The Good Soldier Svejk (35 page)

"Now kiss the crucifix," ordered the police sergeant, when the old woman, amid immense sobs, had repeated the oath and crossed herself piously.

"That's right. Now take the crucifix back to where you borrowed it from and tell them I needed it for a cross-examination."

The old woman, now completely crushed, tiptoed out of the room with the crucifix, and through the window she could be seen continually looking back at the police station, as if she wanted to make sure that it was not a dream, but that she had really just been through a ghastly ordeal.

Meanwhile, the police sergeant was rewriting his report, which in the night he had supplemented with blots, and which, through having been licked, now looked as if it had been smeared with marmalade. He rearranged the whole thing and remembered there was one detail he hadn't asked about. He therefore had Schweik sent for and enquired of him :

"Can you take photographs?"

"Yes."

"Why haven't you got a camera with you?"

"Because I haven't got one," was Schweik's clear and straightforward answer.

"But if you had one, you'd take photographs, wouldn't you?" asked the police sergeant.

"Pigs might fly if they had wings," replied Schweik, and he blandly eyed the questioning expression on the face of the police sergeant, whose head was now aching so badly again that the only other question he could think of was :

"Is it hard to photograph a railway station?"

"That's easier than anything else," replied «Schweik, "because it don't move and keeps in the same place, so you don't have to tell it to look pleasant."

The police sergeant could accordingly conclude his report thus:

With further reference to report Number 2172, I beg to add—

And this is what he begged to add :

—in the course of my cross-examination he stated that he could take photographs, and those of railway stations for preference. Though no camera was found in his possession, it may be conjectured that he is hiding it somewhere and therefore does not carry it with him so as to avert attention from himself, which is borne out by his own admission that he would take photographs if he had a camera with him.

The police sergeant, whose head was heavy with the effects of the previous day's events, became more and more entangled in his report on photography, and continued :

There can be no doubt that, according to his own admission, only the fact he has no camera with him prevented him from photographing the premises of the railway station and, in fact, all places of strategic importance, and there can be no question that he would have done so if he had had with him the necessary photographic apparatus which he had hidden. It is due only to the circumstances that no photographic apparatus was available that no photographs were found in his possession.

"That'll be enough," said the police sergeant, and he signed his report. He was thoroughly pleased with his work and he read it with great pride to his right-hand man.

"That's a neat bit of work," he said. "That's the way to write reports. You've got to put everything in. A cross-examination isn't a simple job, let me tell you. No, sir. It's not much use unless you can shove the whole lot into your report, so that it makes the coves at the top sit up and take notice. Bring that chap in, and let's settle up with him."

"Now this gentleman's going to take you off to the superintendent at Pisek," he announced grandly to Schweik. "According to regulations, we ought to put handcuffs on you. But I think you're a decent sort of chap, so we won't put them on this time. I'm pretty certain you won't try to give us the slip on the way."

The police sergeant was evidently moved by the sight of Schweik's good-natured face, for he added :

"And don't bear any grudge against me. Now take him along. Here's the report."

"Well, good-bye," said Schweik tenderly. "Thanks for all the trouble you've taken on my account. I'll write to you if I have the chance, and if I'm passing this way again at any time, I'll pay you a call."

Schweik accompanied the right-hand man on to the highroad, and all the people who saw them so deeply immersed in friendly conversation thought they must be very old acquaintances who happened to be going the same way to town.

"I'd never have thought," remarked Schweik, "that I was going to have so much trouble to get to Budejovice. It reminds me of a butcher I know who one night got as far as the Palacky monument and then kept walking round it till morning, because the wall didn't seem to have any end to it. It upset him so much that in the morning he came over quite faint and so he began to shout 'Police !' and when the police came running up, he asked them the way home to Kobylin, because he said he'd been walking for five hours alongside some wall or other, and there was no end to it. So they ran him in and he smashed the cell up for them."

They were just passing a pond and Schweik inquired with interest whether there were many fish poachers in the neighbourhood.

"The place fairly swarms with 'em," replied the right-hand

man. "They tried to chuck the other sergeant into the water. The pond keeper up there on the dike peppers their backsides with buckshot, but it's no use. They shove a piece of sheet-iron inside their breeches."

The right-hand man went on to talk about progress and how there's nothing people don't think of, and how one gets the better of the other, and then he expounded a new theory to the effect that the war was a great stroke of luck, because in all those scrimmages, not only the honest men would be knocked out, but the rogues and vagabonds as well.

"As it is, there's too many people in the world," he declared. "They're squeezed together like a lot of blessed sardines, and the way they breed is something awful."

They were now approaching a wayside inn.

"It's damned windy to-day," said the right-hand man. "A little drop of something wouldn't do us any harm. You needn't tell anyone I'm taking you to Pisek. That's a state secret."

In his mind's eye the right-hand man saw the instructions of the central authorities concerning suspects and of the duty of every police officer "to isolate them from the local population and to take strict precautions, when conveying them to the higher authorities, to prevent any unnecessary verbal communications with the public."

"They mustn't be told who you are," the right-hand man continued. "It's nobody's business what you've been up to. There mustn't be any panic.

"Panic's a bad thing in wartime," he went on. "Somebody passes a remark and before you know where you are, it's spread like wildfire all over the neighbourhood. See what I mean?"

"That's all right," said Schweik. "I won't spread any panic."

And he kept his word, for when the landlord started talking to them, he went out of his way to remark :

"My brother here says we shall be at Pisek in an hour's time."

"Is your brother on leave?" the busybody landlord asked the right-hand man, who, without moving an eyelid, answered as bold as brass :

"To-day's his last day."

"We diddled him all right," he observed to Schweik with a

smile, when the landlord was out of earshot. "No panic, if you please. There's a war on."

When the right-hand man before entering the inn had expressed his belief that a little drop of something wouldn't do them any harm, he had been optimistic, because he had overlooked the possibility of applying the principle on a larger scale. And when he had reached the twelfth drop, he declared in a very decided manner that up to three o'clock the superintendent would be at lunch, so it would be useless to get there earlier, apart from the fact that a snowstorm was just starting. If they got to Pisek by four in the afternoon, there'd be loads of time. Why, up to six o'clock there'd be time enough. They'd get there in the dark with weather like that. Not that it mattered whether they started then or later ; Pisek wouldn't run away.

"We ought to think ourselves lucky we're in a nice warm spot," he declared; "in this sort of dirty weather the chaps in the trenches are worse off than we are by the fire."

It was quite dark by the time the right-hand man decided that they could start off for Pisek. In the snowstorm they could not see a yard ahead of them, and the right-hand man said :

"Follow your nose till you get to Pisek."

He said this again and then again, but when he was saying it for the third time, his voice no longer sounded from the highroad, but from some lower place, where he had slipped along a snow-covered slope. With the aid of his rifle, he laboriously clambered on to the highroad again. Schweik heard him chuckling to himself in muffled tones : "A regular toboggan slide."

Five times the right-hand man repeated this performance. He was like an ant that, whenever it falls anywhere, stubbornly climbs to the top again. When he reached Schweik at last, he said in perplexed and despairing accents :

"I might very easily lose you."

"Don't you worry about that," said Schweik. "The best thing we can do is to tie ourselves together. Then we can't lose each other. Have you got any handcuffs?"

"Every policeman always has to carry handcuffs with him," said the right-hand man earnestly, as he floundered in a circle round Schweik. "That's our daily bread, as you might say."

"Well, shove 'em on, then," urged Schweik. "Let's see how they work."

With a masterly movement the guardian of the law fastened one handcuff on Schweik and then attached the other end to his own right wrist. They were now linked together like Siamese twins. They floundered inseparably along the highroad, and whenever the right-hand man tumbled, he pulled Schweik with him. The result of this was, that the handcuffs began to cut into their flesh, and at last the right-hand man announced that he couldn't stand it any longer and that he'd have to undo the handcuffs. After long and vain attempts to separate himself from Schweik, he sighed :

"We're fastened together for ever and ever."

"Amen," added Schweik, and they continued their troublesome journey. The right-hand man became terribly depressed and when, after appalling torments, they reached the police headquarters at Pisek late in the evening, he was in a state of complete collapse. On the staircase he said to Schweik :

"Now there's going to be ructions. We can't get away from each other."

And ructions there were when the station sergeant sent for the superintendent, Captain Kônig.

The captain's first words were :

"Breathe on me."

"Aha, I've got you taped all right, my man," said the captain, whose keen and experienced sense of smell had unerringly fathomed the situation. "Rum, cognac, toddy, cherry brandy, grog, gin.

"Sergeant," he continued, turning to his subordinate, "here's an example of how not to do it. He's handcuffed himself to the prisoner. He's arrived dead-drunk. There'll have to be an official inquiry into this. Take off their handcuffs."

"What's that?" he asked the right-hand man, who was saluting the wrong way round.

"I've brought a report, sir."

"A report, eh? There's going to be a report about you, my man," said the captain curtly. "Sergeant, lock them both up, and in the morning bring them up for cross-examination. Have a look

through that report from Putim and then send it on to me in my quarters."

The captain studied the "report" which the police sergeant at Putim had drawn up on the subject of Schweik. Before him stood his own sergeant, who was privately cursing the captain and all his reports, because his friends were waiting for him to make up a whist party.

"I told you not so long ago, Sergeant," said the captain, "that the police sergeant at Protivin is the biggest bloody fool I've ever known, but the sergeant at Putim with this report of his beats him hollow. The soldier who was brought along here by that boozy blackguard of a policeman isn't a spy. I expect he's just a common or garden deserter. This report is full of such awful twaddle that a child could see at a glance that the chap was as drunk as a lord when he wrote it."

He had another look at the report from Putim and ordered Schweik to be brought to him immediately. Also, a telegram was to be sent to Putim, instructing the sergeant there to come to Pisek the next day.

"What regiment did you desert from?" was the greeting with which the captain received Schweik.

"I never deserted from any regiment."

The captain looked hard at Schweik and beheld such a lighthearted expression in his tranquil countenance, that he asked :

"How did you get hold of that uniform?"

"Every soldier gets a uniform when he joins up," replied Schweik with a bland smile. "I'm in the 91st regiment and I never ran away from it. It's all the other way round."

He accompanied the latter phrase with such emphasis that the captain's jaw dropped as he inquired :

"What do you mean by all the other way round?"

"It's as simple as A. B. G," explained Schweik confidentially. "I'm on my way to my regiment. I'm looking for my regiment, not running away from it. All I want is to get to my regiment as soon as possible. Well, I suppose the thought of it made me so flurried that I keep moving away from Budejovice, although that's where they're all waiting for me. The sergeant at Putim, he