XV

always something⁠—I don’t know what it is⁠—that hinders you from seeing clearly how much Barnabas has⁠—I’ll not say achieved⁠—but has had bestowed on him. He’s permitted to go into the bureaux, or if you prefer, into an antechamber, well let it be an antechamber, it has doors that lead on further, barriers which can be passed if one has the courage. To me, for instance, even this antechamber is utterly inaccessible, for the present at least. Who it is that Barnabas speaks to there I have no idea, perhaps the clerk is the lowest in the whole staff, but even if he is the lowest he can put one in touch with the next man above him, and if he can’t do that he can at least give the other’s name, and if he can’t even do that he can refer to somebody who can give the name. This so-called Klamm may not have the smallest trait in common with the real one, the resemblance may not exist except in the eyes of Barnabas, half-blinded by fear, he may be the meanest of the officials, he may not even be an official at all, but all the same he has work of some kind to perform at the desk, he reads something or other in his great book, he whispers something to the clerk, he thinks something when his eye falls on Barnabas once in a while, and even if that isn’t true and he and his acts have no significance whatever, he has at least been set there by somebody for some purpose. All that simply means that something is there, something which Barnabas has the chance of using, something or other at the very least; and that it is Barnabas’s own fault if he can’t get any further than doubt and anxiety and despair. And that’s only on the most unfavourable interpretation of things, which is extremely improbable. For we have the actual letters, which I certainly set no great store on, but more than on what Barnabas says. Let them be worthless old letters, fished at random from a pile of other such worthless old letters, at random and with no more discrimination than the lovebirds show in the fairs when they pick one’s fortune out of a pile; let them be all that, still they have some bearing on my fate. They’re evidently meant for me, although perhaps not for my good, and, as the Superintendent and his wife have testified, they are written in Klamm’s own hand, and, again on