And if she keeps begging me to free her from you, why shouldn’t I do her the favour? Particularly as I’m not even doing you any harm, now that you’ve found consolation with Barnabas’s wretched sisters.’ ‘Now I see your fear,’ said K., ‘and a pitiful fear it is too. You’re try-ing to entangle me in your lies. Frieda asked me for just one thing, to set her free from my servile, lascivious assistants who had run so wild. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to finish doing as she asked, and now I see the consequences of omitting to do so.’
‘Mr Land Surveyor, sir! Mr Land Surveyor!’ someone shouted down the road. It was Barnabas. He arrived out of breath, but didn’t forget to bow to K. ‘I’ve succeeded,’ he said. ‘Succeeded in what?’ asked K. ‘You mean you’ve delivered my request to Klamm?’ ‘Not that, no,’ said Barnabas. ‘I tried hard, but it just couldn’t be done. I pushed my way to the front, I stood there all day uninvited, so close to the lectern that once a clerk actually pushed me aside because I was standing in his light, I tried to attract attention, which is strictly forbidden, by raising my hand when Klamm looked up, I stayed in the office longer than anyone. In the end I was alone there with the servants, and then I had the pleasure of seeing Klamm come back again, but it wasn’t because of me, he just wanted to look something up in a book, and then he left directly. At last, as I still didn’t move, a servant practically swept me out of the doorway with his broom. I’m telling you all this to make sure you aren’t dissatisfied with what I’ve done again.’ ‘What use is all your industry to me, Barnabas,’ said K., ‘if you weren’t successful?’ ‘Oh, but I was successful,’ said Barnabas. ‘When I left my office—well, I call it my office—I saw a gentleman coming slowly along, apparently from the corridors fur-ther inside the building. Otherwise the place was empty, it was already very late. I decided to wait for him; it was a fine opportunity to stay there, in fact I felt like staying there for ever rather than hav-ing to bring you bad news.
But it was worth waiting for the gentle-man anyway, because he was Erlanger.* Don’t you know him? He’s one of Klamm’s principal secretaries. A slight little gentleman with a bit of a limp. He recognized me at once, he’s famous for his memory and his knowledge of human nature; he simply frowns and that’s enough for him to recognize anyone, often including people he’s never met before, people he’s only heard or read about, and he can’t very well ever have seen me, for instance. But even though he recognizes everyone at once, he starts by asking questions as if he wasn’t sure. “Aren’t you Barnabas?” he said to me. Then he asked: “You know the land surveyor, don’t you?” And then he said: “This is handy. I’m just going to the Castle Inn. Tell the land sur-veyor to call and see me there. I’ll be in Room 15. But he’ll have to come at once. I have only a few hearings to conduct there, and I’ll be going back at five in the morning. Tell him I am very anxious to speak to him.” ’
Suddenly Jeremias set off at a run. Barnabas, who had hardly noticed him before in his excitement, asked: ‘What’s up with Jeremias?’ ‘He wants to get to Erlanger ahead of me,’ said K., run-ning after Jeremias himself. He caught up with him, took his arm firmly, and said: ‘Is it desire for Frieda that’s come over you all of a sudden? I feel exactly the same, so we’ll go at the same pace.’
A small group of men stood outside the dark Castle Inn, two or three of them carrying lanterns, so that you could make out many of their faces. K. saw only one man he knew, Gerstäcker the carrier. Gerstäcker greeted him with the words: ‘So you’re still in the village, are you?’ ‘Yes,’ said K. ‘I’m here indefinitely.’ ‘Well, that’s nothing to do with me,’ said Gerstäcker, coughing hard and turning to the others.
It turned out that they were all waiting for Erlanger. Erlanger had arrived, but he was still talking to Momus before receiving the other members of the public. The general conversation turned on the fact that they weren’t allowed to wait inside the inn, but had to stand out here in the snow. To be sure, it wasn’t very cold, but all the same it was thoughtless to leave them waiting outside the house in the night, perhaps for hours. Of course, that was not Erlanger’s fault, he was said to be very easygoing, he probably hardly knew about it, and would certainly have been very angry if he had been told. It was all the fault of the landlady of the Castle Inn, who in her neurotic striv-ing for refinement didn’t want so many members of the public in the Castle Inn all at once. ‘If we must have them here, if they really must come,’ she was in the habit of saying, ‘then for heaven’s sake let them come one after another.’ And she had carried her point, so the mem-bers of the public, who at first just waited in a corridor, had to wait on the stairs later, then in the front hall, finally in the bar, and last of all they were thrown out into the street. Even that wasn’t enough for her. She found it intolerable to be ‘always under siege’, as she put it, in her own house. She couldn’t understand why members of the public had to come there at all. ‘To make the steps outside the house dirty,’ an official had once said in answer to her question. He probably spoke in anger, but she had found the idea very plausible, and liked to quote his remark. She was trying to get a building put up opposite the Castle Inn where members of the public could wait, which in fact would suit their own wishes very well. She would have liked it best of all if discussions with the members of the public and hearings had taken place entirely away from the Castle Inn, but the officials opposed any such idea, and if the officials seriously opposed it then of course the landlady couldn’t win, although she did exercise a kind of little tyranny in minor matters, thanks to her tireless yet softly feminine zeal. However, it looked as if the landlady would have to continue putting up with discussions and hearings at the Castle Inn, for the gentlemen from the castle declined to leave the inn to go about their official business when they were in the village. They were always in a hurry, and anyway they came to the village only very much against their will; they had not the faintest desire to prolong the time they spent here beyond what was strictly necessary, so they could not be expected to move temporarily over the street with all their papers, thus losing time, just for the sake of peace and quiet in the Castle Inn. They liked best to do official business in
