And now Prokop was able to get out of bed for an hour or so every day;
so far he was only capable of dragging his legs along somehow and there
was not much question of talking to him. Whatever you said to him, he
answered in a niggardly manner, excusing himself with a weak smile.
At mid-day—it was the beginning of April—he sat down on a seat in the
garden. Next to him the wiry-haired terrier Honzik grinned for all he
was worth, obviously proud of his function as companion, and through
sheer delight he licked himself, and blinked his eyes when Prokop’s
scarred left hand smoothed his warm, shaggy head. About this time the
doctor usually ran out of his consulting room, his skull-cap slipping
about his bald head, squatted down on his haunches and planted vegetables
in the garden. With his short fat fingers he worked the heaps of soil
and carefully arranged the beds for the young buds. Every now and then
he became excited and grunted; he had stuck his pipe into the ground
somewhere and was unable to find it. At this point Prokop arose and with
the astuteness of a detective (for he spent his time in bed reading
detective stories) went straight to it. Whereat Honzik shook himself
noisily.
About then also Annie used to come and water her father’s flower-beds.
Her right hand carried the can, her left swung in the air. A silver
stream of water hissed into the new soil, and if Honzik happened to be
near he caught it on his back or on his stupid, good-natured head, which
led him to yelp desperately and seek protection with Prokop.
The whole of the morning patients kept on arriving at the
consulting-room. In the waiting-room they coughed or were silent, each
one thinking about his own suffering. Sometimes a terrible cry was to
be heard when the doctor was pulling out the teeth of some little boy.
Then Annie in a panic took shelter behind Prokop, pale, and quite beside
herself, her long lashes trembling in her anxiety, waiting until the
frightful affair was over. Finally the boy ran off wailing and Annie
awkwardly apologized for her tender-heartedness.
It was different when there drew up before the doctor’s house a cart
on the bottom of which straw had been spread and two old men carefully
carried a seriously wounded man up the steps. He had a crushed hand or
a broken foot, or his head had been split open by the kick of a horse.
A cold sweat poured down his terribly pale forehead and he was quietly
groaning with heroic self-control. A tragic silence descended upon
the whole house; something serious was silently taking place in the
consulting-room. The fat, jovial servant went about on the tips of her
toes. Annie’s eyes were full of tears and her fingers trembled. Then the
doctor would burst into the kitchen and shout for rum, wine, or water,
and with redoubled gruffness cover up his acute sympathy. And the whole
of the next day he would be silent, fly into rages and slam the doors.
But there was also a holiday, the splendid annual function of the
provincial doctor, the inoculation of the children. A hundred mothers
nursed their squalling, yelling, or sleeping children; they filled up
the consulting-room, the passage, the kitchen, and the garden. Annie was
wildly excited and wanted to nurse, swaddle, and play with all these
toothless, downy children in an ecstasy of exuberant motherhood. The
doctor’s bald pate seemed to shine more than ever. From early in the
morning he went about without his spectacles, so as not to frighten these
scamps, and his eyes were filled with exhaustion and happiness.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night the bell would ring excitedly. Then
voices were heard in the doorway, the doctor grumbled and Joseph had to
harness the horse. Somewhere in the village, behind a lighted window,
a new being was about to enter the world. It was already morning when
the doctor returned, tired out, but contented, and strongly smelling of
carbolic. Annie liked him best of all like that.
There were other people about the place; the fat, garrulous Nanda in
the kitchen, who sang and clattered the whole day and was always being
doubled up with laughter. Then the serious, whiskered coachman, Joseph.
A historian, he was always reading history books and was delighted to
expound the Hussite wars or the historical secrets of the country. Then
the gardener from the castle, a great one for the girls, who appeared
every day in the doctor’s garden, pruned his roses, clipped his bushes
and convulsed Nanda with laughter. Then the above-mentioned shaggy and
excited Honzik, who followed Prokop about, chased fleas and chickens
and, best of all, liked to sit on the doctor’s coach-box. Fritz was an
old horse, a little grey, a friend of the rabbits, good-natured and
reliable. It was the height of pleasantness to smooth his warm and
sensitive nostrils. Then a dark-haired boy who helped in the yard, in
love with Annie, who, together with Nanda, made fun of him mercilessly.
The foreman, an old fox, who played chess with the doctor, who became
excited, grew angry and always lost the game. And other local characters,
among whom an extraordinarily tedious surveyor with political interests
who bored Prokop on the strength of being also a professional man.
Prokop read a lot, or at least pretended to. His scarred, heavy face did
not reveal much, especially nothing of his desperate secret struggle
with his disturbed memory. The last few years of study had particularly
suffered; the most simple formulæ and processes were lost and Prokop
jotted down in the margin of his book fragments of formulæ which came
into his head when he was least thinking of them. Then he would leave the
book and go to play billiards with Annie, since this was a game during
which one had no need to talk. Annie was impressed by his leathery and
impenetrable seriousness. He played with concentration, aimed with his
eyebrows severely drawn together, and when the ball, as if on purpose,
went in the wrong direction he opened his mouth in astonishment and
indicated the proper destination with a movement of his tongue.
Evenings by the lamp. Most talkative of the three was the doctor,
an enthusiastic scientist without any knowledge of the subject. He
was especially fascinated with the deeper mysteries of the universe:
radio activity, the boundlessness of space, electricity, relativity,
the origins of matter and of prehistoric man. He was an out-and-out
materialist, and just for this reason experienced a sweet and secret fear
when confronted with unsolved problems. Occasionally Prokop could not
contain himself and corrected the German _naïveté_ of his views. The old
gentleman listened piously, and began to have an inordinate admiration
for Prokop, especially when he could no longer understand what he was
talking about—potentials of resonance or the quantum theory. Annie sat
quietly, resting her chin on her hands. She did not even blink and,
large-eyed, looked at Prokop and her father in turn.
And the nights, the nights were wide and quiet, as everywhere in the
country. Now and then one could hear the rattle of chains from the
cowshed or, nearer or farther away, the barking of a dog. A falling
star flashed across the sky, the spring rain hissed in the garden or
water dropped with a silver note into the deserted well. A clear, deep
cold came in through the open window and one fell into a blessed sleep,
untroubled by dreams.