said Pepi, “it’s the gentlemen’s room; the gentlemen eat and drink there; that is, it’s reserved for that, but most of them remain upstairs in their rooms.” “If I knew,” said K. , “that nobody was in there just now, I would like very much to go in and have a look for the table-cover. But one can’t be certain; Klamm, for instance, is often in the habit of sitting there.” “Klamm is certainly not there now,” said Pepi. “He’s making ready to leave this minute, the sledge is waiting for him in the yard.”
Without a word of explanation K. left the taproom at once; when he reached the hall he turned, instead of to the door, to the interior of the house, and in a few steps reached the courtyard. How still and lovely it was here! A foursquare yard, bordered on three sides by the house buildings, and towards the street—a side-street which K. did not know—by a high white wall with a huge, heavy gate, open now. Here where the court was, the house seemed stiller than at the front; at any rate the whole first storey jutted out and had a more impressive appearance, for it was encircled by a wooden gallery closed in except for one tiny slit for looking through. At the opposite side from K. and on the ground floor, but in the corner where the opposite wing of the house joined the main building, there was an entrance to the house, open, and without a door. Before it was standing a dark, closed sledge to which a pair of horses were yoked. Except for the coachman, whom at that distance and in the falling twilight K. guessed at rather than recognised, nobody was to be seen.
Looking about him cautiously, his hands in his pockets, K. slowly coasted round two sides of the yard until he reached the sledge. The coachman—one of the peasants who had been the other night in the taproom—smart in his fur coat, watched K. approaching non-committally, much as one follows the movements of a cat. Even when K. was standing beside him and had greeted him, and the horses were becoming a little restive at seeing a man looming out of the dusk, he remained completely detached. That exactly suited K. ’s purpose.