After breakfast, which like K.’s entire board and lodging, so the landlord told him, was to be paid for by the castle, he thought he would go straight into the village. But when the landlord, to whom, remembering his behaviour yesterday, he had said only the bare minimum, kept hovering around him with a silent plea in his eyes, he took pity on the man and asked him to sit down and keep him company for a while.
‘I haven’t met the count yet,’ said K., ‘but they say he pays well for good work. Is that so? If you’re travelling as far from your wife and child* as I am, you want to bring something worthwhile home.’ ‘No need to worry about that, sir. There’ve never been any com-
plaints of poor pay.’
‘Well,’ said K., ‘I’m not the timid sort myself, and I can speak my mind even to a count, but of course it’s far better to be on friendly terms with such gentlemen.’
The landlord was perched opposite K. on the edge of the window-sill, not daring to sit anywhere more comfortable, and he kept look-ing at K. with his large, brown, anxious eyes. To begin with he had moved close to his guest, but now he seemed to want to run away. Was he afraid of being interrogated about the count? Did he fear that, although he was now calling his guest ‘sir’, K. was not to be relied on? K. thought he had better distract the man’s mind. Looking at his watch, he said: ‘Well, my assistants will soon be arriving. Will you be able to accommodate them here?’
‘Of course, sir,’ said the landlord. ‘But won’t they be staying with you up at the castle?’
Was he so easily and cheerfully giving up the prospect of guests, and in particular the custom of K., whom he seemed anxious to send off to the castle?
‘That’s not decided yet,’ said K. ‘First I must find out what kind of work they want me to do. For instance, if I’m to work down here, then it would be more sensible for me to stay down here too. And in addition, I’m afraid that living up in the castle wouldn’t agree with me. I always prefer to be a free agent.’
‘You don’t know what the castle is like,’ said the landlord quietly. ‘True,’ said K. ‘One ought not to judge too early. At the moment
all I know about the castle is that up there they know how to pick a good land surveyor. And perhaps there are other advantages there as well.’ And he rose to his feet, to allow the landlord, who was uneasily biting his lip, a chance to be rid of his company. It wasn’t easy to win this man’s trust.
As K. was walking away, he noticed a dark portrait in a dark frame on the wall. He had seen it even from where he lay last night, but at that distance he hadn’t been able to make out the details, and had thought that the real picture had been removed from the frame, leav-ing only a dark backing. But there was indeed a picture, as he now saw, the head and shoulders of a man of about fifty. The sitter’s head was bent so low on his chest that you could hardly see his eyes, and the reason why he held it like that seemed to be the weight of his high, heavy forehead and large hooked nose. The man’s beard, which was squashed in at his throat by the angle of his head, stood out below his chin. His left hand was spread and he was running it through his thick hair, but he could raise his head no higher. ‘Who’s that?’ asked K. ‘The count?’ He was standing in front of the portrait, and did not even look at the landlord. ‘Oh no,’ said the landlord, ‘that’s the castle warden.’ ‘Well, they have a fine warden at the castle, to be sure,’ said K. ‘A pity his son has turned out so badly.’ ‘No, no,’ said the landlord, drawing K. slightly down to him and whispering in his ear. ‘Schwarzer was putting on airs yesterday; his father is only a deputy warden, and one of the most junior of them.’ At this moment the landlord seemed like a child to K. ‘What a rascal!’ he said, laughing. However, the landlord did not join in his laughter, but said, ‘His father is powerful too.’ ‘Oh, come along!’ said K. ‘You think everyone is powerful. Including me, I wonder?’ ‘No,’ said the man, diffidently but gravely, ‘I don’t think you are powerful.’ ‘You’re a very good observer, then,’ said K. ‘The fact is, and just between you and me, I really am not powerful. As a result I probably feel no less respect for the powerful than you do, but I am not as honest as you and won’t always admit it.’ And to cheer the landlord and show his own good-will, he tapped him lightly on the cheek. At this the man did smile a little. He was only a boy really, with a soft and almost beardless face. How had he come to marry his stout, elderly wife, who could be seen through a hatch bustling about the kitchen next door, hands on her hips, elbows jut-ting? But K. did not want to probe the man any further now, or wipe the smile he had finally won from him off his face; he just signed to him to open the door and stepped out into the fine winter morning.
Now he could see the castle above, distinctly outlined in the clear air, and standing out even more distinctly because of the thin cover-ing of snow lying everywhere and changing the shape of everything. In fact, much less snow seemed to have fallen up on Castle Mount than here in the village, where K. found it as difficult to make his way along the road as it had been yesterday. Here the snow came up to the cottage windows and weighed down on the low rooftops, while on the mountain everything rose into the air, free and light, or at least that was how it looked from here.
Altogether the castle, as seen in the distance, lived up to K.’s expectations. It was neither an old knightly castle from the days of chivalry, nor a showy new structure, but an extensive complex of buildings, a few of them with two storeys, but many of them lower and crowded close together. If you hadn’t known it was a castle you might have taken it for a small town. K. saw only a single tower, and could not make out whether it was a dwelling or belonged to a church. Flocks of crows were circling around it.
His eyes fixed on the castle, K. went on, paying no attention to anything else. But as he came closer he thought the castle disappoint-ing; after all, it was only a poor kind of collection of cottages assem-bled into a little town, and distinguished only by the fact that, while it might all be built of stone, the paint had flaked off long ago, and the stone itself seemed to be crumbling away. K. thought fleetingly of his own home town, which was hardly inferior to this castle. If he had come here only to see the place, he would have made a long journey for nothing much, and he would have done better to revisit the old home that he hadn’t seen for so long. In his mind, he com-pared the church tower of his childhood home with the tower up above. The former, tapering into a spire and coming down to a broad, red-tiled roof, was certainly an earthly building—what else can we build?—but it had been erected for a higher purpose than these huddled, low-built houses and made a clearer statement than the dull, workaday world of this place did. The tower up here—the only visible one—now turned out to belong to a dwelling, perhaps the main part of the castle. It was a simple, round building, partly covered with ivy, and it had small windows, now shining in the sun—there was something crazed about the sight—and was built into the shape of a balcony at the top, with insecure, irregular battlements, crumbling as if drawn by an anxious or careless child as they stood out, zigzag fashion, against the blue sky. It was as if some melancholy inhabitant of the place, who should really have stayed locked up in the most remote room in the house, had broken through the roof and was standing erect to show himself to the world.
Once again K. stopped, as if standing still improved his powers of judgement. But his attention was distracted. Beyond the village church where he now was—in fact it was only a chapel, extended like a barn so that it could hold the whole congregation—lay the school. It was a long, low
