The Good Soldier Svejk (21 page)

Schweik came back presently with the pertinacious gentleman, Who was staring gloomily in front of him.

"Take a seat/' said the Chaplain affably; "we're just finishing

supper. We've had lobster, salmon, and now we're having a peck at some fried eggs and ham. We can afford to do ourselves well when people lend us money."

"I hope you are not making fun of me," said the gloomy man. "This is the third time to-day I've been here. I hope that now everything is going to be put right."

"Beg to report, sir," remarked Schweik, "that there's no choking this chap off. He's like a fellow named Bousek from Libeń. Eighteen times he got chucked out of Exner's, and every time he went back because he said he'd forgotten his pipe. He crawled back through the window, through the door, out of the kitchen, over the wall into the saloon bar, across the cellar into the taproom, and I expect he'd have got through the chimney if the fireman hadn't cleared him off the roof A chap who can stick to it like that might have been an M. P. or even a cabinet minister. They did what they could for him."

The persistent man, as if he were taking no notice of Schweik's remarks, repeated obstinately: "I want to have things clear and I must ask you to hear what I have to say."

"Your wish shall be granted," said the Chaplain. "Speak your mind, my dear sir. Speak as long as you like, and meanwhile we will continue our feast. I hope that won't prevent you from telling your story. Schweik, serve the next course."

"As ybu are aware," said the persistent man, "there is a war on. I lent you this money before the war, and if there were no war, I should not insist
on
payment. But I have had some distressing experiences."

He took a notebook from his pocket and continued :

"I've got it all here in black and white. Lieutenant Janata awed me 700 crowns, and then went and fell in action on the Drina. Lieutenant Prasek was taken prisoner on the Russian front, and he owes me 2,000 crowns. Captain Wichterle, who owed me a similar amount, got killed at Rawa Ruska by his own troops. Lieutenant Machek was taken prisoner in Serbia, and he owes me 1,500 crowns. And there are more people like that. One gets killed in the Carpathians without paying me his I. O. U., another gets taken prisoner, another gets drowned in Serbia, another dies in hospital in Hungary. Now you realize my fears that this war

will ruin me unless I put my foot down firmly. You may object that you are in no immediate danger. Just look here."

He thrust his notebook beneath the Chaplain's nose :

"Here you are : Chaplain Matyas died in the isolation hospital at Brno a week ago. It's enough to drive a man off his head. He owed me 1,800 crowns, and then he goes into a cholera ward to administer extreme unction to a man whom I don't know from Adam."

"He was only doing his duty, my dear sir," said the Chaplain. "I am going on the same errand to-morrow."

"Into a cholera ward, too," remarked Schweik. "You can come along with us, to see what it means to sacrifice your life."

"Sir," said the persistent man, "you can take my word for it that I'm in a tight corner. Is this war being waged only to dispatch all my creditors into the next world?"

"When you get called up and go to the front," observed Schweik once more, "the Chaplain and me'll celebrate a mass asking the Lord to let the first shell blow you to pieces."

"This is no laughing matter, sir," said the dauntless one to the Chaplain. "Kindly ask your servant not to interfere in our business and let us get the matter settled."

"Look here, sir," said Schweik, "just you say the word and I won't interfere in your business. Otherwise I shall go on sticking up for your interests, as it's right and proper for a soldier to do. This gentleman's absolutely right. He wants to get away from here alone. I'm not fond of scenes, either. I'm all for good manners, I am."

"Schweik, I'm beginning to get sick of this," said the Chaplain, as if unaware of the visitor's presence. "I thought this fellow was going to amuse us by telling us funny stories, but he wants me to order you not to interfere, although you've twice come into contact with him. On the very evening before an important religious ceremony, when I ought to be directing my whole mind to God, he comes and worries me with some absurd tale about a paltry twelve hundred crowns, prevents me from searching my conscience, turns my thoughts away from God, and wants me to tell him once more that I won't give him anything. I refuse to say another word to him. I don't want this sacred evening to be

spoilt. Schweik, tell him yourself : 'The Chaplain won't give you a brass farthing.'"

Schweik fulfilled the order, yelling the words into the victim's ear.

The persistent visitor, however, remained seated.

"Schweik," said the Chaplain, "ask him how much longer he thinks he's going to dawdle about here?"

"I won't budge an inch until I get my money," declared the dauntless one obdurately.

The Chaplain stood up, went to the window and said :

"Then in this case I leave him to you, Schweik. Do with him whatever you think fit."

"Come along, sir," said Schweik, grabbing the visitor by the shoulder. "Three's a lucky number."

And he repeated his previous performance with dispatch and elegance, while the Chaplain drummed the funeral march on the window pane.

The evening which was devoted to meditation comprised several stages. The Chaplain was so devout and fervid in his approach to God that at midnight the sound of song could still be heard from his quarters :

"When we were marching away
               
All the girls wept with dismay."

And the good soldier Schweik was singing in chorus with him.

There were two persons who were looking forward eagerly to the afternoon's extreme unction ceremony in the military hospital : an old major and a bank manager, a reserve officer. They had both been shot through the stomach in the Carpathians and were now lying side by side. The reserve officer considered it his duty to receive the offices for the dying because his superior officer was anxious to obtain extreme unction. He thought it would be an act of insubordination not to obtain extreme unction also. The devout major was prompted by cunning, as he supposed that a prayer of faith will heal the sick. But in the night before the extreme unction was to be administered, they both died, and

when the Chaplain arrived with Schweik in the morning, they were lying beneath a shroud, with their faces blackened like all those who die of strangulation.

"We did things in style, too, sir, and now they've spoiled everything," grumbled Schweik, when they were told in the office that the two officers no longer needed any attention.

And they really had done things in style. They had driven in a cab, Schweik had rung the bell and the Chaplain had held a bottle of oil wrapped up in a cloth, with which he had solemnly blessed all the passers-by who had raised their hats.

It is true that there were not many of them, although Schweik had done his best to make a huge din with the bell.

A few urchins ran after the cab, and one of them perched himself on the back of it, whereupon his comrades yelled in chorus : "Whip behind ! Whip behind !"

Schweik brandished the bell, the cabman cracked his whip behind, in Vodickovâ Street a house porter's wife, a member of the Marian congregation, galloped up and overtook the cab, received a blessing while on the run, made the sign of the cross, spat, and returned panting to her former place.

The sound of the bell caused the greatest concern to the cabman's nag, which it evidently reminded of bygone years, because the animal kept looking round, and from time to time made efforts to dance on the cobbles.

This is what Schweik was referring to, when he said that they had done things in style. The Chaplain went into the office to settle the financial side of the extreme unction and supplied the pay-corps sergeant with an account showing that the military exchequer owed him 150 crowns for consecrated oil and travelling expenses.

Then ensued a dispute between the officer in charge of the hospital and the Chaplain, in the course of which the Chaplain banged his fist on the table several times and remarked : "Don't run away with the idea that extreme unction can be had for nothing. When an officer of the dragoons is detailed for stable duty on a stud farm, he's paid allowances. I'm sorry those two didn't live long enough for extreme unction. It would have meant fifty crowns more."

Schweik meanwhile waited downstairs in the guard room with the bottle of holy oil, in which the soldiers evinced a keen interest. One of them expressed the view that this oil would be very good for cleaning rifles and bayonets with. One young soldier from the Moravian highlands, who still believed in the Lord, said that wasn't the way to talk about such things, and sacred mysteries shouldn't be dragged into the discussion. We must, he said, live in hope, like Christians. An old reservist looked at the raw recruit and retorted :

"Damn fine hopes ! All you can hope is to have your head blown off by a shell. We've been diddled. One day there was a clerical bloke came here and talked about the peace of God that was spreading over the earth, and how God objects to war but wants everyone to live in peace like brothers. Oh, yes, not half ! And the minute the war broke out, they started praying in all the churches for victory. The way they talk, anyone'd think the Lord was a kind of super-brass-hat who's managing the whole blessed show. I've seen plenty of funerals in this hospital and the arms and legs they've cut off taken away by the cartload."

"And they bury the soldiers naked," said another soldier, "and then another chap puts on the old uniform, and then another, and so it goes on."

"Until we win," observed Schweik.

"You're a fine one to talk about winning," retorted a corporal from a corner. "Your job is to get to the front, into the trenches, and then at 'em for all you're worth, past the barbed wire, the mines and the machine guns. It's easy to talk when you've got a cushy job at the base."

"I think it's a bit of all right to have a bayonet shoved through you," said Schweik, "and it's not so bad to be shot through the belly. But what's better still is when a shell blows you up and you see how your legs and your guts have got separated from you. And it strikes you as so queer that you die before anyone can explain it to you."

The young recruit sighed from the depths of his heart. He was filled with distress at having got mixed up in a ghastly muddle which meant that he was to be slaughtered like an ox in the shambles. What was it all for?

Another soldier, a schoolmaster in civil life, seemed to have read his thoughts, for he remarked :

"There are scientists who say that war is due to sun spots. Whenever a sun spot makes its appearance, some disaster or other is bound to happen. The capture of Carthage -"

"Oh, you shut up and keep all that scientific muck to yourself," interposed the corporal. "The best thing you can do is to sweep the room out. You're
on
fatigue duty to-day. We don't care damn-all about sun spots. I wouldn't take a dozen of 'em, not if they was offered to me as a gift."

"These here sun spots are jolly important," intervened Schweik. "Once there was a sun spot and on that very same day I got an awful walloping in a pub down at Nusle. Ever since then, if I have to go anywhere, I always have a look in the papers to see whether another spot's been spotted, so to speak. And if it has, why, I don't go nowhere, no, not me, thanks all the same. When that volcano blew up the whole of the island of Martinique, there was a professor chap wrote in the
Narodni Politika
that he'd been warning readers for quite a long time about a big sun spot. Only the
Narodni Politika
didn't get to the island in time, and so the people on the island got done in."

Meanwhile, upstairs, in the office, the Chaplain had met one of the ladies belonging to the "Society for the Religious Training of Soldiers," a repulsive old harridan, who from early morning used to parade the hospital, distributing images of saints which the sick and wounded soldiers threw into the spittoons. On her rounds she irritated everyone by her nonsensical chatter, the purport of which was that they should repent of their sins and become better men, in order to receive eternal salvation after death.

When conversing with the Chaplain, she was livid as she told him
how
the war, instead of making the soldiers nobler, was turning them into brutes. The convalescents downstairs put out their tongues and called her a frump and a canting old geezer.

"Das ist wirklich schrecklich, Herr Feldkurat, das Volk ist verdorben,"
¹
she said. And she went on to expound her idea of

¹
"Oh, it's shocking, Chaplain, how depraved they are."

the religious training which soldiers should receive. A soldier could not fight gallantly for his emperor unless he believed in God and was religiously minded. Then he did not fear death, because he knew that paradise was in store for him. She continued to drivel in this way and she evidently meant to stick to the Chaplain, who, however, took his leave in a most ungallant spirit.

"We're going home, Schweik," he shouted into the guard room. On the homeward journey they didn't do things in style.

"Another time somebody else can go and do their extreme unction for them, and welcome," said the Chaplain. "Upon my word, it's a fine thing for a man to have to haggle with them before he can get his money for every blessed soul he wants to save. A pack of damned chartered accountants, that's what they are."