s all the same.”

  “He was alcoholic, wasn’t he ?” asked the specialist. “A heavy drinker, wasn’t he ?”

  “How do we know,” said the clairvoyant vaguely, “whether a man drinks out of solitude or out of obstinacy ? What is he loosening and melting in him: the ice of destitution or a little ill-tempered, jumping flame ? You’re right, he had gone to pieces very much; he could have been a powerful gentleman with fat hps, instead of rolling about swollen with rum, or dried up with fever like that. Why didn’t he provide himself with a ball of gold which would have tied him to one place ? Property makes a man setded and cautious. He could have been rich and afraid of death.”

  “Nothing else ?” asked the surgeon after a moment’s silence.

  The clairvoyant grinned. “You would like me to invent something, wouldn’t you ? A beautiful Creole for him to fall in love with. Some erotic adventure in which his life would be at stake. Wild animals, and tornadoes. Interesting events in an active life. I’m sorry,” he jeered, “but events aren’t in my line; I look at life in its totality, and I can’t provide you with chequered life stories.” He seemed annoyed as if he had lost the thread. “I know,” he mumbled, “you’re interested in that scar on his leg. It was nothing, only an accident; he had no passion for hunting, and he didn’t look for excitement in danger.” He knitted his brows and swayed with the strain of remembering. “He fell foul of a wild beast that others were hunting,” he burst out at last, glad that it was over. “It’s true, he went through a lot; but that was because at first he was impatient and irritable; that is, he was prone to encounter situations that don’t occur to people of a quiet disposition. Later on he became lazy, and dull, and without caring for it, wealth began to cling to him, his outward resdessness was succeeded by a drowsy and misguided kink in his mind. Most of the time he lay in his room, his mouth half open with the heat, listening to the buzzing of the flies against the mosquito netting; for hours at a time, for whole days he gaped at the ceiling, and at the wall stuck over with patterned wallpaper. It was covered with hexagonal pictures, like a honeycomb, and he put up with them without thought and without motion.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  “STRANGE,” exclaimed the clairvoyant, “how his life was closing in and becoming almost reconciled in that feeling of solitude. Apparently in his childhood he had been surrounded by walls covered with the same or a similar kind of design, and even then there was a feeling of solitude in him. If he had cried openly the nurse would have gone to ask what was the matter with him; but now it was an old negress with long breasts flapping like shiny plaice.

  All his life might be only a dream amidst those regular diagrams; who knows how long a dream lasts, perhaps a second, perhaps an hour. All other things, in fact, only came to disturb that ingrained solitude of a lonely child: his father’s reprimands, school, youth, the sugar factory, and his wanderings, Lord, that futile wandering! Some huge bug with orange and green, dots running over the patterned wallpaper, not in a straight line as if it wished to get anywhere, but here there, here there, always stopping for a moment, and then off again somewhere else; he gazed at it for hours, too lazy to get up and throw it out. And then, yes, still that irritated buzzing of the fly hitting its head against the mosquito netting. That was everything; but what came from outside, the gabble of the negroes, the clacking of the mill, the dry rustling of the palm-trees, the rustle of the sheaves of sugar-cane, cracking in the heat of the sun, a thousand voices and murmurs, all that was nothing, only so much phantasy: he could half-close his eyes and listen to it flowing away into nothingness.

  In that lethargy a scrap of a paper or a copy of a journal fell into his hands, the journal of some professional publication, or something like that; he turned over the pages without interest, and halted at a hexagonal diagram from the corners of which rays ran out with symbols of atoms. How about it, how about it, it was a very long time since such-like things had interested him. But the pictures on the wall changed into chemical formulae, they seemed to grin at him, again he took the bit of paper in his hand, and studied that diagram with contracted eyebrows, spelled out the letters, and struggled through the erudite text. Suddenly he sat up, sprang up, ran about in the room, and beat his head. Yes, yes, surely it was that very diagram, that damned chemical formula, with which more than twenty years ago, yes, Christ, what a long time, what a long time! with which he had gone to the arch-priest of chemistry, and, sir, if you gave permission for work in your laboratory—on a bigger scale—with this supposed compound. He raised his bristly eyebrows—what long hair; nonsense, impossible. Apparently you haven’t heard of this and that authority, you haven’t read this and that work: ages ago I showed scientifically that the benzole group, and so on. Case X ran round the room, and snorted excitedly. And here it’s in black and white, signed by some American, of course; and unsuspected industrial possibilities, he says—Case X halted as if rooted to the ground. And that was only one link of a chain of possibilities, one stone in the vault; that formula would link up with another like the cells of a honeycomb in accordance with geometrical laws. And they don’t know that, Case X sniggered, they haven’t got to that; but it’s written down, everything set out, and written down in those notebooks, put away in a box, in a lumber-room. With them are broken toys, and clothes from mother. Perhaps termites have already destroyed everything. No, there are no white ants there; everything is just as it was …”

  The clairvoyant, sitting on the bed, began to sway with his body. “He sat on the bed, swaying to and fro, strenuously recalling what those formulae were like, and how they fitted together. But his mind was unbalanced through heavy drinking and indolence, flight and solitude; he beat at that learned paper with his fist as if he wanted to force it into compliance, but what could he do, what could he do with that dull and thick head. Instead of chemical formulae, the Southern Cross, Eridanus, Centaur, and Hydra stole into his mind. He still tried to brush it all away, but it weighed on him like a numb and dreadful strain; and suddenly it came—like a flash; I will go home and find those notebooks. It was as if everything fell away from him, such a peculiar and immense relaxation. Then he got up, opened the window for a fly which was buzzing madly and in desperation against the net, he also set free the bug helplessly wandering over the wall.�
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  The clairvoyant with his head to one side seemed to enjoy the taste of this picture. “It’s strange,” he observed, “that it’s possible to explain the same event in two entirely different and at the same time correct ways. If Case X decided so precipitously to return, you would say, and so would he: it was so, that they would not steal his spiritual property. He began to be terribly anxious about his notebooks when he realized that they might be of some value. Certainly it would be possible to draw from it a considerable sum of money—even that side of the business was of some interest to Case X, who was no longer a young fellow. But chiefly there was the motive that it was HIS business, that strong accent on the I which none of us men escapes. We defend OUR possessions, OUR rights, OUR work so instinctively and ferociously as if we were defending our own life.

  “But on the other side,” said the clairvoyant, bending his head over the other shoulder as if to gain a favourable point of view, “these are immediate or actual motives, I should say, mere pretexts on which an act or a decision could be arrived at. If we view Case X in the light of the totality of his life, the matter is different. Not only was the matter of his spiritual property at stake, but something bigger and more difficult; duty which he ran away from once by letting himself be defeated. He violated the task he wasn’t equal to, and he let it slip out of his hands; from that time on he lived an odd, stray life that was not his own; one might say that he ran off his proper track. Yes, one may call it his tragic error, and it really was an error, even although he could not have acted differently. And then he returned—or was by his inner guidance turned back to the way which he had lost because he had not the patience and consistency to go on with it. He was returning, a man physically ruined, infected with the canker of lassitude, but mature. Then at last he realized the dreadful and inexorable constraint of life, for he felt it his duty to die. The circle was closing in, and necessity was being fulfllled.”

  “So he did want to come back?” reminded the surgeon after a while.

  “Yes, but first he had to do this and that: to sell the property and suchlike things. The more those outside obstacles became involved the more violently his impatience accumulated; through the days of delay his haste almost became an affliction; he was beyond himself with the fury of return, every minute was for him a nagging torment; at last he disentangled and tore away everything, and back he dashed to where he had come from.”

  “By boat?” asked the surgeon.

  “… I don’t know. But if he had been borne by a ray of light, even that would have been intolerably slow for him, and he would have pressed his nails into his palms with insane impatience. Certainly his return was violent and infinite like a headlong fall.”

  “I looked at the map,” observed the surgeon. “He might have come via Florida, Europe, or via Natal, Dakar, Europe. But wasn’t it chance that he should have found an aeroplane ready!”

  “Chance,” mumbled the clairvoyant. “There is no such thing as chance. It was predestined that he should travel with such fury. He left behind a fiery trail like a meteor.”

  “And … why did he crash?”

  “He was at home then.” The clairvoyant raised his eyes. “Understand, he had to crash. He could not do anything more. It was enough that he had come back.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  WHAT could be done, what could be done when his heart weakened; it beat quicker, always quicker, but his blood-pressure fell; how soon would that tattered heart stop with a faint hiccup ? The end of Case X. Who put that nosegay by his bed?

  “There’s a new kind of serum for yellow fever, they say,” the famous specialist was heard to say. “But where could we get it here, eh ? Besides, he’ll die of heart-failure, even God can’t help him with that.”

  The nurse crossed herself.

  “That clairvoyant of yours,” went on the old coryphe, sitting on the edge of the bed, “that’s a nice neurotic. But how he described the interconnection of those solitary and excited periods was quite interesting. It would correspond to the periodic succession of depression and excitation in a badly balanced man. That explains sufficiently well the story of Case X.”

  “As much as we know,” said the surgeon, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Something surely, my friend,” said the specialist. “That body says a lot. For instance, that he was down there a long time, but that he was not born there; he caught any tropical disease that was going, ergo he was not acclimatized. I ask you, why did he run away to such lost places ?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered the surgeon. “I’m not a clairvoyant.”

  “Nor am I, but I’m a doctor,” said the old gentleman with meaning.

  “Look here, he was periodically neurotic, a dual personality, easily succumbing to fits of depression.”

  “That’s what that clairvoyant explained to you,” grinned the surgeon.

  “Of course, but patellar reflexes also say something. Hum, what did I want to say ?—Yes, a cyclothymic like that easily gets into conflict with his surroundings, or his employment, weariness comes over him, he lets everything go, and runs away. If he were physically weaker he might submit passively; but that chap was so physically developed—you’ve noticed that, haven’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “His reactions must have been abnormally violent, almost throwing him off his line. As a doctor I ought not to say so, but physical weakness with many people is something like wise and gentle fetters; instinctively they put a brake on their reactions because they are afraid not to crack up. This one had no need to be careful with himself; and so be was not afraid of such a jump. As far as West Indies, what?”

  “Via service in the navy,” reminded the surgeon.

  “That also shows a roving disposition, doesn’t it. As you were good enough to remark, it is a body of an educated man; that Case X was not born a tramp, and if he became a sailor or an adventurer, it reveals the damnable cleavage in his life. What sort of a conflict was it ? It’s all the same; whether it was of one kind or another, it was conditioned simply by his constitution.”

  The specialist leaned over the sphygmometer fastened to the arm of the unconscious man. “It’s bad,” he sighed, “he’s sinking; he won’t last much longer.” He rubbed his nose, and watched with regret the faint and irregular breathing of that immovable body. “Down there,” he said, “I should think that there are quite good doctors, those in colonial service; I wonder why they let him be gnawed through with framboesia. He must have lived in some place where doctors were too far away; perhaps some negro magician on Haiti, or somewhere, rubbed some stuff on it for him. That was no civilized life. Oh dear.” He blew into his handkerchief, and carefully rubbed it. “A life story. You can read many queer things.” The old gentleman nodded his head thoughtfully. “And he drank, he must have drowned his wits in drink. Think of it in that climate, in that feverish and stewy heat—that was not even being alive, it was half-unconsciousness, deception, wandering away from reality—”

  “What interests me most,” said the surgeon suddenly becoming unusually communicative, “is why he was coming back—why he was coming back in such a dreadful hurry. First, that—that he flew in such a storm as if he couldn’t wait. And then that he came back with yellow fever. Four or five days before the crash he must have been somewhere in the tropics, isn’t that so? That means that he had … I don’t know; apparently from one aeroplane to another—it’s queer. I’m always wondering what a tremendously strong motive he must have had to come back with such a rush. And bang, in that flight he got killed.”

  The specialist raised his head. “Listen … he’d got to die all the same. Even if he hadn’t crashed…. It was very nearly the end with him already.”

  “Why?”

  “Sugar, liver—and especially the heart. There was nothing to be done. Eh, my friend, it wasn’t so easy to come back. Too long a journey.” The old gentleman raised himself. “Take that sphygmometer off him, sister. Well, he came back, and now h
e’s nearly home. He’s not wandering any further, he knows the way—isn’t it true, my lad ?”

  “DEAR DOCTOR,

  When you have a free moment, read these few pages that I enclose. I want to explain that they are about the man who fell from the sky, and whom you in the hospital called Case X. You advised me not to think of him any more; I didn’t obey, and the result is these pages. If he’d had his name on the report sheet over his head, or if anyone had known the slightest bit about him, it would probably not have occurred to me to think about him; but his fatal incognito would not let me rest. This shows you how accidental and casual are the causes which excite our minds.

  From that moment I have been thinking of him, this in literary language means that I have been inventing a story about him, one of the thousand stories that I haven’t written and shall not write. It is a bad habit to look at people and at things for possible stories. As soon as you open your mind to possibility, you are lost; you open, as they say, the door of your phantasy; nothing prevents you from inventing anything, for the sphere of possibility is inexhaustible, running from every face and event into infinity, with an agreeable and disturbing freedom. But look out, stop! As soon as you start on that line you discover that even by way of fiction you must travel with decision, examining the fitness of every step. Here we’ve got it! Now we have to split our heads deciding which possibility is possible and probable; we have to support it with our knowledge of facts and with reasons, we have to struggle with our own phantasy, nursing it so that it does not forsake that mysterious and proper path that is called truth. What folly to suck truth out of one’s finger! what nonsense to invent people and stories, and then deal with them as if they were real! I will give you an axiom of metaphysical madness: that possibility which among all possibilities is the only one possible WOULD BE REALITY. See the fixed idea of men of fancy: to chase reality through the roundabout of phantoms. If you think that all we have to do is to manufacture illusions, you are mistaken; our mania is more monstrous: we attempt to achieve reality itself.