Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 1

Councillor Krespel-1

Councillor Krespel––––––––

THE MAN WHOM I AM GOING to tell you about was Krespel, a Member of Council in the town of H____. This Krespel was the most extraordinary character that I have ever come across in all my life. When I first arrived in H____ whole town was talking of him, because one of his most extraordinary pranks chanced to be in full swing. He was a very clever lawyer and diplomat, and a certain German prince - not a person of great importance—had employed him to draw up a memorial, concerning claims of his on the Imperial Chancery, which had been eminently successful. As Krespel had often said he never could meet with a house quite to his mind, this prince, as recompense for his services, undertook to pay for the building of one, to be planned by Krespel according to the dictates of his fancy. He also offered to buy a site for it; but Krespel determined to build it in a delightful piece of garden ground of his own, just outside the town-gate. So he got together all the necessary building materials, and had them laid down in this piece of ground. After which, he was to be seen all day long, in his usual extraordinary costume—which he always made with his own hands, on peculiar principles of his own—slaking the lime, sifting the gravel, arranging the stones in heaps, etc., etc. He had not gone to any architect for a plan. But one fine day he walked in upon the principal builder, and told him to come next morning to his garden, with the necessary workmen—stonemasons, hodmen and so forth—and build him a house. The builder, of course, asked to see the plan, and was not a little astonished when Krespel said there was no plan and no occasion for one; everything would go on all right without one.

The builder arrived next morning with his men, and found a great rectangular trench, carefully dug in the ground. 'This is the foundation,' Krespel said. 'So set to work, and go on building the walls till I tell you to stop.'

'But what about the doors and windows?' asked the builder. 'Are there to be no partition walls?'

'Just you do as I tell you, my good man ' said Krespel as calmly as possible come quite right in its own good time.'

Nothing but the prospect of liberal payment induced the man to have anything to do with so preposterous a job—but never was there a piece of work carried through so merrily; for it was amid the ceaseless jokes and laughter of the workmen—who never left the ground, where abundance of victuals and drink was always at hand—that the four walls rose with incredible speed, till one day Krespel cried 'Stop!'

Mallets and chisels paused. The men came down from their scaffolds and formed a circle about Krespel, each grinning countenance seeming to say—'What's going to happen now?'

'Out of the way!' cried Krespel, who hastened to one end of the garden, and then paced slowly towards his rectangle of stone walls. On reaching the side of it which was nearest—the one, that is, towards which he had been marching—he shook his head dissatisfied, went to the other end of the garden, then paced up to the wall as before, shaking his head, dissatisfied, once more.

This process he repeated two or three times; but at last, going straight up to the wall till he touched it with the point of his nose, he cried out, loud: 'Come here, you fellows, come here! Knock me in the door! Knock me in a door here!' He gave the size it was to be, accurately in feet and inches; and what he told them to do they did. When the door was knocked through, he walked into the house, and smiled pleasantly at the builder's remark that the walls were just the proper height for a nice two-storied house. He walked meditatively up and down inside, the masons following him with their tools, and whenever he cried 'here a window six feet by four; a little one yonder three feet by two,' out flew the stones as directed.

It was during these operations that I arrived in H____ , and it was entertaining in the extreme to see some hundreds of people collected outside the garden, all hurrahing whenever the stones flew out, and a window appeared where none had been expected. The house was all finished in the same fashion, everything being done according to Krespel's directions as given on the spot. The quaintness of the proceeding, the irresistible feeling that it was all going to turn out so marvelously better than was to have been expected; but, particularly Krespel's liberality, which, by the way, cost him nothing, kept everybody in the best of humor. So the difficulties attending this remarkable style of house-building were got over, and in a very brief time there stood a fully-finished house, which had the maddest appearance certainly, from the outside, no two windows being alike and so forth, but was a marvel of comfort and convenience within. Everybody said so who entered it, and I was of the same opinion, when Krespel admitted me to it after I made his acquaintance.

It was some time, however, ere I did so. He had been so engrossed by his building operations that he had never gone, as he did at other times, to lunch at Professor M 's on Thursdays, saying he should not cross his threshold till after his house-warming. His friends were expecting a grand entertainment on that occasion. However, he invited nobody but the workmen who built the house. Them he entertained with the most recherché dishes. Journeymen masons feasted on venison pasties; carpenters' apprentices and hungry hodmen for once in their lives stayed their appetites with roast pheasant and pate de foie ares. In the evening their wives and daughters came, and there was a fine ball. Krespel just waltzed a little with the foremen's wives, and then sat down with the town-band, took a fiddle, and led the dance-music till daylight.

On the Thursday after this house-warming, which had established Krespel in the position of a popular character—'a friend to the working classes' at last met him at Professor M 's, to my no small gratification. The most extravagant imagination could not invent anything more extraordinary than Krespel's style of behavior. His movements were awkward, abrupt, constrained, so that you expected him to bump against the furniture and knock things over' or do some mischief or other every moment. But he never did; and you soon noticed that the lady of the house never changed color ever so little, although he went floundering heavily and uncertainly about, close to tables covered with valuable china, or maneuvering in dangerous proximity to a great mirror reaching from floor to ceiling; even when he took up a valuable china jar, painted with flowers, and whirled it about near the window to admire the play of the light on its colors. In fact, whilst we were waiting for luncheon, he inspected and scrutinized everything in the room with the utmost minuteness, even getting up upon a cushioned arm-chair to take a picture down from the wall and hang it up again.

All this time he talked a great deal; often (and this was more noticeable while we were at luncheon) darting rapidly from one subject to another, and at other times—unable to get away from some particular idea—he would keep beginning at it again and again, and get into labyrinths of confusion over it, till something else came into his head. Sometimes the tone of his voice was harsh and strident, at other times it would be soft and melodious; but it was always completely inappropriate to what he happened to be talking about. For instance, as we were discussing music, and some one was praising a new composer, Krespel smiled, and said in his gentle cantabile tone, 'I wish to heaven the devil would hurl the wretched music-perverter ten thousand millions of fathoms deep into the abysses of hell!' after which he screamed out violently and wildly, 'She's an angel of heaven, all compounded of the purest, divines" music': and the tears came to his eyes. It was some time ere we remembered that, about an hour before, we had been talking of a particular prima donna.

There was a hare at table, and I noticed that he carefully polished the bones on his plate, and made particular inquiries for the feet, which were brought to him, with many smiles, by the professor's little daughter of fifteen. All through luncheon the children had kept their eyes upon him as on a favorite, and now they came up to him, though they kept a respectful distance of two or three paces. 'What's going to happen?' thought I. The dessert came, and Krespel took a small box from his pocket, out of which he brought a miniature turning-lathe, made of steel, which he screwed on to the table, and proceeded to turn, from the bones, with wonderful skill and rapidity, all sorts of charming little boxes, balls, etc., which the children took possession of with cries of delight.

As we rose from table, the professor's niece said: 'And how is our dear Antonia, Mr. Krespel?'

'Our—OUR dear Antonia!' he answered, in his sustained singing tone, most unpleasant to hear. At first he made the sort of face which a person makes who bites into a bitter orange and wants to look as if it were a sweet one; but soon this face changed to a perfectly terrible-looking mask, out of which grinned a bitter, fierce—nay' as it seemed to me, altogether diabolical, sneer of angry scorn.

The professor hastened up to him. In the look of angry reproach which he cast at his niece I read that she had touched some string which jarred most discordantly within Krespel.

'How are things going with the violins ?' asked the professor, taking Krespel by both hands.

The cloud cleared away from his face, and he answered in his harsh rugged tone, 'Splendidly, Professor. You remember my telling you about a magnificent Amati, which I got hold of by a lucky accident a shore time ago? I cut it open this very morning, and expect that Antonia has finished taking it to pieces by this time.'

'Antonia is a dear, good child,' said the Professor.

'Ay! that she is—that she is!' screamed Krespel and, seizing his hat and stick, was off out of the house like a flash of lightning.

As soon as he was gone, I eagerly begged the Professor to tell me all about those violins, and more especially about Antonia.

'Ah,' said the Professor, 'Krespel is an extraordinary man; he studies fiddle-making in a peculiar fashion of his own.'

'Fiddle-making?' cried I in amazement.

'Yes,' said the Professor; 'connoisseurs consider that Krespel's violin-making is unrivalled at the present day. Formerly, when he turned out any special chef-d'oeuvre, he would allow other people to play upon it; but now he lets no one touch them but himself. When he has finished a fiddle, he plays upon it for an hour or two (he plays magnificently, with a power, a feeling and expression which the greatest professional violinists rarely equal, let alone surpass). Then he hangs it up on the wall beside the others, and never touches it again, nor lets anyone else lay hands upon it.'

'And Antonia ?' I eagerly asked.

'Well, that,' said the Professor, 'is an affair which would give me a very shady opinion of Krespel, if I didn't know what a thoroughly good fellow he is; so that I feel convinced there is some mystery about it which we don't at present fathom. When he first came here, some years ago, he lived like a hermit, with an old housekeeper, in a gloomy house in Street. His eccentricities soon attracted people's attention, but when he saw this, he quickly sought and made acquaintances. Just as was the case in my house, people got so accustomed to him that they couldn't get on without him. In spite of his rough exterior even the children got fond of him, though they were never troublesome to him, but always looked upon him with a certain amount of awe which prevented over-familiarity. You have seen how he attracts children by all sorts of ingenious tricks. Everybody looked upon him as a regular old bachelor and woman-hater, and he gave no sign to the contrary; but after he had been here some time, he went off on some excursion or other, no one knew where, and it was some months before he came back.