Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, an Ordinary Life

by Karel Čapek

  That period of my life was a kind of continuous monologue; a monologue is a dreadful thing, a bit like self-annihilation, something like sawing through the fetters that bind us to life; a man who holds a monologue is not only lonely, but he is discarded or lost. God knows what sort of obstinacy or something there was in me: in the office I got a sort of savage pleasure from the fact that it was ruining me; besides that agitated haste of arrival and departure, always that rush, always that disorder; a station, particularly a big station, is congested, a little like a festering ganglion—the devil knows why so much riff-raff, petty thieves, pimps, wenches, and queer individuals collect there; perhaps because people who are coming or going are already de-railed from their lines of habit and become, so to speak, a favourable spot upon which all kinds of vice can sprout. I sniffed with satisfaction that faint odour of decomposition, it suited my feverish mood, that revengeful feeling of annihilation and petering out. And then, you know, there was another victorious satisfaction; there on that same platform I had got out a little more than a year before, a startled country bumpkin with a wooden box, not knowing where to go; and now I was crossing the rails, waiving the notice, nonchalant and blase; how far had I gone in that time, where had I left my stupid and bashful years ? How far, almost at the end!

  One day I coughed up over my papers into my handkerchief a lump of blood, and while I was looking at it in astonishment a bigger and terrible portion came up. They crowded together round me, frightened and helpless, one old clerk wiped my sweaty forehead with a towel; I seemed to myself like Mr. Martinek at home; it used to come over him while he was at work, and then he sat on a pile of planks, terribly pale and perspiring, with his face in the palms of his hands; I used to look at him from a distance, dreadfully perplexed and frightened—now I had an equally strong feeling of terror and of distance. That old clerk with spectacles, like a slow, black beetle, took me home and put me to bed; he even came to visit me because he saw that I was afraid. After a few days I got up, but God knows what happened with me: I had a terrible desire to live, even if it were as silently and slowly as that old clerk; a desire to sit at a table and turn over the papers while the gas lamp hissed silently and stubbornly.

  “Above” in the office there was someone very sensible; they didn’t make much fuss over the investigation into the state of my health, and they moved me officially to a small railway station in the mountains.

  CHAPTER XI

  IN its way it was the end of the world; the line ended there; a little bit past the station were the buffers where the last rusty metals were overgrown with shepherd’s-purse and hair-grass. You didn’t go any farther; beyond a green mountain river murmured in the bend of a narrow valley. Well, it was like being at the bottom of a pocket there, the end, nothing beyond. I think that the railway was built there merely to carry planks from the sawmill and long, straight trunks tied with a chain. In addition to the station and the sawmill there was a pub, a few wooden houses—Germans like logs—and forests murmuring in the wind like an organ.

  The station-master was a grumpy man like a walrus; he weighed me up suspiciously. Who knows why they’ve moved this youngster here from Prague, very likely as a punishment; I shall have to watch his fingers. Twice a day a passenger train arrived, consisting of two carriages from which a group of hairy men got out with saws and hatchets, wearing green hats on ginger-haired pates; when the signal bell had stopped ringing, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, you walked out on to the platform to assist with the great event of the day. The station-master, with his hands on the back, chatted with the chief guard, the engine-driver went for a drink of beer, the stoker made as if he were wiping the engine with a dirty rag, and again there was silence; only a bit farther on the planks banged as they were being loaded on to the wagons.

  In the tiny, shady office the telegraph apparatus would tick, that was some gentleman from the sawmill announcing his arrival; in the evening a little cab would wait in front of the station while the unshaven driver thoughtfully flicked away the flies from the shaggy horse’s shoulder with the point of his whip. “Na prr,” he would say at times in a thin voice, the horse would shuffle from one foot to the other, and there was silence again. Then a little train would come puffing up with two carriages, the station-master somewhat respectfully and somewhat intimately would salute the magnate from the sawmill, who would take his seat in the cab, talking conspicuously and loudly; the other mortals would only exchange remarks under their breath with snuffling voices. And that was the end of the day; there was nothing else but to go to the pub, where one table was spread with a white tablecloth for the gentlemen from the station, from the sawmill, and from the forest management; or to take a stroll for a bit along the rails to where they were grown over with grass and shepherd’s-purse, sit down on the pile of planks, and breathe the keen air. High up a little fellow is sitting—no, it’s no longer so high, and out of the little chap has emerged a gentleman in a tight official blouse, with an official cap on the head, and with an interesting little moustache on an interestingly pale face; the devil knows why they’ve sent him here, thinks the station-master of the last station in the world. I beg to state, sir, that they’ve sent him for this; to sit on the planks as he used to sit at home. You have to go a long way to get back home again. You must learn a lot and commit many stupidities, you must cough up part of your life to find yourself again on the planks smelling of wood and resin. It’s healthy for the lungs, they say. And already it’s dark, stars peeping through in the sky; there were stars at home, too, but not in the town. How many there are, no, how many, it’s almost impossible to believe. And then one thinks how much it matters who knows how much one has gone through; and yet there are such masses of stars! And this is really the last station in the world: the line runs to its end in the grass and shepherd’s-purse, and then comes the universe. Right behind those buffers. You might say that the wood and the river are murmuring, and instead it’s the universe, the stars rustle like the alder leaves and the mountain breeze blows between the worlds: Lord, it’s good to fill your lungs!

  Or to go with a rod to catch trout, to sit by a swiftly flowing river and make as if we were fishing, and instead we’re only looking into the water to see how quickly it flows away; it is always the same ripple, and always new, always the same and new, and never an end; man, how much flows away with that water! as if something in you were detaching itself, something were swimming away from you, and the water carries it off. Where does it come from in man ? All the time it’s taking away with it some of his impurities and sadness, and always there’s enough left for the next time. Even from that solitude how much has flown away and never an end. The young man sits over the water and sighs with loneliness. That’s good, something says in him, only sigh a lot, and very deeply; it’s good for the lungs. And the trout fisherman sighs greatly and deeply.

  But be it said: he didn’t give in easily, and he didn’t just become reconciled with the last station in the world. First he had to show them that he had come from Prague and that he was not just anybody; it did him good to be a little mysterious, and he put on airs in front of the forestry probationers and the red-nosed, beardy men from the woods, like a man who has much behind him; but look what deep and ironic lines life had etched out round his mouth. They couldn’t understand it very well, they were too healthy; they bragged about their adventures with girls picking raspberries, or at village dances; and they could be absorbed in a game of skitdes for a whole Sunday afternoon. As time went on the interestingly pale man found that he was mildly and quiedy interested in watching the run of the ball and the fall of the skittles, always the same and always new, like the ripples on the river. The line grown over with hair-grass and shepherd’s-purse. The piles of planks sent away, and again there were new ones. Always the same, and always new. And, gende-men, I caught five trout. Where ? Just behind the station, such fellows. Sometimes I became horrified: Is this life ? Yes, it is life: two tiny trains a day, a blind line grown over wi
th grass, and just behind the universe like a wall.

  And the interesting young man sitting on the pile of planks stooped down with satisfaction for a tiny stone to throw at the signalman’s hen. So, and now get excited, you silly; I’m already a level-headed man.

  CHAPTER XII

  Now I understand it; all that squealing and rattling was only a crossing; I thought I should fly to pieces as it shook inside me, and instead I was already running on to the proper and long line of my life. Something adjusts itself in man when his life is getting on to its proper line: up till then he had an uncertain possibility of being this, or that, to go here or there, but now it’s to be determined by a higher validity than his own will. Therefore his inner self jibs and tosses about, not knowing that these tremors of his are just the ratde of the wheels of fate as they run on to the right rail.

  Now I understand how it is all rolled out nicely and continuously right from childhood; nothing, almost nothing, was due to mere chance, but a link in a chain of necessity. I should say that my fate was decided when in the place of my childhood they began to build a railway; the tiny world of a little old town was suddenly linked with space, the little town was putting on seven-league boots; it has changed tremendously since then, factories have sprung up, money and misery—in short, it was its historical re-birth. Even if I didn’t understand it then, I was fascinated by those new, noisy, manly things that invaded the closed world of a child, those rowdy troops of ruffians, scourings of the whole world, bangs of dynamite, and riddled slopes. I think that that child’s great attachment to a strange little girl was mainly an expression of that fascination. It remained with me subconsciously and inevitably. Why otherwise should I have jumped at the first opportunity to apply for a post on the railways ?

  Those years of study, I know, they were another rail; but wasn’t I homesick enough, and lost ? But instead I found satisfaction and certainty in performing my duties; it was a relief to stick to the prescribed line of lessons and tasks; it was some sort of order, yes, it was a fixed rail along which I could run. I am apparently a bureaucrat by nature; to give me a feeling that I am working fully and well, my life must be directed by a sense of duty. Therefore I suffered such a catastrophe when, on going to Prague, I ran off the straight and safe lines that would have guided me. Suddenly I was not governed by any schedule or by any task that must be done by to-morrow morning. Because no authority had taken me up I gave myself to the wild leadership of the fat, drunken poet. God, how simple it all is, and I thought then what experiences I was having. I even wrote poems like every other student in those days, and I thought that at last I had found myself. When I applied for the post on the railways I did it out of spite, to show my father; in reality, unconsciously and blindly, I was already feeling for MY own firm line under my feet.

  And there’s another thing, apparently a mere detail, perhaps I am making too much of it: my derailment began at the moment when, with my box in my hand, I stood on the platform, helpless and miserable, almost crying with embarrassment and shame. For a very long time I felt ashamed of that defeat. Who knows: perhaps I became a young gentleman on the railways and later on a rather bigger cog in the railways, also to efface and redeem for myself that painful and humiliating moment on the platform.

  These explanations, it’s true, are retrospective; but at times I used to have an intense and strange sensation that that particular moment CORRESPONDED to something in my-life that happened long ago; that something was being accomplished that I had already experienced before. Perhaps it was when under a hissing lamp I sat bent over the notice: Good Lord, but it was just like the time when I sweated, gnawing my pen over my school exercises, urged on by the awful realization that they must be done. Or the feeling of the conscientious pupil which I never lost all my life: that I have done all my lessons. It is strange that those moments when I was conscious of this remote and strangely clear connection with something long ago moved me like a revelation of something mysterious and great; in them life was revealed to me as a vast, determined whole linked by invisible relations which we comprehend but rarely. When at the last station in the world I sat on the planks which reminded me of father’s joiner’s yard I began for the first time, with amazement and resignation, to live the beautiful and simple order of life.

  CHAPTER XIII

  IN due time I was moved to a more important station. It was, it’s true, not big, but it was on the main line; six times a day big express trains passed through, without stopping, of course. The station-master was a German, and very good-natured; the whole day long he smoked his clay pipe, but when an express was signalled he put it down in a corner, brushed himself, and went on the platform to pay due honour to the international connection. The station was very tidy, petunias in all the windows, everywhere baskets of lobelias and nasturtiums; the garden full of lilac, jasmine, and roses, and then by the storehouse and signal-box nothing but flower beds, marigolds in flower, forget-me-nots, and antirrhinums. And everything had to shine—windows, lamps, green-painted pumps—otherwise the old gentleman was terribly annoyed: “What’s this,” he grumbled, “international expresses pass through here, and you leave muck about like this!” The muck might be a bit of waste paper, but it could not be tolerated, for a great moment was approaching: over there behind the bend with a dull roar the powerful, high chest of an express locomotive was emerging, the old gentleman took three steps forward, and already it was thundering past him: the engine-driver greeted with his hand, on the steps of the express the conductors saluted, the old gentleman stood to attention, heels together, shoes polished like a mirror, and raised with dignity his hand to his red cap. (Five paces behind, that interestingly pale official with a high cap, in trousers polished on the seat, saluting a bit more casually, that was me.) Then the old gentleman, with a wide, proprietary eye, looked at the blue sky, clean windows, flowering petunias, raked sand, his polished shoes, and the metals which glistened as if he had had them specially polished for the purpose, he contentedly rubbed his nose; well, that was all right, and went to light his pipe again. That ceremony took place six times a day, always with the same pomp and the same solemnity. Railway people throughout the whole monarchy knew of the old gentleman and his model station; that festive transit was a pleasant and serious game that they all looked forward to. Every Sunday afternoon, on the covered platform, there was a holiday corso; the local people, dressed up and starched, promenaded politely and silently under the baskets of lobelias, while the old gentleman walked up and down with his hands behind his back, looking at the lines, like the chef of an establishment having a look to see if everything is in order. It was his station, his household; and if miracles could happen so that recompense and glory might be given to righteous souls, one day an international express (the 12.17) would have stopped at the platform, and the Emperor would have stepped out; he would have raised two fingers to his cap and said: “You’ve made it very nice here, Mr. Station-master. Your station has often caught my eye.”

  He liked his station, he liked everything to do with railways, and, best of all, he liked engines; he knew them all by their series numbers and their good points. That one there doesn’t go very well uphill, but, sir, what lines she’s got! And this, look, what length, by Jove, that’s a boiler for you! He talked about them as if they were girls, with appreciation and chivalry. Yes, it’s true, you laugh at this short and stumpy thirty-six one with her squat chimney, but think how old she is, you chicken! For express engines he had an admiration absolutely passionate. That short, robust chimney, that deep chest, and those wheels, my friend, she’s a beauty! His life was almost pathetic in that beauty passed him flying like lightning; and yet for its sake he polished his shoes, for its saSe he decorated the windows with petunias, and saw to it that there was no tiny blemish anywhere. God, how simple is the prescription for a happy life: to do what we have to out of love for the thing.