As he listened seriously and trustingly to Adulf’s reasoning, K was astounded to what extent it coincided with his own views. True, the textbook selection of examples adduced by the talkative crown prince seemed to K a bit crude; did not the whole point lie not in the striking manifestations of witchcraft but in the delicate shadings of a fantastic something, which profoundly, and at the same time mistily, colored the island’s history? He was, however, unconditionally in agreement with the basic premise, and that was the answer he gave, lowering his head and nodding to himself. Only much later did he realize that the coincidence of ideas which had so astonished him had been the consequence of an almost unconscious cunning on the part of their promulgator, who undeniably had a special kind of instinct that allowed him to guess the most effective bait for any fresh listener.
When the king had finished his plums he beckoned to his nephew and, having no idea what to talk to him about, asked how many students there were at the university. K lost countenance—he did not know the number, and was not alert enough to name one at random. “Five hundred? One thousand?” persisted the king, with a note of juvenile eagerness in his voice. “I’m sure there must be more,” he added in a conciliatory tone, not having received an intelligible answer; then, after a reflective pause, he went on to inquire whether his nephew enjoyed riding. Here the crown prince butted in with his usual luscious unconstraint, inviting his cousin for an outing together the following Thursday.
“Astonishing, how much he has come to resemble my poor sister,” said the king with a mechanical sigh, taking off his glasses and returning them to the breast pocket of his brown frogged jacket. “I am too poor to give you a horse,” he continued, “but I have a fine little riding whip. Gotsen” (addressing the Lord Chamberlain), “where is that fine little riding whip with the doggie’s head? Look for it afterwards and give it to him … an interesting little object, historical value and all that. Well, I’m delighted to give it to you, but a horse is beyond my means—all I have is a pair of nags, and I’m keeping them for my hearse. Don’t be vexed—I’m not rich.” (“Il ment,” said the crown prince under his breath and walked off, humming.)
On the day of the outing the weather was cold and restless, a nacreous sky skimmed overhead, the sallow bushes curtseyed in the ravines, the horsehooves plapped as they scattered the slush of thick puddles in chocolate ruts, crows croaked; and then, beyond the bridge, the riders left the road and set off at a trot across the dark heather, above which a slim, already yellowing birch rose here and there. The crown prince proved to be an excellent horseman, although he had evidently never attended a riding school, for his seat was indifferent. His heavy, broad, corduroy-and-chamois-encased bottom, bouncing up and down in the saddle, and his rounded, sloping shoulders aroused in his companion an odd, vague kind of pity, which vanished completely whenever K glanced at the prince’s rosy face, radiating health and sufficiency, and heard his urgeful speech.
The riding whip had come the previous day but had not been taken: the prince (who, by the way, had set the fashion of using bad French at court) had called it with scorn “ce machin ridicule” and contended that it belonged to the groom’s little boy, who must have forgotten it on the king’s porch. “Et mon bonhomme de père, tu sais, a une vraie passion pour les objets trouvés.”
“I’ve been thinking how much truth there is in what you were saying. Books say nothing about it at all.”
“About what?” asked the prince, laboriously trying to reconstruct which stray theory he had been expounding lately in front of his cousin.
“Oh, you remember! The magical origin of power, and the fact—”
“Yes, I do, I do,” hastily interrupted the prince and forthwith found the best way to have done with the faded topic: “I didn’t finish then because there were too many ears around. You see, our whole misfortune lies today in the government’s strange ennui, in national inertia, in the dreary bickering of Peplerhus members. All this is so because the very force of the spells, both popular and royal, has somehow evaporated, and our ancestral sorcery has been reduced to mere hocus-pocus. But let’s not discuss these depressing matters now, let’s turn to more cheerful ones. Say, you must have heard a good deal about me at college? I can imagine! Tell me, what did they talk about? Why are you silent? They called me a libertine, didn’t they?”
“I kept away from malicious chatter,” said K, “but there was indeed some gossip to that effect.”
“Well, hearsay is the poetry of truth. You are still a boy—quite a pretty boy to boot—so there are many things you won’t understand right now. I shall offer you only this observation: all people are basically naughty, but when it is done under the rose, when, for instance, you hasten to gorge yourself on jam in a dark corner, or send your imagination on God knows what errands, all that doesn’t count; nobody considers it a crime. Yet when a person frankly and assiduously satisfies the appetites inflicted upon him by his imperious body, then, oh then, people begin to denounce intemperance! And another consideration: if, in my case, that legitimate satisfaction were limited simply to one and the same unvarying method, popular opinion would become resigned, or at most would reproach me for changing my mistresses too often. But God, what a ruckus they raise because I do not stick to the code of debauchery but gather my honey wherever I find it! And mark, I am fond of everything—whether a tulip or a plain little grass stalk—because you see,” concluded the prince, smiling and slitting his eyes, “I really seek only the fractions of beauty, leaving the integers to the good burghers, and those fractions can be found in a ballet girl as well as in a docker, in a middle-aged Venus as well as in a young horseman.”
“Yes,” said K, “I understand. You are an artist, a sculptor, you worship form.…”
The prince reined in his horse and guffawed.
“Oh, well, it isn’t exactly a matter of sculpture—à moins que tu ne confondes la galanterie avec la Galatée—which, however, is pardonable at your age. No, no—it’s all much less complicated. Only don’t be so bashful with me, I won’t bite you, I simply can’t stand lads qui se tiennent toujours sur leurs gardes. If you don’t have anything more interesting in view, we can return via Grenlog and dine on the lakeside, and then we’ll think up something.”
“No, I’m afraid I—well—I have something to take care of—It so happens that tonight I—”
“Oh, well, I’m not forcing you,” the prince said affably, and a little farther, by the mill, they said good-bye.
As many very shy people would have done in his place, K, when forcing himself to face that ride, foresaw an especially trying ordeal for the very reason of Adulf’s passing for a jovial talker: with a mild, minor-mode person it would have been easier to establish the tone of the outing beforehand. As he prepared himself for it, K tried to imagine all the awkward moments that might result from the necessity of raising his normal mood to Adulf’s sparkling level. Moreover he felt obligated by their first meeting, by the fact that he had imprudently concurred with the opinions of someone who therefore could rightfully expect that both men would get along just as nicely on subsequent occasions. In making a detailed inventory of his potential blunders and, above all, in fancying with the utmost clarity the tension, the leaden load in his jaws, the desperate boredom he would feel (because of his innate capacity, on all occasions, for watching askance his projected self)—in tabulating all this, including futile efforts to merge with his other self and find interesting such things as were supposed to be interesting, K also pursued a secondary, practical aim: to disarm the future, whose only force is surprise. In this he nearly succeeded. Fate, constrained by its own evil choice, was apparently content with the innocuous items he had left beyond the field of prevision: the pale sky, the heath-country wind, a creaking saddle, an impatiently responsive horse, the unflagging monologue of his self-complacent companion, all fused into a fairly endurable sensation, particularly since K had mentally set a certain time limit for the ride. It was only a matter of seeing
it through. But when the prince, with a novel proposal, threatened to extend this limit into the unknown, all of whose possibilities had once again to be agonizingly appraised (and here “something interesting” was again being forced upon K, requiring an expression of happy anticipation), this additional period of time—superfluous! unforeseen!— was intolerable; and so, at the risk of seeming impolite, he had used the pretext of a nonexistent impediment. True, as soon as he turned his horse, he regretted this discourtesy just as acutely as, a moment ago, he had been concerned for his freedom. Consequently, all the nastiness expected from the future deteriorated into a doubtful echo of the past. He thought for a moment if he should not overtake the prince and consolidate the foundation of friendship through a belated, but hence doubly precious, acquiescence to a new ordeal. But his fastidious apprehension of offending a kind, cheerful man did not outweigh his fear of obviously being unable to match that kindness and cheerfulness. Thus it happened that fate outwitted him after all, and, by means of a last furtive pinprick, rendered valueless that which he was prepared to consider a victory.
A few days later he received another invitation from the prince, asking that he “drop in” any evening of the following week. K could not refuse. Moreover, a sense of relief that the other was not offended treacherously smoothed the way.
He was ushered into a large yellow room, as hot as a greenhouse, where a score of people, fairly evenly divided by sex, sat on divans, hassocks, and a deep rug. For a fraction of a second the host seemed vaguely perplexed by his cousin’s arrival, as if he had forgotten that he had invited him, or thought he had asked him for a different day. However, this momentary expression immediately gave way to a grin of welcome, after which the prince ignored his cousin, and neither, for that matter, was any attention paid to K by the other guests, evidently close friends of the prince: extraordinarily thin, smooth-haired young women, half a dozen middle-aged gentlemen with clean-shaven, bronzed faces, and several young men in the open-necked silk shirts that were fashionable at the time. Among them K suddenly recognized the famous young acrobat Ondrik Guldving, a sullen blond boy with a bizarre gentleness of gesture and gait, as if the expressiveness of his body, so remarkable in the arena, were muffled by clothes. To K this acrobat served as a key to the entire constellation of the gathering; and, even if the observer was ridiculously inexperienced and chaste, he immediately sensed that those gauze-dim, delectably elongated girls, their limbs folded with varied abandon, who were making not conversation but mirages of conversation (consisting of slow half-smiles and “hms” of interrogation or response through the smoke of cigarettes inserted in precious holders), belonged to that essentially deaf-and-dumb world that in former days had been known as “demi-monde” (all curtains drawn, no other world known). The fact that, interspersed among them, were ladies one saw at court balls did not change things in the least. The male group was likewise somehow homogeneous, despite its comprising representatives of the nobility, artists with dirty fingernails, and young roughs of the stevedore type. And precisely because the observer was inexperienced and chaste, he immediately had doubts about his initial, involuntary impression and accused himself of common prejudice, of trusting slavishly the trite talk of the town. He decided that everything was in order, i.e., that his world was in no way disrupted by the inclusion of this new province, and that everything about it was simple and comprehensible: a fun-loving, independent person had freely selected his friends.
The quietly carefree and even somehow childish rhythm of this gathering was particularly reassuring to K. The mechanical smoking, the various dainties on gold-veined little plates, the comradely cycles of motion (somebody found some sheet music for somebody; a girl tried on another girl’s necklace), the simplicity, the serenity, all of it denoted in its own way that kindliness which K, who himself did not possess it, recognized in all of life’s phenomena, be it the smile of a bonbon in its goffered bonnet, or the echo of an old friendship divined in another’s small talk. With a frown of concentration, occasionally releasing a series of agitated groans, which would end in a grunt of vexation, the prince was busy trying to drive six tiny balls into the center of a pocket-size maze of glass. A redhead in a green dress and sandals on her bare feet kept repeating, with comic mournfulness, that he would never succeed; but he persisted for a long time, jiggling the recalcitrant gimmick, stamping his foot, and starting all over again. Finally he tossed it on a sofa, where some of the others promptly started on it. Then a man with handsome features, distorted by a tic, sat down at the piano, struck the keys with disorderly vigor in parody of somebody’s way of playing, and right away rose again, whereupon he and the prince began arguing about the talent of a third party, probably the author of the truncated melody, and the redhead, scratching a graceful thigh through her dress, started explaining to the prince the injured party’s position in a complicated musical feud. Abruptly the prince consulted his watch and turned to the blond young acrobat who was drinking orangeade in a corner: “Ondrik,” he said with a worried air, “I think it is time.” Ondrick somberly licked his lips, put down his glass, and came over. With fat fingers, the prince undid Ondrik’s fly, extracted the entire pink mass of his private parts, selected the chief one, and started to rub regularly its glossy shaft.
“At first,” related K, “I thought that I had lost my mind, that I was hallucinating.” Most of all he was shocked by the natural quality of the procedure. Nausea welled within him, and he left. Once in the street, he even ran for a while.
The only person with whom he felt able to share his indignation was his guardian. Although he had no affection for the not very attractive Count, he resolved to consult him as the sole familiar he had. He asked the Count in despair how could it be that a man of Adulf’s morals, a man, moreover, no longer young, and therefore unlikely to change, would become the ruler of the country. By the light in which he had suddenly seen the crown prince, he also perceived that besides hideous ribaldry, and despite a taste for the arts, Adulf was really a savage, a self-taught oaf, lacking real culture, who had appropriated a handful of its beads, had learned how to flaunt the glitter of his adaptive mind, and of course did not worry in the least about the problems of his impending reign. K kept asking was it not crazy nonsense, the delirium of dreams, to imagine such a person king; but in setting those questions he hardly expected matter-of-fact replies: it was the rhetoric of young disenchantment. Nevertheless, as he went on expressing his perplexity, in abrupt brittle phrases (he was not born eloquent), K overtook reality and had a glimpse of its face. Admittedly, he at once fell back again, but that glimpse imprinted itself in his soul, revealing to him in a flash what perils awaited a state doomed to become the plaything of a prurient ruffian.
The Count heard him out attentively, now and then turning on him the gaze of his lashless vulturine eyes: they reflected a strange satisfaction. A calculating and cool mentor, he replied most cautiously, as if not quite agreeing with K, calming him down by saying that what he had happened to catch sight of was acting upon his judgment with undue force; that the only purpose of the hygiene established by the prince was not to allow a young friend to waste his strength on wenching; and that Adulf had qualities which might show themselves upon his ascension. At the end of the interview the Count offered to have K meet a certain wise person, the well-known economist Gumm. Here the Count pursued a double purpose: on one hand, he freed himself of all responsibility for what might follow, and remained aloof, which would do very nicely in case of some mishap; and on the other hand, he was passing K over to an experienced conspirator, thus beginning the realization of a plan that the evil and wily Count had been nursing, it seems, for quite a time.