XVIII
Then, as he was looking round aimlessly, K. saw Frieda far away at a turn of the passage; she behaved as if she did not recognise him and only stared at him expressionlessly; she was carrying a tray with some empty dishes in her hand. He said to the servant, who however paid no attention whatever to him—the more one talked to the servant the more absentminded he seemed to become—that he would be back in a moment, and ran off to Frieda. Reaching her he took her by the shoulders as if he were seizing his own property again, and asked her a few unimportant questions with his eyes holding hers. But her rigid bearing hardly as much as softened, to hide her confusion she tried to rearrange the dishes on the tray and said: “What do you want from me? Go back to the others—oh, you know whom I mean, you’ve just come from them, I can see it.” K. changed his tactics immediately; the explanation mustn’t come so suddenly, and mustn’t begin with the worst point, the point most unfavourable to himself. “I thought you were in the taproom,” he said. Frieda looked at him in amazement and then softly passed her free hand over his brow and cheeks. It was as if she had forgotten what he looked like and were trying to recall it to mind again, even her eyes had the veiled look of one who was painfully trying to remember. “I’ve been taken on in the taproom again,” she said slowly at last, as if it did not matter what she said, but as if beneath her words she were carrying on another conversation with K. which was more important—“this work here is not for me, anybody at all could do it; anybody who can make beds and look good-natured and doesn’t mind the advances of the boarders, but actually likes them; anybody who can do that can be a chambermaid. But in the taproom, that’s quite different. I’ve been taken on straight away for the taproom again, in spite of the fact that I didn’t leave it with any great distinction, but, of course, I had a word put in for me. But the landlord was delighted that I had a word put in for me to make it easy for him to take me on again. It actually ended by them having to press me to take on the post; when you reflect what the taproom reminds me of you’ll understand that. Finally I decided to take it on. I’m only here temporarily. Pepi begged us not to put her to the shame of having to leave the taproom at once, and seeing that she has been willing and has done everything to the best of her ability, we have given her a twenty-four hours’ extension.” “That’s all very nicely arranged,” said K., “but once you left the taproom for my sake, and now that we’re soon to be married are you going back to it again?” “There will be no marriage,” said Frieda. “Because I’ve been unfaithful to you?” asked K. Frieda nodded. “Now, look here, Frieda,” said K., “we’ve often talked already about this alleged unfaithfulness of mine, and every time you’ve had to recognise finally that your suspicions were unjust. And since then nothing has changed on my side, all I’ve done has remained as innocent as it was at first and as it must always remain. So something must have changed on your side, through the suggestions of strangers or in some way or other. You do me an injustice in any case, for just listen to how I stand with those two girls. The one, the dark one—I’m almost ashamed to defend myself on particular points like this, but you give me no choice—the dark one, then, is probably just as displeasing to me as to you: I keep my distance with her in every way I can, and she makes it easy, too, no one could be more retiring than she is.” “Yes,” cried Frieda, the words slipped out as if against her will, K. was delighted to see her attention diverted, she was not saying what she had intended—“Yes, you may look upon her as retiring, you tell me that the most shameless creature of them all is retiring, and incredible as it is, you mean it honestly, you’re not shamming, I know. The Bridge Inn landlady once said of you: ‘I can’t abide him, but I can’t let him alone either, one simply can’t control oneself when one sees a child that can hardly walk trying to go too far for it, one simply has to interfere.’ ” “Pay attention to her advice for this once,” said K. smiling, “but that girl—whether she’s retiring or shameless doesn’t matter—I don’t want to hear any more about her.” “But why do you call her retiring?” asked Frieda obdurately—K. considered this interest of hers a favourable sign, “have you found her so, or are you simply casting a reflection on somebody else?” “Neither the one nor the other,” said K., “I call her that out of gratitude, because she makes it easy for me to ignore her, and because if she said even a word or two to me I couldn’t bring myself to go back again, which would be a great loss to me, for I must go there for the sake of both our futures, as you know. And it’s simply for that reason that I have to talk with the other girl, whom I respect, I must admit, for her capability, prudence and unselfishness, but whom nobody could say was seductive.” “The servants are of a different opinion,” said Frieda. “On that as on lots of other subjects,” said K. “Are you going to deduce my unfaithfulness from the tastes of the servants?” Frieda remained silent and suffered K. to take the tray from her, set it on the floor, put his arm through hers, and walk her slowly up and down in the corner of the passage. “You don’t know what fidelity is,” she said, his nearness putting her a little in the defensive, “what your relations with the girl may be isn’t the most important point; the fact that you go to that house at all and come back with the smell of their kitchen on your clothes is itself an unendurable humiliation for me. And then you rush out of the school without saying a word. And stay with them, too, the half of the night. And when you’re asked for, you let those girls deny that you’re there, deny it passionately, especially the wonderfully retiring one. And creep out of the house by a secret way, perhaps actually to save the good name of the girls, the good name of those girls! No, don’t let us talk about it any more.” “Yes, don’t let us talk of this,” said K., “but of something else, Frieda. Besides, there’s nothing more to be said about it. You know why I have to go there. It isn’t easy for me, but I overcome my feelings. You shouldn’t make it any harder for me than it is. Tonight I only thought of dropping in there for a minute to see whether Barnabas had come at last, for he had an important message which he should have brought long before. He hadn’t come, but he was bound to come very soon, so I was assured, and it seemed very probable too. I didn’t want to let him come after me, for you to be insulted by his presence. The hours passed and unfortunately he didn’t come. But another came all right, a man whom I hate. I had no intention of letting myself be spied on by him, so I left through the neighbour’s garden, but I didn’t want to hide from him either, and I went up to him frankly when I reached the street, with a very good and supple hazel switch, I admit. That is all, so there’s nothing more to be said about it; but there’s plenty to say about something else. What about the assistants, the very mention of whose name is as repulsive to me as that family is to you? Compare your relations with them with my relations with that family. I understand your antipathy to Barnabas’s family and can share it. It’s only for the sake of my affairs that I go to see them, sometimes it almost seems to me that I’m abusing and exploiting them. But you and the assistants! You’ve never denied that they persecute you, and you’ve admitted that you’re attracted by them. I wasn’t angry with you for that, I recognised that powers were at work which you weren’t equal to, I was glad enough to see that you put up a resistance at least, I helped to defend you, and just because I left off for a few hours, trusting in your constancy, trusting also, I must admit, in the hope that the house was securely locked and the assistants finally put to flight—I still underestimate them, I’m afraid—just because I left off for a few hours and this Jeremiah—who is, when you look at him closely, a rather unhealthy elderly creature—had the impudence to go up to the window; just for this, Frieda, I must lose you and get for a greeting: ‘There will be no marriage.’ Shouldn’t I be the one to cast reproaches? But I don’t, I have never done so.” And once more it seemed advisable to K. to distract Frieda’s mind a little, and he begged her to bring him something to eat for he had had nothing since midday. Obviously relieved by the request, Frieda nodded and ran to fetch something, not farther along the passage, however, where K. conjectured the kitchen was, but down a few steps to the left. In a little she brought a plate with slices of meat and a bottle of wine, but they were clearly only the remains of a meal, the scraps of meat had been hastily ranged out anew so as to hide the fact, yet whole sausage skins had been overlooked, and the bottle was three-quarters empty. However K. said nothing and fell on the food with a good appetite. “You were in the kitchen?” he asked. “No, in my own room,” she said. “I have a room down there.” “You might surely have taken me with you,” said K. “I’ll go down now, so as to sit down for a little while I’m eating.” “I’ll bring you a chair,” said Frieda already making to go. “Thanks,” replied K. holding her back, “I’m neither going down there, nor do I need a chair any longer.” Frieda endured his hand on her arm defiantly, bowed her head and bit her lip. “Well, then, he is down there,” she said, “did you expect anything else? He’s lying on my bed, he got a cold out there, he’s shivering, he’s hardly had any food. At bottom it’s all your fault, if you hadn’t driven the assistants away and run after those people, we might be sitting comfortably in the school now. You alone have destroyed our happiness. Do you think that Jeremiah, so long as he was in service, would have dared to take me away? Then you entirely misunderstood the way things are ordered here. He wanted me, he tormented himself, he lay in watch for me, but that was only a game, like the play of a hungry dog who nevertheless wouldn’t dare to leap up on the table. And just the same with me. I was drawn to him, he was a playmate of mine in my childhood—we played together on the slope of the Castle Hill, a lovely time, you’ve never asked me anything about my past—but all that wasn’t decisive as long as Jeremiah was held back by his service, for I knew my duty as your future wife. But then you drove the assistants away and plumed yourself on it besides, as if you had done something for me by it; well, in a certain sense it was true. Your plan has succeeded as far as Arthur is concerned, but only for the moment, he’s delicate, he hasn’t Jeremiah’s passion that nothing can daunt, besides you almost shattered his health for him by the buffet you gave him that night—it was a blow at my happiness as well—he fled to the Castle to complain, and even if he comes back soon, he’s gone now all the same. But Jeremiah stayed. When he’s in service he fears the slightest look of his master, but when he’s not in service there’s nothing he’s afraid of. He came and took me; forsaken by you, commanded by him, my old friend, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t unlock the school door. He smashed the window and lifted me out. We flew here, the landlord looks up to him, nothing could be more welcome to the guests, either, than to have such a waiter, so we were taken on, he isn’t living with me, but we are staying in the same room.” “In spite of everything,” said K., “I don’t regret having driven the assistants from our service. If things stood as you say, and your faithfulness was only determined by the assistants’ being in the position of servants, then it was a good thing that it came to an end. The happiness of a married life spent with two beasts of prey, who could only be kept under by the whip, wouldn’t have been very great. In that case I’m even thankful to this family who have unintentionally had some part in separating us.” They became silent and began to walk backwards and forwards again side by side, though neither this time could have told who had made the first move. Close beside him, Frieda seemed annoyed that K. did not take her arm again. “And so everything seems in order,” K. went on, “and we might as well say goodbye, and you go to your Jeremiah, who must have had this chill, it seems, ever since I chased him through the garden, and whom you’ve already left by himself too long in that case, and I to the empty school, or, seeing that there’s no place for me there without you, anywhere else where they’ll take me in. If I hesitate still in spite of this, it’s because I have still a little doubt about what you’ve told me, and with good reason. I have a different impression of Jeremiah. So long as he was in service he was always at your heels and I don’t believe that his position would have held him back permanently from making a serious attempt on you. But now that he considers that he’s absolved from service, it’s a different case. Forgive me if I have to explain myself in this way: Since you’re no longer his master’s fiancée, you’re by no means such a temptation for him as you used to be. You may be the friend of his childhood, but—I only got to know him really from a short talk tonight—in my opinion he doesn’t lay much weight on such sentimental considerations. I don’t know why he should seem a passionate person in your eyes. His mind seems to me on the contrary to be particularly cold. He received from Galater certain instructions relating to me, instructions probably not very much in my favour, he exerted himself to carry them out, with a certain passion for service, I’ll admit—it’s not so uncommon here—one of them was that he should wreck our relationship; probably he tried to do it by several means, one of them was to tempt you by his evil languishing glances, another—here the landlady supported him—was to invent fables about my unfaithfulness; his attempt succeeded, some memory or other of Klamm that clung to him may have helped, he has lost his position, it is true, but probably just at the moment when he no longer needed it, then he reaped the fruit of his labours and lifted you out through the school window, with that his task was finished, and his passion for service having left him now, he’ll feel bored, he would rather be in Arthur’s shoes, who isn’t really complaining up there at all, but earning praise and new commissions, but someone had to stay behind to follow the further developments of the affair. It’s rather a burdensome task to him to have to look after you. Of love for you he hasn’t a trace, he frankly admitted it to me; as one of Klamm’s sweethearts he of course respects you, and to insinuate himself into your bedroom and feel himself for once a little Klamm certainly gives him pleasure, but that is all, you yourself mean nothing to him now, his finding a place for you here is only a supplementary part of his main job; so as not to disquieten you he has remained here himself too, but only for the time being, as long as he doesn’t get further news from the Castle and his cooling feelings towards you aren’t quite cured.” “How you slander him!” said Frieda, striking her little fists together. “Slander?” said K., “no, I don’t wish to slander him. But I may quite well perhaps be doing him an injustice, that is certainly possible. What I’ve said about him doesn’t lie on the surface for anybody to see, and it may be looked at differently too. But slander? Slander could only have one object, to combat your love for him. If that were necessary and if slander were the most fitting means, I wouldn’t hesitate to slander him. Nobody could condemn me for it, his position puts him at such an advantage as compared with me that, thrown back solely on my own resources, I could even allow myself a little slander. It would be a comparatively innocent, but in the last resort a powerless, means of defence. So put down your fists.” And K. took Frieda’s hand in his; Frieda tried to draw it away, but smilingly and not with any great earnestness. “But I don’t need slander,” said K., “for you don’t love him, you only think you do, and you’ll be thankful to me for ridding you of your illusion. For think, if anybody wanted to take you away from me, without violence, but with the most careful calculation, he could only do it through the two assistants. In appearance good, childish, merry, irresponsible youths, fallen from the sky, from the Castle, a dash of childhood’s memories with them too; all that of course must have seemed very nice, especially when I was the antithesis of it all, and was always running after affairs moreover which were scarcely comprehensible, which were exasperating to you, and which threw me together with people whom you considered deserving of your hate—something of which you carried over to me too, in spite of all my innocence. The whole thing was simply a wicked but very clever exploitation of the failings in our relationship. Everybody’s relations have their blemishes, even ours, we came together from two very different worlds, and since we have known each other the life of each of us has had to be quite different, we still feel insecure, it’s all too new. I don’t speak of myself, I don’t matter so much, in reality I’ve been enriched from the very first moment that you looked on me, and to accustom oneself to one’s riches isn’t very difficult. But—not to speak of anything else—you were torn away from Klamm, I can’t calculate how much that must have meant, but a vague idea of it I’ve managed to arrive at gradually, you stumbled, you couldn’t find yourself, and even if I was always ready to help you, still I wasn’t always there, and when I was there you were held captive by your dreams or by something more palpable, the landlady, say—in short there were times when you turned away from me, longed, poor child, for vague inexpressible things, and at those periods any passable man had only to come within your range of vision and you lost yourself to him, succumbing to the illusion that mere fancies of the moment, ghosts, old memories, things of the past and things receding ever more into the past, life that once been lived—that all this was your actual present-day life. A mistake, Frieda, nothing more than the last and, properly regarded, contemptible difficulties attendant on our final reconciliation. Come to yourself, gather yourself together; even if you thought that the assistants were sent by Klamm—it’s quite untrue, they come from Galater—and even if they did manage by the help of this illusion to charm you so completely that even in their disreputable tricks and their lewdness you thought you found traces of Klamm, just as one fancies one catches a glimpse of some precious stone that one has lost in a dung-heap, while in reality one wouldn’t be able to find it even if it were there—all the same they’re only hobbledehoys like the servants in the stall, except that they’re not healthy like them, and a little fresh air makes them ill and compels them to take to their beds, which I must say that they know how to snuffle out with a servant’s true cunning.” Frieda had let her head fall on K.’s shoulder; their arms round each other, they walked silently up and down. “If we had only,” said Frieda after a while, slowly, quietly, almost serenely, as if she knew that only a quite short respite of peace on K.’s shoulder were reserved for her, and she wanted to enjoy it to the utmost, “If we had only gone away somewhere at once that night, we might be in peace now, always together, your hand always near enough for mine to grasp; oh how much I need your companionship, how lost I have felt without it ever since I’ve known you, to have your company, believe me, is the only dream that I’ve had, that and nothing else.”
Then someone called from the side passage, it was Jeremiah, he was standing there on the lowest step, he was in his shirt, but had thrown a wrap of Frieda’s round him. As he stood there, his hair rumpled, his thin beard lank as if dripping with wet, his eyes painfully beseeching and wide with reproach, his sallow cheeks flushed, but yet flaccid, his naked legs trembling so violently with cold that the long fringes of the wrap quivered as well, he was like a patient who had escaped from hospital, and whose appearance could only suggest one thought, that of getting him back in bed again. This in fact was the effect that he had on Frieda, she disengaged herself from K., and was down beside Jeremiah in a second. Her nearness, the solicitude with which she drew the wrap closer round him, the haste with which she tried to force him back into the room, seemed to give him new strength, it was as if he only recognised K. now. “Ah, the Land Surveyor!” he said, stroking Frieda’s cheek to propitiate her, for she did not want to let him talk any further, “forgive the interruption. But I’m not at all well, that must be my excuse. I think I’m feverish, I must drink some tea and get a sweat. Those damned railings in the school garden, they’ll give me something to think about yet, and then, already chilled to the bone, I had to run about all night afterwards. One sacrifices one’s health for things not really worth it, without noticing it at the time. But you, Land Surveyor, mustn’t let yourself be disturbed by me, come into the room here with us, pay me a sick visit, and at the same time tell Frieda whatever you have still to say to her. When two who are accustomed to one another say goodbye, naturally they have a great deal to say to each other at the last minute which a third party, even if he’s lying in bed waiting for his tea to come, can’t possibly understand. But do come in, I’ll be perfectly quiet.” “That’s enough, enough!” said Frieda pulling at his arm. “He’s feverish and doesn’t know what he’s saying. But you, K., don’t you come in here, I beg you not to. It’s my room and Jeremiah’s, or rather it’s my room and mine alone, I forbid you to come in with us. You always persecute me, oh K., why do you always persecute me? Never, never will I go back to you, I shudder when I think of the very possibility. Go back to your girls; they sit beside you before the fire in nothing but their shifts, I’ve been told, and when anybody comes to fetch you they spit at him. You must feel at home there, since the place attracts you so much. I’ve always tried to keep you from going there, with little success, but all the same I’ve tried; all that’s past now, you are free. You’ve a lovely life in front of you; for the one you’ll perhaps have to squabble a little with the servants, but as for the other, there’s nobody in heaven or earth that will grudge you her. The union is blessed beforehand. Don’t deny it, I know you can disprove anything, but in the end nothing is disproved. Only think, Jeremiah, he has disproved everything!” They nodded with a smile of mutual understanding. “But,” Frieda went on, “even if everything were disproved, what would be gained by that, what would it matter to me? What happens in that house is purely their business and his business, not mine. Mine is to nurse you till you’re well again, as you were at one time, before K. tormented you for my sake.” “So you’re not coming in after all, Land Surveyor?” asked Jeremiah, but was now definitely dragged away by Frieda, who did not even turn to look at K. again. There was a little door down there, still lower than the doors in the passage—not Jeremiah only, even Frieda had to stoop on entering—within it seemed to be bright and warm, a few whispers were audible, probably loving cajolements to get Jeremiah to bed, then the door was closed.