Their shameless conduct knows no bounds, and it’s lucky for the village that they may leave the Castle Inn only when they’re told to. However, in the Castle Inn itself we have to try to get along with them; Frieda found that very difficult, so she was extremely glad to turn to me to calm the servants down. I’ve been spending the night with the servants in the stables at least twice a week for more than two years. Earlier, when Father could still get to the Castle Inn with me, he would sleep somewhere in the bar, waiting for me to bring him any news early in the morning. There wasn’t much of it. To this day we haven’t found the messenger con-cerned, although he’s said to be still in the service of Sortini, who thinks very highly of him, and when Sortini withdrew to more remote offices they say he went too. In general the servants have gone as long as us without seeing him, and if one of them does claim to have seen him it’s probably a mistake. So my plan was likely to fail, and even if it hasn’t failed entirely we haven’t found the messenger, and unfortunately my father was finished off by walking to the Castle Inn and spending the night there—and perhaps even by his sym-pathy for me, in so far as he is still capable of it—and he has been in the condition in which you’ve seen him for almost two years, although perhaps he is better off than my mother, whose death we expect any day now. Only Amalia’s superhuman efforts keep it at bay. But what I have managed to do at the Castle Inn is to establish a certain connection with the castle; please don’t despise me when I say that I am not sorry for what I did. You will perhaps be thinking, what kind of close connection with the castle may that be? And you are right, it is not a close connection. I do know many of the servants now, the servants of almost all the gentlemen who have come to the village over the last few years, and if I were ever to get into the castle I wouldn’t feel I was a stranger there. To be sure, I know the servants only as they are in the village; in the castle they are quite different and probably don’t deign to recognize anyone, certainly not someone they’ve consorted with in the village, even if they have sworn a hun-dred times in the stable that they’d be very glad to see me again at the castle.
I have enough experience to know how little such promises mean. But that’s not the main point. It’s not only through the ser-vants themselves that I have a connection with the castle; it may be the case, and I hope it is, that someone up there is observing me and what I do—and the administration of such a large body of servants must be a very important, onerous part of the official work—and whoever is watching me from up there may judge me more leniently than others do. Perhaps he realizes that I am fighting for our family and continuing our father’s efforts, if only in rather a pathetic way. If you look at it like that, then perhaps I will also be forgiven for tak-ing money from the servants and using it for our family. And I have achieved something else as well, although perhaps you will be another who blames me for it. I have heard a great deal from the servants about how people can get into the service of the castle with-out going through the tedious process of public acceptance, which can last years. Then they are not officially acknowledged employees, but they work under cover and are semi-official. They have neither rights nor duties, and the fact that they have no duties is the worst of it, but they do have one advantage, they are close to everything, they can spot good opportunities and use them. You are not an employee if you are one of them, but you may find some work by chance if there’s no employee ready to hand, someone calls, you come hurrying up, and now you are employed, which you weren’t a moment before. But when does such an opportunity arise? Sometimes quickly, you have hardly arrived, you have hardly looked around you when the oppor-tunity comes, not everyone has the presence of mind to take it at once, but then again it may not come for more years than the proced-ure of public acceptance takes, and such a semi-official employee cannot be publicly acknowledged in the regular sense. There is plenty to think about here, but no one mentions the fact that very meticulous selection is involved in the process of public acceptance, and any member of a family that seems disreputable in some way or another is ruled out from the first, suppose such a person applies.
He may be on tenterhooks for years anticipating the result, and from the first day everyone has been asking him in amazement how he can embark on such a hopeless venture, but he still has hope, how else could he live? Then, after many years, perhaps in old age, he learns of his rejection, he learns that all is lost and his life has been in vain. Here again, of course, there are exceptions, so it is easy to fall prey to temptation. It can happen that even disreputable people are finally accepted, there are officials who like the scent of such game, posi-tively against their will, and then during the acceptance tests they sniff the air, they twist their mouths, they roll their eyes; in some way such a man seems to them extraordinarily appetizing, and they have to stick resolutely to the guidelines in the legal books to resist him. Sometimes, however, that helps the man not to acceptance but to an endlessly protracted acceptance procedure, one that will never come to an end at all, but will be cut short only by his death. So both legal acceptance and the other kind are full of difficulties both overt and covert, and before you let yourself in for anything of that nature it is highly advisable to weigh up the pros and cons carefully. And Barnabas and I did not fail to do so. Whenever I came back from the Castle Inn, we sat down together and I told him the latest news of what I had learnt. We discussed it for days, and Barnabas neglected the work he was doing more often than he should. And here, as you see it, I may be to blame. For I knew that we couldn’t rely much on the stories the servants told. I knew that they never wanted to talk to me about the castle, they were always changing the subject, I had to wheedle every word out of them, and then when they did get going they let rip, talked nonsense, boasted, outdid each other in exagger-ations and inventions, so that obviously in all that shouting, each vying with the other in the darkness of the stable, there might be at best some few indications of the truth. However, I passed it all on to Barnabas, just as I had memorized it, and he, who was still unable to distinguish between truth and lies, and as a result of our family’s situation was almost dying of longing for these things, he drank it all in and was eager for more.
And it was on Barnabas that my new plan depended. There was no more to be had from the servants. Sortini’s messenger could not be found, and never would be, Sortini seemed to withdraw ever further, and with him so did the messenger. Even their appearance and Sortini’s name often seemed to be lapsing into oblivion, and I had to describe them at length, achieving nothing except that, with some difficulty, people did remember them but could say nothing beyond that. And as for my life with the servants, naturally I had no influence on how it was judged, I could only hope that it would be taken as it was meant and that a little of the guilt would be lifted from our family, but I saw no sign of that. Yet I stuck to it, since I saw no other opportunity of doing something for us at the castle. For Barnabas, however, I did see such an opportunity. If I felt like it, and I felt like it very much indeed, I could gather from the servants’ stories that a man taken into the service of the castle can do a great deal for his family. Although how much of those stories was credible? It was impossible to find out, but it was clear that it would
