Meanwhile Karel sat clouded and absent. A heavy silence was in the room.
“Something has happened to you?” Vojtech broke out.
“Nothing.”
Vojtech shook his head. He did not know his brother in this mood. The smell of wine and of women came from him. And yet he is a married man. He has a young wife, mild as a sheep, meek and pretty. For years he has stayed at home, a man of commonsense and authority, a domestic machine, an example of a well-ordered life, a little hard, methodical, precise, and esteeming himself immensely. Once he had been seriously ill; and ever since that time had based his life on an amazingly regular, healthy plan, as if life itself were worthy to be, day by day, redeemed by order and self-control. And now he sits there, sullen, darkly sober, like a man who is just awakening after a night of debauchery. He is sitting there with an expression unspeakably strained and hard, chewing something painfully. Do you not see how cruel it is, what is happening to him! It was three o’clock in the morning. Vojtech struck his forehead.
“My God, that tea,” he remembered, running with housewifely eagerness and anxiety to the kitchen. He shivered with cold. Wrapping himself in a blanket like an old woman, he boiled the water above a blue spirit-flame, much pleased that he could perform some mechanical action. He prepared the cups and the sugar, satisfying himself with the familiar tinkling of the things. Through a chink he looked into the room, and there, see, his brother is standing at the open window, as though he were listening to the roaring of the weirs on the Vltava, a bright and clear voice wrapped in the cold rustling of the rain as in a veil.
“Aren’t you cold?” asked Vojtech.
“No.”
Vojtech stood at the door in a yearning mood. Here on the one side, a quiet, dark hole, a warm drink, a joy to be at home, a pleasure to entertain someone; and there, on the other side, a window, wide-open, filled with the majestic voice of the river and the darkness, for perhaps the night itself is rushing over the Vltava weir, such is its roar; and at the window, a tall, erect man, incredibly queer, strangely excited. Your own brother whom you do not recognize. Vojtech stood on the threshold as though on the bound-
