Karel Matěj Čapek-Chod

“ For a good while the overseer looked him in the eyes, then suddenly his own severe eyes were lighted up by a smile so genial and almost friendly, that Kuba could not help smiling back at him. The overseer gave him a nod which expressed trust and at the same time a warning. Then he turned to the two other workmen. ‘Attention!’ he called out.
The brake left the cylinder with a click, the men cried: ‘Ready.’
The chief engineer set the lever in motion, the engine purred like a spindle, and broke into a roar like a waterfall, to finish the last ten thousand copies. ”

“ His thoughts are flying, perhaps not as fast as the mad paper-strip in front of him, yet in the course of the two hours since he has been standing there, he has been totting them up one by one, and the sum-total which he has drawn in the end is so fearful that it scares him; but not a single movement betrays what he is thinking. ”

“ One of the workmen there had let the cylinders down on an overseer who had worried him; it had torn off his arm ‘as though it had been a travelling bag,’ and the machine had gone on as though nothing had happened.
Spattered Kuba can do it when he likes, at any of the shifts of paper rolls; he will have time to do it until four o’clock in the morning; any one of the white rolls with which the yard is filled may bring death to the tyrant.
It is going to happen in exactly an hour’s time, and death is approaching in the shape of the fourth roll, which has a torn cover ”

“ There is the place where he will be drenched in his own blood; where he will bleed to death like an ox, there, inside the machine, with just room enough underneath the cylinders for a man to crouch and insert the paper by the light of an electric lamp.
Kuba has seen it done once when he was working at a cotton printer’s, and knows what the power of these cylinders is when they are at work. ”

“ The right hand ever hovers near the lever. His arms are covered with black, oily smears; drops of sweat are on his forehead and run down his cheeks in rivulets. Perhaps it is for this reason that his companions have called him ‘spattered’ Kuba, or it may be because of the freckles with which his plain, red-bearded face is sprinkled; they are as large as a threepenny piece. ”

“ The sum-total is that he is going to kill somebody to-night. He can see his victim every time he looks up. The head, covered with a silk skull-cap, is just visible between the framework and the cylinder, bending now over the indicator, now over the tablet on which he enters the number of copies which have passed through. He is the overseer in charge, and Kuba is going to kill him to-night. ”

“ His tall, bony figure, covered with a blue blouse which is tucked into his trousers so that there should be no fulness in which a tooth of the machinery could catch, is standing upright like a statue; only the thin bare arms are moving: they have hard broad muscles, and sinews like the strings of a double bass. ”

“ From the moment when the overseer takes the seal off the indicator which gives the number of copies, every workman becomes a part of the machinery which has to perform certain movements within a certain time. ”

“ The overseer, who was putting on his overcoat, came up to him: ‘Well, Spattered Kuba,’ he addressed him, ‘if you have not found another job we will keep you on . . . what the devil has happened to your hand? I am always telling you men, you won’t be careful until one of you leaves his paw in the machine. And as you have told me that you get the toothache at that lever, you can change places with Strizek ”