on very slowly, he was met with the retort that it was not getting on slowly at all, although
they would have been much further on by now had K. come to the lawyer in time.
Unfortunately he had neglected to do so and that omission was likely to keep him at a
disadvantage, and not merely a temporal disadvantage, either.
The one welcome interruption to these visits was Leni, who always so arranged things
that she brought in the lawyer’s tea while K. was present. She would stand behind K.’s
chair, apparently looking on, while the lawyer stooped with a kind of miserly greed over
his cup and poured out and sipped his tea, but all the time she was letting K. surreptitiously
hold her hand. There was total silence. The lawyer sipped, K. squeezed Leni’s hand, and
sometimes Leni ventured to caress his hair. “Are you still here?” the lawyer would ask,
after he had finished. “I wanted to take the tea-tray away,” Leni would answer, there would
follow a last handclasp, the lawyer would wipe his mouth and begin again with new energy
to harangue K.
Was the lawyer seeking to comfort him or to drive him to despair? K. could not tell,
but he soon held it for an established fact that his defense was not in good hands. It might
be all true, of course, what the lawyer said, though his attempts to magnify his own
importance were transparent enough and it was likely that he had never till now conducted
such an important case as he imagined K.’s to be. But his continual bragging of his
personal connections with the officials was suspicious. Was it so certain that he was
exploiting these connections entirely for K.’s benefit? The lawyer never forgot to mention
that these officials were subordinate officials, therefore officials in a very dependent
position, for whose advancement certain turns in the various cases might in all probability
be of some importance. Could they possibly employ the lawyer to bring about such turns in
the case, turns which were bound, of course, to be unfavorable to the accused? Perhaps
they did not always do that, it was hardly likely, there must be occasions on which they
arranged that the lawyer should score a point or two as a reward for his services, since it
was to their own interest for him to keep up his professional reputation. But if that were
really the position, into which category were they likely to put K.’s case, which, as the
lawyer maintained, was a very difficult, therefore important case, and had roused great
interest in the Court from the very beginning? There could not be very much doubt what
they would do. A clue was already provided by the fact that the first plea had not yet been
handed in, though the case had lasted for months, and that according to the lawyer all the
proceedings were still in their early stages, words which were obviously well calculated to
lull the accused and keep him in a helpless state, in order suddenly to overwhelm him with the verdict or at least with the announcement that the preliminary examination had been
concluded in his disfavor and the case handed over to higher authorities.
It was absolutely necessary for K. to intervene personally. In states of intense
exhaustion, such as he experienced this winter morning, when all these thoughts kept
running at random through his head, he was particularly incapable of resisting this
conviction. The contempt which he had once felt for the case no longer obtained. Had he
stood alone in the world he could easily have ridiculed the whole affair, though it was also
certain that in that event it could never have arisen at all. But now his uncle had dragged
him to this lawyer, family considerations had come in; his position was no longer quite
independent of the course the case took, he himself, with a certain inexplicable
complacence, had imprudently mentioned it to some of his acquaintances, others had come
to learn of it in ways unknown to him, his relations with Fräulein Bürstner seemed to
fluctuate with the case itself — in short, he hardly had the choice now to accept the trial or