Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, an Ordinary Life

by Karel Čapek

  ‘She was immensely happy: happy with the pride of her old father, and of herself, happy because people liked her, and that she was earning her own living, happy with quiet and serene content. Her eyes radiated peace, her boyish voice was low and said little; I loved the blue-print stains on her hands and fingers. As for me, I was young, and therefore vain, I was a dandy, so of course I gave myself an air of self-assurance; but that girl puzzled me. I thought that she intended to become a sexless being, and out of some kind of spite I made up my mind to humble her as a woman; I thought that if I seduced her I should somehow score over her. Perhaps I felt ashamed before her for myself, for the tedium and triviality of my life, and so, just for that, I wanted to gloat over the glory of a male conquest. You understand that this is how it seems to me now; but then it was only love, desire, a dreadful desire to bend over her, and press from her the sob that she loved me.’

  He became serious, and thought for a moment. ‘And now, sister, I am coming to things about which it is not easy for me to talk; but I want to tell you everything. It was not a first love, in which no matter how you think, it follows inevitably and almost unaware; I wanted to have her, and I searched for means which would deliver her to me. I am ashamed to remember how stupid and gross, how futile, all those worldly tricks of mine appeared beside the strange and almost rough sincerity and integrity of that virgin girl. I realized that she was above it, and above me, that she was of finer stuff than I, but it was no longer possible for me to turn back. Men are strange, sister. I was so engrossed with tormenting and vile thoughts of how in some mean way, through a lie, or hypnosis, drugs, or by any other means, I could seduce and dishonour her, like a temple is dishonoured—listen, sister, I am not keeping anything secret from you: I seemed like a devil to myself. And all the time while I was degrading her in my mind, she loved me. Sister, she loved me, and one day she revealed her love to me as simply as a blossom falls from a tree. It was so different—O Lord, it was so different from what I in my passion could imagine. First that alone, that I was as clumsy as a boy who falls in love for the first time.’

  He covered his face with his hands as he said that, and became still and silent. ‘Yes, I was a pig,’ he said afterwards, ‘and I deserve everything that came to me afterwards. I was bending over her, lying with closed eyes, and I tried to enjoy to the full my apparent triumph. I should have liked to see the tears well up from under her eyelids, to see her cover her face with shame and despair; but her face was calm and serene, and she breathed like someone asleep. I felt depressed, I wrapped her up, and turned to the window to work up the devil of my pride. When I turned back she looked at me with full and clear eyes, and she smiled as she said: “Well, now I belong to you!”

  ‘I was horrified—yes, I was horrified with astonishment and humiliation. There was in her so much light, clarity, transparency, I don’t know what to call it. Just simply—Now I belong to you, and everything is all right; here we’ve got it, here we are, and nothing can be done about it. What a relief, how clear it was, what a simple and tremendous solution. Yes, it was solved, and with the most definite certainty, and the most complete fullness: this sensible little maid spoke with assurance and without hesitation. Well, now I belong to you. Think how proud she was, how satisfied with herself because she had found this holy, this bright, and certain living truth; her eyes were still wide open with that astonishing and tremendous discovery, and she became filled with the great peace of something decided for ever. The same small features which for a few seconds were broken with confusion and pain now took on a new and final expression—the expression I should say of a man who has found himself. Yes, now I know what I am. I belong to you, and what has occurred was in order, and the order of things has been accomplished. As when water closes over the ripples, becomes smooth again, and you can see the bottom.’

  ‘Sister, I’m not keeping anything back from you. If she had dug her hands into my eyes, if she had been shaken with sobs, if anything of her had cried out with reproof, What have you done to me, you vile person? I should have felt nothing but delight in victory. A delight both bad and good, pride, magnanimity, and repentance, what do I know; I should perhaps have fallen on my knees, vowing an oath, and kissing her hands, stained with red lead and pencils. But this victory was not for me; for me was only the confusion, and shame, into which I began to fall. I tried to stammer something about love; she raised her brows as if in astonishment. Why talk about that, need we yet ? I belong to you, and this means everything, love, acquiescence, reality, yes it means everything. It would be vulgar and immodest to prattle of sentiment and gratitude. What’s the good of talking? It has happened, I am yours; and if you have still to talk, it would be as if there were something here that needed explaining away. Ah, sister, sister, don’t you understand how wise and mature that was, how dignified and pure! Isn’t it as if I had intended to sin, and she had made a sacrament of it? What shame, I did not know what to say; she looked at my rooms with interest, as if she were seeing them for the first time, and she hummed a little tune to herself, she who never sang. She did not actually say so, but she just felt at home, that she belonged there.’

  ‘She smiled, and sat down beside me, and with her small and rather harsh voice she spoke—not of the present, or the future, but of herself, of her childhood, of the affections of a girl; she was giving me her past, as if it all ought to belong to me. I could not get rid of a strange feeling of humiliation and inferiority; I wanted to embrace her again, but she just raised her hand—that alone was sufficient for her defence. No, she said without embarrassment, let us wait. Everything was so simple and matter-of-fact. If I belong to you, it is no folly, but a real thing, lasting, and valid. She kissed me on the mouth, as if to say, don’t frown, little one, as if she were my mother, as if she were older and stronger than I, and more mature—It was almost unbearably sweet, and at the same time, God forgive me, as humiliating as a blow.’

  ‘Then she left me—you know that, sister, the heaviest step is going away. In the way in which a man walks away he reflects his embarrassment, incertitude, rashness, self-assurance, frivolity, or vanity. Mind your back, for we are not protected when we go away. I don’t know how she went away. She stood in the door with her head slightly lowered, and then she vanished. So lightly and silently. This is important because that is how I saw her for the last time.’

  ‘For that same night I ran away like a scamp.’ ”

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE sister of mercy blew loudly and indignantly into her stiff handkerchief, and continued: “That is what he told me. His act was abominable, and it seems as if he is sorry for it; but I must say that he ought not to exculpate so completely the girl, who, as he says, had given herself of her own will. Even if, according to his description, she was gentle and sweet, she deserved the punishment that fell upon her, and we might say that to some extent that man was God’s instrument; but that does not mitigate his guilt.

  ‘When I think now,’ he said afterward, ‘of the strange motives which led to my flight, I see them in a different light to what I did then. At that time I was young, and I had a number of more or less adventurous and hazy plans; besides that I still had in me, from my childhood, a feeling of revolt against any kind of duty. There was in me a violent, anxious aversion to anything which would bind me, and this cowardice I felt to be the expression of my liberty. The depth and fixity of her love terrified me; although she stood above me, I was frightened that I should be bound for ever. I felt that I must decide between myself and her, and I decided for myself.’

  ‘Now I know more, and I see things in a different light. Now I know that she was more complete than I, that everything was decided in her, and nothing in me, that she was mature, while I was still a confused, adolescent, irresponsible boy. What I felt in myself to be a revolt against entanglements was the fear of her superiority, the fear of that great certainty. The virtue of belonging to someone was not given to me, I could not say: I belong to you too, just as
you see me here, unchangeable, complete, and final. There was not in me the fullness of a man that I could give to her. I can go through it with you without emotion as if it were a bill, but I can talk like this because it is the ledger of my life. Debit, credit. She gave me herself; she said: Well, now I belong to you. And I—everything I had was love, was passion, a doubtful promise, something like an unsigned cheque.’ He laughed quietly. ‘For I am a man of business, sister, and I should like to get my accounts in order. My flight, you know, was the flight of an insolvent debtor. I owed her myself.’

  It seemed to me (said the sister of mercy) that he was grinning as if he was jeering at me; I tried to speak, but then he grinned still more, and began to disappear. With an effort I tore myself from my sleep, disturbed with such a vivid dream. I prayed for him and for the girl, and I tell you the whole day long it stuck in my head. The following night I lay awake for a long time, but as soon as sleep came over me he was already there as if he had been waiting for it. Again he was sitting on the steps with a lowered head; he seemed sad and uneasy. Behind the cottage a field was waving in the wind, grown over with something that looked like maize, or reeds in a swamp.

  ‘It’s not maize,’ he said suddenly, ‘it’s sugar-cane. It seems that I have been buying cane on the islands for many years, and getting rum out of it, aquardiente, as they call it there, but that is not the point. In reality I was nothing more than an immature boy who had run away into the world. I feel annoyed for having described it to you in a not very suitable manner, and it is worth while for me to correct your unfavourable impression. Yes, for instance, I know that to a certain extent you condemn that girl; in what I told you about her behaviour you are inclined to see weakness towards temptation and sinful satisfaction of the flesh. If that were so, then what I took to be her tremendous honesty, and patience of perfect love, was only the illusion of a young enamoured man; but then, sister, that perfect love must have been in me, without my knowing it, and my flight would have been sheer madness. It would have been unintelligible, and unintelligible my whole life would have remained. I know, this is what is called an indirect proof. You can object that life is meaningless, and inexplicable, but I see that you do not think that it is.

  ‘I have another direct proof that what I have described to you is correct. It is the life which I led myself after that strange flight. By this flight I must have committed something extremely cowardly; I must have violated some mystic order, for ever since then a curse had been lying on me. By that I do not mean the troubles that I had to face, but that from that time on I had neither stability nor fixity in anything. I tell you, sister, that after that I lived a bad life: the life of a man who is un-forgiven. I use your words to express it, for I am too much a man of the world, and I should say that I lived like a piggish prodigal, a lost hound, a deceitful rogue, and God knows what else, miserable and inconstant, you can imagine: and all because at a certain point I failed dismally. I was too empty, flimsy, and green to be able to face when I met it all of a sudden the fullness of life, yes, how shall I describe it; I have in my mind something that means order and persistence, achievement, value, the peace of something complete for ever. If genuine reality is something which is, and which therefore endures, then I ran away from reality; it was an accursed flight for I never found it again. You can’t realize, sister, how frail and ephemeral is all evil; it must perpetually renew itself, but in vain; in baseness a man does not fulfil himself, and the blasphemer, murderer, the jealous, and the rake live lives that are strangely fragmentary and unsettled. Ah, I can’t piece together all my life; it is all chips, rubble, and scraps, which won’t fit together to form any picture. In vain, in vain I struggle with my petty and sinful acts; they are incoherent and confused, nothing but broken threads and chaos, without head or tail. That’s how it is, that’s how it is, amen, and you call it a bad conscience.

  ‘I can show you my pockets; they used to be crammed with gold. I can bare my shoulders; they bear the marks of the lash of a whip and of the teeth of mulattos. Feel here; my liver is hard and swollen with heavy drinking. Once red fever got me, and another time they hunted me with guns like a deserter. I could tell you of fifty lives, and they are all false; only their scars are left now. This is the hut where I lay, on the point of death, and abandoned like a sick cat; I went over my different lives, and I could not get them all straight; I think I must have invented them during my fever, they were only vile and awful dreams. Twenty years or so, and only muddled, senseless, fleeting dreams. Then they took me to the hospital, and nurses in white aprons cooled me with ice. God, how good it was, how cool it was, poultices and white aprons, and all that—you know, somehow as if I mattered; but death had already entered me.’

  CHAPTER IX

  “I SHOULD say, God’s finger,” remarked the sister of mercy. “Illness is a warning, and the Church does wisely in sending its servants to the beds of the sick, to point the way at that cross-road. But in these days people are too much afraid of illness and death, and because of that they cannot recognize that warning, and they cannot read mene tekel when it is written with the fiery hand of pain.

  ‘Death entered me then,’ he said. ‘They got me past the worst, but I lay stretched out, as weak as a fly. I can’t say that I was afraid of death; I was amazed that I was able, that I could die at all, that is, go through so serious and far-reaching an experience; I faced it like a task I wasn’t fitted for. I felt as if I were being asked to do something too great, important, and decisive for me, and as if it were hopeless to try to object that I was not ready for it; and I felt a kind of tremendous uncertainty or anxiety. Strange, before that I had faced death so many times, and God knows my life was active, and often dangerous enough; but until then Davy Jones had only been for me a matter of risk or chance, I could laugh at him, or defy him, but now he seemed to be something inexorable, and, like some solution, inexplicable, but supremely valid, and final. Sometimes weakness and indifference gained the upper hand, and then I said to him, Well, all right, I shall close my eyes, and you get it done, but quick; I don’t want to know anything. But at other times I was angry at my childish cowardice. But it’s nothing, I said to myself, it’s nothing very hard, it’s only the end. Every adventure has its end, and this will only be one more. But strange enough, however much I thought about it I could not think of death as an end, snip, like cutting a thread. I looked at it then from close enough, and it seemed to me to be something vast and enduring; I can’t say what, but a tremendous space in time, for death is lasting. I will tell you, it was this very permanence that frightened me so terribly; I despaired of being equal to it, for I had never undertaken anything permanent, and I never signed a contract that would bind me for any length of time. I had had plenty of opportunities to settle down and live respectably without any great effort, but every time I was filled with violent and overwhelming loathing; I took it to be part of my character that needed change, moods, and adventure. And now, now I had to meet this contract for eternity; I was soaking with cold sweat, and I gasped with terror. But it’s impossible, it’s not for me, it’s not for me, God in Heaven, help me, for I’m not ready yet to decide for ever. Ah, yes, if, say, you could make an experiment with death for three months, for half a year—well, here’s my hand; but don’t ask me to say to you: Well, now I belong to you.’

  ‘And this, sister, was like lightning, or revelation. Again I saw that girl as she lay full of certainty and joy, as she said quiedy: Well, now I belong to you. And again I stood puny and humiliated before that courage to live while I fluttered ridiculously before the decision to die. And I began to understand that life like death has the elements of permanence, that in its way, and with its own small means, it has the will and the courage to last for ever. And these are the two parts which mutually complete and fit into each other. Yes, it’s like that: only a fragmentary and casual life is swallowed up by death, while that which is complete and real attains its fulfilment. Two parts which fit together into eternity. B
ecause I was delirious, it seemed to me to be like two hemispheres which ought to be put together, but the one was chipped and bent, a mere crock, and however much I tried it would not fit into the other one which, so perfect and smooth, was death. I must mend it, I kept saying to myself, so that the two will fit together: Well, now I belong to you.’

  ‘After that, sister, I invented a life for myself. I say invented because much of it could not be pieced together, and had to be thrown away, while on the other side solid and complementary things were missing. With my youth there would also have been much to correct, but I did not bother myself with that much; the most important was, then, and still is, that in that real reality, that is in that that was not, and yet somehow did exist, not as a fact, but as a meaning—like a leaf torn from a book—God, what did I want to say ?—that’s owing to the fever. Yes, the most important thing is that in that real reality the things were different, quite different, do you understand? That is, they ought to have been different, that was essential; and that real story, as it really ought to have been, is—is—’ His teeth chattered, but he controlled himself with an effort, ‘You know, as I told you,’ he chattered, ‘as I told you, she was lying—and she said: “Well, now I belong to you.” That is holy truth, sister, but what followed, what followed ought to have been different. Now I know because death and life have entered me. I ought to have said, You, yes, I should have said, that’s it, thank God; You belong to me, and you will wait, wait, till I come back with life and death in my body. Don’t you see that I’m not complete enough to live. I am not yet complete enough to endure, not brave enough to decide, not of one piece like you, like you. I ask you, what would you do with a heap like me ? But I don’t know myself what I shall become, I don’t know where is my head and tail. As for you, you are eternal, you know everything that is to be known, you know that you belong; but I—’