As soon as we got here we laid you on the sofa. That's as far as we could manage.'
'And what have I been up to?
Was I up to anything at all?
Wasn't I perhaps drunk?'
'Not half!' answered Svejk, 'to-hotally you were, sir. A little delirium came over you.
I hope it'll help you if you change your clothes and wash.'
'I feel as if someone had given me a drubbing,' complained the chaplain. 'And I'm thirsty too.
Did I have a brawl yesterday?'
'It wasn't too bad, sir.
The thirst is the result of the thirst you had yesterday.
A chap doesn't get over it so quickly.
I knew a cabinetmaker who got drunk for the first time on New Year's Eve in 1910 and on the morning of the first of January he had such a thirst and felt so bad that he bought a salted herring and started drinking again.
And he has gone on doing that every day for four years and no one can help him because he always buys his salted herrings on Saturday for the whole week.
It's a proper merry-go-round, as our old sergeant-major in the 91st regiment always used to say.'
The chaplain was suffering from a hundred-per-cent hangover and was in a state of utter depression.
Anyone who had been listening to him at that moment would have been convinced that he regularly attended the lectures of Dr Alexander Batek ('We must declare war to the death on the demon of alcohol, who slaughters our best men') and had been reading his
'Hundred ethical sparks'. He modified it slightly, it's true.
'If,' he said, 'you drank noble drinks like arak, maraschino, cognac -all right! But yesterday I drank some frightful borovicka.
1 I'm surprised I could swill that stuff like I did.
It had a disgusting taste.
If it had only been griotte.
People think up different kinds of filth and drink them like water.
A borovicka like that doesn't even taste good, it doesn't have any colour and burns your throat.
If it had only been the genuine article, distilled from juniper, like what I once drank in Moravia.
But it was made out of some kind of wood alcohol and scented oils. Look how I am belching.
'Alcohol's poison,' he decided.
'It must be original and genuine and not manufactured synthetically in a factory as the Jews do it.
It's the same with rum. Good rum's a rarity. 'If we only had here genuine orechovka,' he sighed. 'That would put my stomach right.
The sort of orechovka which Captain Smibl in Bruska has.'
He began rummaging in his pockets and examining his purse.
'I've only got thirty-six kreutzers.
What about selling the sofa?' he reflected.
'What do you think?
Would anyone buy it?
I'll tell the landlord that I've lent it to somebody or that somebody's stolen it.
But no, I'll keep the sofa.
I'll send you to Captain Snabl to ask him to lend me a hundred crowns.
The day before yesterday he had a win at cards.
If you don't get anything from him, then go to the barracks at Vrsovice to Lieutenant Mahler.
If you don't succeed with him, you can go to the Hradcany to Captain Fiser.
You can tell him that I've got to pay for my horse's fodder and I've spent the money on drink.
And if you don't have any luck with him we'll pawn the piano and damn what happens.
I'll write you a few general lines.
Don't let yourself get fobbed off.
Say that I need it and that I'm quite broke.
Think up whatever you like, but don't return empty-handed, otherwise I'll march you off to the front.
Ask Captain Snabl where he buys his orechovka and buy two bottles of it.'
Svejk discharged his mission brilliantly.
His sincerity and honest countenance won him complete confidence and no one doubted the truth of what he was saying.
He considered it appropriate, in the presence of Captain Snabl, Captain Fiser and Lieutenant Mahler, not to say that the chaplain had to pay for his horse's fodder, but to support his request for a loan by saying that the chaplain had to pay paternity alimony.