'Is it Monday or Friday today?'
He was anxious to know too whether it was December or June and exhibited a great aptitude for asking the most diverse questions such as:
'Are you married?
Do you like gorgonzola?
Did you have bugs at home?
Are you all right?
Has your dog had distemper?'
He became communicative. He told how he owed money for riding breeches, a whip and a saddle, that he'd had V.D. some years ago and had cured it with permanganate.
'There was no idea of trying anything else, no time for it,' he said with a belch.
'It may seem to you pretty drastic, but tell me, hie, hie, what am I to do, hie, hie?
You must forgive me.
'Thermos flask,' he continued, forgetting what he had been talking about a moment ago, 'is the name for receptacles which keep drinks and food in their original warmth. Which do you think, my dear colleague, is the fairer game, farbl or vingt-et-un?
'Really, I've seen you somewhere before,' he called out, trying to embrace Svejk and kiss him with salivary lips.
'We were at school together. You're a good chap,' he said, tenderly stroking his own leg.
'How you've grown from the time when I saw you last.
The pleasure of seeing you makes up for all my sufferings.'
A poetic mood came over him and he began to speak of going back to the sunshine of happy faces and warm hearts.
Then he knelt down and began to pray
'Ave Maria', laughing to split his sides.
When they stopped before his apartment, it was very difficult to get him out of the droshky.
'We aren't there yet,' he shrieked.
'Help!
They're kidnapping me!
I want to go on.'
He was literally torn out of the droshky like a boiled snail from its shell.
At one moment it seemed as if he would be pulled apart, because his legs got stuck behind the seat.
He laughed loudly when this was happening, saying he had diddled them:
'You arc tearing me apart, gentlemen.'
Then he was dragged through the carriage entrance up the steps to his apartment and, once inside, thrown like a sack on to the sofa.
He declared that he wouldn't pay for the car which he hadn't ordered, and it took more than a quarter of an hour for them to explain to him that it was a droshky.
And even then he did not agree, objecting that he only drove in a fiacre.
'You're trying to diddle me,' he declared, winking knowingly at Svejk and at the droshky driver. 'We walked here.'
And suddenly in an outburst of generosity he threw his purse to the driver:
'Take it all.
I can pay.
A kreutzer more or less doesn't make any difference to me.'
He should really have said 'thirty-six kreutzers' because that was all the purse contained.
Fortunately the driver subjected him to an exhaustive search, talking of swipes over the jaw as he did so.
'All right, then, give me one,' the chaplain answered.
'D'you think I couldn't take it?
I could manage five from you.'
In the chaplain's waistcoat pocket the driver found ten crowns. He went away cursing his fate and the chaplain for wasting his time and ruining his business.
The chaplain took some time to fall asleep because he kept on making new plans. l-Ie wanted to do all sorts of things, play the piano, take dancing lessons and fry fish.
Then he promised Svejk his sister, although he did not have one.
And he also asked to be taken off to bed, and finally he fell asleep, asserting that he wished to be regarded as a human being, which was just as valuable an entity as a pig.
III When Svejk entered the chaplain's room in the morning, he found him lying on the sofa and puzzling hard how it could happen that someone had wetted him in such a peculiar way that he had got stuck to the leather couch with his trousers.
'Humbly report, sir,' said Svejk, 'that in the night you ... ' In a few words he explained to the chaplain that he was terribly mistaken if he thought that he had been wetted.
The chaplain, who had an unusually heavy hangover, was in a depressed mood.
'I can't remember,' he said, 'how I got from the bed on to the sofa.'
'You never were in the bed, sir.