I appreciate the surveys you have carried out so far. The work of your assistants is praiseworthy too; you know how to keep them busy. Do not desist from your zealous labours! Bring the work to a happy conclusion! Any interruption would be irksome to me. Furthermore, rest assured that the matter of your remuneration will be decided very soon. I am keeping an eye on you.’ K. did not look up from the letter until the assistants, who had been reading much more slowly than he did, gave three loud cheers to celebrate the good news. ‘Calm down,’ he told them, and added, to Barnabas: ‘This is a misunderstanding.’ Barnabas didn’t know what he meant. ‘It’s a mis-understanding,’ repeated K., and all this afternoon’s weariness came back to him. The way to the schoolhouse seemed so long, Barnabas’s whole family loomed in the background, and the assistants were still crowding K. so close that he elbowed them out of the way. How could Frieda have sent them to meet him when he had ordered them to stay with her? He would have found the way home by himself, and more easily than in this company. What was more, one of the assist-ants had wound a scarf around his neck, its free ends were fluttering in the wind and had blown into K.’s face several times. The other assistant kept removing the scarf from K.’s face at once with his long, pointed, nimble fingers, but that did nothing to improve matters. Both of them actually seemed to have enjoyed this going back and forth, and they were all worked up by the wind and the wild night. ‘Go away!’ shouted K. ‘If you were going to come and meet me, why didn’t you bring my stick? What am I going to use now to drive you home?’ They ducked behind Barnabas, but they were not so fright-ened that they didn’t first place their lanterns on their protector’s shoulders to right and left. He shook them off at once. ‘Barnabas,’ said K., and it depressed him to see that Barnabas clearly didn’t understand him, and that while at times of calm his jacket might look very smart there was no help to be found in him when matters were serious, only mute resistance, and there was no resisting that resist-ance either, for Barnabas himself was defenceless, only his smile shone, but that was as little help as the stars up there against the stormy wind down here below. ‘See what the gentleman says to me,’ said K., holding the letter in front of Barnabas’s face. ‘The gentle-man has been misinformed. I have not carried out any surveys, and you can see for yourself what my assistants are worth. I clearly can’t interrupt work that I am not doing, I can’t even be irksome to the gentleman, so how could I have earned his appreciation? And I feel I can never rest assured of anything.’ ‘I’ll go and pass that message on,’ said Barnabas, who had been looking past the letter all this time.
He couldn’t have read it anyway, for K. was holding it very close to his face. ‘Oh yes?’ said K. ‘You promise to pass on what I tell you, but can I really believe you? I need a trustworthy messenger so much—now more than ever!’ And K. bit his lip impatiently. ‘Sir,’ said Barnabas, bending his neck slightly in a way that almost tempted K. to believe in him again, ‘sir, I will certainly pass on what you say, and I will certainly deliver that last message you gave me too.’ ‘What?’ cried K. ‘You mean you haven’t delivered it yet? Didn’t you go up to the castle next day?’ ‘No,’ said Barnabas, ‘my dear father is an old man, you’ve seen him yourself, and there was a lot of work at home, I had to help him, but I’ll soon be going up to the castle again.’ ‘But what are you thinking of, you extraordinary fellow?’ cried K., clapping a hand to his forehead. ‘Doesn’t Klamm’s business come before everything else? You hold the high office of a messenger, and is this how you fill it? Who cares about your father’s work? Klamm is waiting for news, and instead you prefer to muck out the stable!’ ‘My father is a shoemaker,’ said Barnabas, undeterred. ‘He had orders from Brunswick, and I’m my father’s journeyman.’ ‘Shoemaker—orders—Brunswick,’ cried K. grimly, as if conclu-sively dismissing each of those words for ever. ‘So who here needs boots on roads that are always empty? And what do I care for all this stuff about shoemakers? I didn’t give you a message to be consigned to oblivion and confusion on the shoemaker’s bench, but so that you could deliver it to the gentleman straight away.’ Here K. calmed down a little, for it occurred to him that all this time Klamm had probably not been in the castle but at the Castle Inn. However, Barnabas aroused his ire again when he began reciting K.’s first message to show how well he remembered it. ‘All right, that’ll do,’ said K. ‘Don’t be angry, sir,’ said Barnabas, and as if unconsciously he meant to punish K. he looked away from him and down, but it was probably in dismay at the way K. was shouting. ‘I’m not angry with you,’ said K., and indeed, now his anger was turned against himself. ‘Not with you personally, but it’s not a good thing for me to have no one but such a messenger for my important business.’ ‘Well, you see,’ said Barnabas—and it appeared that in his anxiety to defend his honour as a messenger he was saying more than he ought to—‘it’s like this.
Klamm doesn’t wait for messages, in fact he’s quite cross when I bring them. “More messages again,” he says, and when he sees me coming in the distance he usually stands up, goes into the next room, and won’t receive me. And it’s not a settled thing that I’m to come at once with every message—if it was a settled thing of course I’d go there at once, but it’s not settled, and if I never came with a message no one would remind me to. If I bring a message I do it of my own free will.’ ‘Very well,’ said K., observing Barnabas and deliberately looking away from the assistants, who slowly took turns to rise as if from the depths behind Barnabas’s shoulders, and then bob quickly down again with a slight whistle imitating the wind, as if alarmed by the sight of K. They amused themselves like that for some time. ‘Very well, I don’t know how Klamm may feel, but I doubt whether you can know about everything up there in detail, and even if you could there’d be nothing we could do to improve matters. But you can carry a message, and that’s what I ask you to do. A very short message. Can you take it tomorrow, and bring me the answer tomorrow too, or at least tell me how you were received? Can you and will you do that? It would be of great value to me. And perhaps I’ll get a chance yet to thank you properly, or perhaps you already have a wish that I can grant.’ ‘I will certainly take your message,’ said Barnabas. ‘And will you try to carry it as well as possible, to give it to Klamm himself, to get the answer from Klamm himself and do it all tomorrow, tomorrow morning. Will you do that?’ ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Barnabas. ‘I always do.’ ‘Well, we won’t quarrel about it any more,’ said K. ‘This is the message: K. the land surveyor asks the chief executive, Office X, to allow him to speak to him in person; he undertakes from the outset to accept any condition attached to such permission. He is forced to make this request because so far all inter-mediaries have failed entirely, and as proof of this he would like to mention that he has not yet carried out any surveys at all, and from what the village mayor says he never will; it was therefore with despair and shame that he read the last letter from the chief execu-tive, and only a personal interview with the chief executive can help him here. The land surveyor knows how much he is asking, but he will do all he can to cause the chief executive as little trouble as possible, he will agree to any restriction on the time of an inter-view, and if it is thought necessary he will agree to use only a set number of words in it. He thinks he could manage with ten words. With deep respect and the greatest impatience, he awaits the deci-sion.’ Forgetting himself, K. had spoken as if he were at Klamm’s own door and addressing the doorkeeper.
‘Well, it came out a lot longer than I meant,’ he added, ‘but you must carry it orally, I won’t write a letter which would only set out on a never-ending journey into the files.’ So K. scribbled it all on a piece of paper, for the benefit of Barnabas alone, leaning the paper on the back of one of the assist-ants, while the other held a light
