by Karel Čapek
It was a queer time; I was as if beyond myself, and at the same time like a clairvoyant; I had the feeling that it was not myself but something powerful and strange inside me that made plans, dropped hints, and thought of everything. I could almost have said: It’s not me, it’s the other one. In a jiffy everything was fixed up, it was a pleasure; it was as if everything had been waiting for someone to make a start; after all, we Czechs had to do something. With my hands behind my back and under the eyes of the gendarmes and of the hiccoughing commandant, I received reports from the chief guards, postmen, and conductors as to where the munitions were going and the guns, what units were on the move, and things like that. In my head was the whole of the transport network, and with half-closed eyes, walking up and down the platform, I pieced it together. There was a brake man, the father of five children, a sad, silent man; I always gave him the message to take farther, this he repeated to his brother in Prague who was a bookbinder, and how it went then, I never knew. It was thrilling to do this sort of thing under the eyes of everyone, and, at the same time, to have it so well organized; at any moment our plot might have failed, and every one of us, elderly men and fathers of families, would have been in it up to the neck; my friends, that would have been a crash! We knew it, and it was on our minds when we crawled to our wives in our feather beds; but what do women know about a man? Thank goodness, our thoughts aren’t visible on our faces. For example, what causes a stoppage on the line at a station? Suddenly everybody shouts and gets worked up, and it takes a couple of days before it is straightened out again. Or lubrication in war time is bad; whose fault is it when axle boxes run hot? Our station was full of abandoned wagons and engines out of use; it’s no good getting worked up and sending telegrams, nothing can be done, we can’t get things through faster. Holding our breath we listened how it was falling to pieces.
There was an accident at the old gentleman’s station, there was a block on the line, and a train with the catde for the front ran into it; nothing big, a few injured, and the cattle had to be slaughtered on the spot, but the old gentleman was so keen on the railways that it turned his head, and he died shordy afterwards. My wife cried on my shoulder at night; I stroked her, and I was very sad. You see, I can’t tell you about my thoughts and about what I am doing; we have lived so well together and now we are so damnably far from each other. How is it that people can become so estranged!
CHAPTER XIX
THE end of the War, the end of the Monarchy; while my wife sniffed and wept (it was in her family, that loyalty to the Emperor), I received a summons from Prague to join the new Ministry of Railways and give my great experience to the task of organizing the railways of the young state. Because of that “great experience” I accepted; besides, during the War my station had suffered so much that it was not difficult for me to part from it.
This is, then, the last paragraph of an ordinary life. From my twentieth year I have been associated with the railways and I have enjoyed it; there I foimd my world, my home, and chiefly a deep satisfaction in that I was doing something that I could do well and capably. And now I was called upon to make use again of the whole of that experience. Well, see, that hasn’t been in vain. I knew it all so well from the blasting of the rocks and building of the track, from the last station in the world and the wooden shed of the lamp attendant, to the confusion and bustle of the big stations; I had met with station buildings like glass palaces, and little stations in the fields smelling of camomile and yarrow; red and green lights, the steaming bodies of the engines, signals, points, and the tapping of the wheels on the points; nothing had been in vain, it all was added up and fused into one single and vast experience; I understand the railways, and that understanding is me, it is my life. Now there is everything that I have lived, it is together in my experience; I can again make use of it, and to the full, and that is as if I lived my life again in its totality. In my office I felt—I can’t say happy, for there was too much disorder, but in my place. It was an ordinary but of its kind a complete life; and as I look back on it I see that in everything that happened some kind of order was realized, or …
CHAPTER XX
FOR three weeks I haven’t written a word; again these heart attacks have come over me as I was sitting at the desk, just in the middle of a word (should it have been law, or purpose ? I can’t say any longer). Then they sent for a doctor for me; on the whole he didn’t say much, some change in my arteries. You must take this, and mainly rest, sir, rest. And so here I he and think—I don’t know if this is a real rest, but I have nothing else to do. It is better again now, and so I wish to finish what I began; there is not much left, and I never left anything unfinished. My pen fell from my hand, just when I was about to write a big untruth; I deserved that attack. Surely I have no one whom I need deceive.
Yes, I liked the railways; but I could not like them any longer when they were messed up by war, when I made plans to sabotage them, and chiefly when I came to the Ministry. Sickened and disgusted by that paper and, for the most part, futile work called the reorganization of the railways; on one side I appreciated too well the various troubles below, and above, which offended my bureaucratic conscience; on the other side I began to sense something more inevitable, the tragedy of railway transport, which awaits the fate of the coaches and coachmen; vainglory, the great days of the railways are over. In short, this kind of work did not suit me at all; the only pleasure it gave me was that I was a rather important bureaucratic creature, that I had some sort of a title, and that I could throw my weight about: for in the end that is the proper and the only purpose in life: to rise as high as possible and enjoy one’s honour and position. Yes, and that’s the whole truth.
As I read what I have just written I feel rather flustered. How is it, the whole truth ?
Well, yes, the whole truth about what we call the purpose of life. It was no pleasure to sit in that office; that was only the sense of satisfaction that I had scrambled up to something, and a jealous envy that those more able or politically more artful had got farther still. And that is the whole story of an ordinary life.
Wait, wait, that isn’t a complete story. (There are two voices arguing, I can discern them quite clearly; the voice which is talking now as if it were defending something.) Surely I wasn’t bent in life—on some career, and such-like things!
Weren’t you really ?
I wasn’t. I was too ordinary to be ambitious. I never wanted to excel; I lived my work and did my work.
Why?
Because I wanted to do it well. To run my thumb down the front and the back, see if it’s good. That’s the real ordinary life.
Ha, and that’s why in the end we sat in that office, not to work for anything more than our own position.
That—that was something else; in fact, it had no connection with what took place before. A man changes as he grows old.
Or he gives himself away in old age, is that it ?
Nonsense. It must have been evident a long time ago that I was pushing myself to the front or something.
All right, then. And who was the little fellow who was worried because he couldn’t beat the others ? Who hated the painter’s son so violently and painfully because he was stronger and more daring—do you remember ?
Wait, it wasn’t quite like that; but surely that little chap mostly played alone; he discovered his own tiny world, his little courtyard of chips, and his corner among the planks; that was quite enough for him, and there he forgot everything. Don’t I know that?
And why did he play alone ?
Because it was in him. His whole life long he has been making his small and shut-up world. A corner for his solitude and for his everyday happiness. His enclosure of chips, his little station, his home: surely you can see that it was always in him!
You mean that need to fence off his life ?
Yes, that urge to have a world of his own.
Then do you know why he had his enclosure of chips ? Because he couldn’t excel among t
he other fellows. That was spite, that was the escape of a little boy who wasn’t strong and daring enough to match himself against the others; he made his own world out of sadness and weakness, he felt that in the wider, open world he would never be anything big and daring as he wanted to be. An ambitious little poltroon, that’s all. Do read carefully what you’ve written about him!
There’s nothing of the sort!
There is, and quite a lot; only you stuck it in between the lines to hide it from yourself. For instance, that good and industrious little pupil in the elementary school: how he couldn’t mix with his class, how he was nervous and timid; he was good because he was lonely and because he wanted to distinguish himself. And how that exemplary little boy nearly burst with pride when the teacher or curate praised him! Then tears of happiness never known before welled into his eyes; later on there will be no tears, but how his chest will puff out when he reads of his appointments. Do you remember with what unspeakable pleasure you took home your good reports ?
That’s because they pleased my father so much.
Well, then, let’s have a look at your father. He was so big and strong, the strongest of them all, wasn’t he ? But he “had great respect for gentlemen”; more precisely, he greeted them humbly, so humbly that it even made his little son blush. And all the time he was eagerly hammering it in, if only you become something, boy, some day, that’s the only thing in life, to become something. You must drudge, save, and grow rich so that the others will respect you and so that you will be somebody. Well and truly, the little chap had an example at home; that comes from his father, all that.
Never mind about my father! Father, that was quite a different example; to be strong and live for one’s work.
Yes; and on Sunday to see in the bank-book—how far we’ve got already. Some day the little chap will sit in an office and measure himself by the dignity into which he has grown. Now my poor father would be pleased with me; now I am more than the attorney and those other big-wigs. At last the little chap has lived to see that he is something; at last he has found himself, and “a great and new experience” has come true which he discovered when he was a child: that there are two worlds, a higher one in which there are gentlemen, and then the humble world of ordinary people. At last I am something like a gentleman; but at the same moment it seems that above me there are still greater gendemen sitting at still nobler tables and that I am again a small, ordinary man to whom it is not decreed to excel. Vainglory: it is a defeat, a damned and final defeat.
CHAPTER XXI
AND always it is as if you could distinguish two voices which quarrel; as if two people were tugging in opposite directions over my past, and each wanted to appropriate the biggest bit.
And what about those years at the gymnasium—do you remember ?
Yes, and if you like, I will leave them to you. In any case they weren’t worth much; that immaturity and that aching feeling of inferiority, all that drudgery of a country student—you’re welcome, you can keep it!
Well, well, you needn’t talk: as if that pot-hunting were nothing; that delight in being first in the class, always to have the exercises finished, always to know the answer; in something at any rate to be better than the others, better than the livelier and more daring ones, isn’t that true ? And for those successes to sit up at night with your head in your hands and cram—but it took eight full years!
Not full, don’t say that; there were other things, too; deeper ones.
For instance ?
For instance that friendship with that little friend who was hard up.
Oh, that one; I know, that lumbering, stupid boy. A fine opportunity to feel superior to somebody and to know that it’s acknowledged. That wasn’t friendship, man; that was a burning and passionate gratitude that somebody in the world humbly acknowledged your ability.
No, it wasn’t like that! And what about love for that shy, shortsighted girl ?
Nothing, stupidity; just puberty!
That wasn’t just puberty!
Besides, it was lack of courage. The others, my lad, they got on better with girls, you envied them a lot for their courage; and you, well, what else could you do but crawl into a corner and make your own enclosure of chips, your own shut-off world ? Because in the open one you wouldn’t have won, don’t you know. Either among the boys or among the girls. It’s always the same story with you; always the disappointed child who has his own world, and intently whispers: Chuck, chuck, chuck!
Stop!
Well, then, do explain that year in Prague, that futile and absurd year in Prague. That year when I loafed around with the poet’s group and wrote verses and despised everything.
… I don’t know. That year doesn’t fit in very well. It doesn’t with me either.
Wait, there’s something I can explain. Here we have an industrious stripling; he’sfinished school and he thinks, Now the world belongs to him. At home he could behave like a somebody and feel important and big; but as soon as he comes to town, oh my gosh, he falls right bang into it, into that panic of inferiority, humiliation, and I don’t know what else. If he’d had time to build an idyllic enclosure of chips round himself he’d have saved himself from it.
Only, unfortunately, the poet had taken him up.
Yes. But do remember how it was. But surely this also was a shut-up corner; those little pubs, that little circle of five or so people—man, it was damned small, smaller than a joiner’s yard. And scoff at everything, that at least is an illusion of ability.
And write verses ?
They were bad. He wrote verses to be able to stand on tiptoes. That was only a mask of a wounded and unsatisfied self-consciousness. He ought to have studied properly, and he would have been all right; he would have passed his examinations with success and would have felt like a little god.
But then I shouldn’t have got on to the railways; I had to slip away somehow from the university so as to look for a post on the railways. Surely I had to get on to the railways, hadn’t I ?
There was no need.
I beg your pardon, that’s absurd, what else could I have done ?
All sorts of things. A man with elbows takes root everywhere.
Why, then, did I look for a post on the railways ?
I don’t know, perhaps by accident.
Well, I’ll tell you: from affection. Because the building of the railway was the greatest event in my childhood.
And when I was at the gymnasium, it was my favourite walk in the evening: to stand on the bridge which spanned the station and to look down at the red and green lights, at the rails, and engines.
I know. Over that bridge an old, hideous prostitute used, to walk; she always rubbed against you when she passed.
That, of course, doesn’t seem to belong here.
Of course not, it’s not nice.
Upon my honour: that was my predestined fate; I liked the railways, that’s all. That’s why I joined them.
Or because someone at the station in Prague had such a humiliating experience, do you remember ? My dear fellow, a piqued self-consciousness is a terrible force, especially, you know, with some pushing and ambitious people.
No, it wasn’t like that! I know, I know that it was from the love of the thing. Otherwise, could I have been so happy with my job ?
… I don’t know about happiness.
I say, who are you after all ?
I’m the one with the elbows, you know.
In any case: you must at least admit that in my work I found myself and my real life.
There’s something in that.
So you see.
Only it wasn’t so simple, my friend. What came before? Poetry and women, an immense intoxication with life, is that it ? Altogether, guzzling, poetry, bestiality, and megalomania, reaction against I don’t know what, and a drunken feeling that something in us, God knows what, grand and unfettered, was boiling over. Do try to remember.
I know.
And that’s the reason, th
at’s how it was, you know.
Wait, how was it ?
It’s clear, isn’t it? Surely you felt that your poetry wasn’t worth much and that you couldn’t succeed in anything like that. That you hadn’t enough talent for it, or personality. That you weren’t equal to your pals in drinking, contempt, women, or anything. They were stronger and more daring, and you, you tried to imitate them; I know how much it cost you, you ass-You tried hard, it’s true, but that was only from a sort of ambition: so I was a maligned poet, with everything that goes with it. And all the time in you there was a sober, faint-hearted, and cautious little voice: Look out, it’s more than you can manage. Then your vain little self-esteem began to prick, then your eagerness to be somebody was balked. That was defeat, my friend. After that all you could do was to look for a way out to save yourself; well, thank God, you found a little place on the railways, and the sobered poet was very glad that he could turn his back on his admittedly short but sufficiently lost Bohemian past.
That’s not true! To get on to the railways, that was my inner necessity.
So it was. That defeat was also an inner necessity, and that flight was also an inner necessity. And how that former poet was pleased that at last he had become a complete and mature man. Withhowmuch superiority and compassion did he suddenly look down on his pals of yesterday, at those immature bunglers who hadn’t yet learned what proper serious life is like. He didn’t even mix with them, and he dropped with old cronies into little pubs where steady fathers of families expanded their worries and wisdom. All of a sudden he tried to get on a level with those small, cautious people; of course, he made a virtue of his retreat: no longer any megalomania, only to show off a bit with bitter, sarcastic resignation; still giving vent to his gall, but in time even that passed. Since then he hadn’t looked at a single verse; he despised it and almost hated it because he considered it to be something unworthy of adult, practical, and genuine men.