“Come with me,” said the gentleman, not really as a command, for the command lay not in the words, but in a slight, studiedly indifferent gesture of the hand which accompanied them. “I’m waiting here for somebody,” said K. , no longer in the hope of any success, but simply on principle. “Come,” said the gentleman once more quite imperturbably, as if he wanted to show that he had never doubted that K. was waiting for somebody. “But then I would miss the person I’m waiting for,” said K. with an emphatic nod of his head. In spite of everything that had happened he had the feeling that what he had achieved thus far was something gained, which it was true he only held now in seeming, but which he must not relinquish all the same merely on account of a polite command. “You’ll miss him in any case, whether you go or stay,” said the gentleman, expressing himself bluntly, but showing an unexpected consideration for K. ’s line of thought. “Then I would rather wait for him and miss him,” said K. defiantly; he would certainly not be driven away from here by the mere talk of this young man. Thereupon with his head thrown back and a supercilious look on his face the gentleman closed his eyes for a few minutes, as if he wanted to turn from K. ’s senseless stupidity to his own sound reason again, ran the tip of his tongue round his slightly-parted lips and said at last to the coachman: “Unyoke the horses.”
Obedient to the gentleman, but with a furious side-glance at K. , the coachman had now to get down in spite of his fur coat, and began very hesitatingly—as if he did not so much expect a counter-order from the gentleman as a sensible remark from K. —to back the horses and the sledge closer to the side wing, in which apparently, behind a big door, was the shed where the vehicles were kept. K. saw himself deserted, the sledge was disappearing in one direction, in the other, by the way he had come himself, the gentleman was receding, both it was true very slowly, as if they wanted to show K. that it was still in his power to call them back.