Free The Castle by Franz Kafka, Willa Muir, Edwin Muir

Frieda, my dear maid."
    "Oh, if that's it," said K., "then of course you're right, but I don't see why we can't be left to settle our own affairs."
    "Because I love her and care for her," said the landlady, drawing Frieda's head towards her, for Frieda as she stood only reached up to the landlady's shoulder.
    "Since Frieda puts such confidence in you," cried K., "I must do the same, and since not long ago Frieda called my assistants true friends we are all friends together. So I can tell you that what I would like best would be for Frieda and myself to get married, the sooner the better. I know, oh, I know that I'll never be able to make up to Frieda for all she has lost for my sake, her position in the Herrenhof and her friendship with Klamm."
    Frieda lifted up her face, her eyes were full of tears and had not a trace of triumph.
    "Why? Why am I chosen out from other people?"
    "What?' asked K. and the landlady simultaneously.
    "She's upset, poor child," said the landlady, "upset by the conjunction of too much happiness and unhappiness."
    And as if in confirmation of those words Frieda now flung herself upon K., kissing him wildly as if there were nobody else in the room, and then weeping, but still clinging to him, fell on her knees before him. While he caressed Frieda's hair with both hands K.
    asked the landlady:
    "You seem to have no objection?"
    "You are a man of honour," said the landlady, who also had tears in her eyes.
    She looked a little worn and breathed with difficulty, but she found strength enough to say: "There's only the question now of what guarantees you are to give Frieda, for great as is my respect for you, you're a stranger here; there's nobody here who can speak for you, your family circumstances aren't known here, so some guarantee is necessary. You must see that, my dear sir, and indeed you touched on it yourself when you mentioned how much Frieda must lose through her association with you."
    "Of course, guarantees, most certainly," said K., "but they'll be best given before the notary, and at the same time other officials of the Count's will perhaps be concerned.
    Besides, before I'm married there's something I must do. I must have a talk with Klamm."
    "That's impossible," said Frieda, raising herself a little and pressing close to K.,
    "what an idea!"
    "But it must be done," said K., "if it's impossible for me to manage it, you must!"
    "I can't, K., I can't," said Frieda. "Klamm will never talk to you. How can you even think of such a thing!"
    "And won't he talk to you?" asked K.
    "Not to me either," said Frieda, "neither to you nor to me, it's simply impossible."
    She turned to the landlady with outstretched arms: "You see what he's asking for!"
    "You're a strange person," said the landlady, and she was an awe-inspiring figure now that she sat more upright, her legs spread out and her enormous knees projecting under her thin skirt, "you ask for the impossible."
    "Why is it impossible?" said K.
    "That's what I'm going to tell you," said the landlady in a tone which sounded as if her explanation were less a final concession to friendship than the first item in a score of penalties she was enumerating, "that's what I shall be glad to let you know. Although I don't belong to the Castle, and am only a woman, only a landlady here in an inn of the lowest kind - it's not of the very lowest but not far from it - and on that account you may not perhaps set much store by my explanation, still I've kept my eyes open all my life and met many kinds of people and taken the whole burden of the inn on my own shoulders, for Martin is no landlord although he's a good man, and responsibility is a thing he'll never understand. It's only his carelessness, for instance, that you've got to thank - for I was tired to death on that evening - for being here in the village at all, for sitting here on this bed in peace and comfort."
    "What?" said K., waking from a kind of absent-minded distraction, pricked more by curiosity than