Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 1

Councillor Krespel-3

Two years afterwards when I was settled in B , I had occasion to make a journey into the South of Germany. One evening I saw the familiar towers of H rising into sight against the dewy, roseate evening sky; and as I came nearer, a strange, indescribable feeling of anxiety and alarm took possession of me, lying on my heart like a weight of lead. I could scarcely breathe. I got out of the carriage into the open air. The oppression amounted to actual physical pain. Presently I thought I could hear the notes of a solemn hymn floating on the air; it grew more distinct, and I made out male voices singing a chorale.

'What's this, what's this?' I cried as it pierced through my heart like a dagger stab.

'Don't you see, sir?' said the postilion, walking beside me, 'it's a funeral going on in the churchyard.'

We were, in fact, close to the cemetery, and I saw a circle of people in black assembled by a grave, which was being filled in. The tears came to my eyes. I felt as if somehow all the happiness and joy of my life were being buried in that grave. I had been descending the hill pretty quickly so that I could not now see into the cemetery. The chorale ceased, and I saw, near the gate, men in black coming away from the funeral. The Professor with his niece on his arm, both in deep mourning, passed close to me without noticing me. The niece had her handkerchief to her eyes and was sobbing bitterly.

I felt I could not go into the town; so I sent my servant with the carriage to the usual hotel, and walked out into the well known country to try if I could shake off the strange condition I was in, which I ascribed to physical causes, being overheated and tired with my journey, etc. When I reached the alley which leads to the public gardens, I saw a most extraordinary sight—Krespel, led along by two men in deep mourning, whom he seemed to be trying to escape from by all sorts of extraordinary leaps and bounds. He was dressed as usual, in his wonderful grey coat of his own making; but from his little three-cornered hat, which he had c****d over one ear in a martial manner, hung a very long, narrow streamer of black crepe, which fluttered playfully in the breeze. Round his waist he had buckled a black sword-belt, but instead of a sword he had stuck a long fiddle bow into it. The blood ran cold in my veins. 'He has gone quite mad,' I said as I followed them slowly.

They took him to his own door, where he embraced them, laughing loudly. When they left him, he noticed me, and after staring at me in silence for a considerable time, said in a mournful, hollow voice: 'Glad to see you, young fellow. You know all about it.' He seized me by the arm, dragged me into the house, and upstairs to the room where the violins hung. They were all covered with crepe, but the masterpiece by the unknown maker was not in its place; a wreath of cypress hung in its stead.

I knew then what had happened. 'Antonia, alas! Antonia,' I cried in uncontrollable anguish.

Krespel was standing in front of me with his arms folded, like a man turned to stone.

'When she died,' he said, very solemnly, 'the soundpost of that fiddle broke with a shivering crash. The faithful thing could only live with her and in her; it is lying with her in her grave.' I sank overwhelmed into a chair; but Krespel began singing a merry ditty, in a hoarse voice; and it was a truly awful sight to see him dancing, as he sang it, upon one foot, while the crepe on his hat kept flapping about the fiddles on the wall; and I could not help giving a scream of horror as, during one of his rapid gyrations, this crepe streamer came wafting over my face, for I felt as if the touch of it must infallibly infect me, and drag me, too, down into the black, terrible abyss of madness.

At this Krespel suddenly stopped dancing, and said in his singing voice: 'What did you shriek out like that for, my boy? Did you see the angel of death? It's generally before the funeral that people see him!' Then, walking into the middle of the floor, he drew the bow out of his belt and, raising it with both hands above his head, he broke it into splinters. Whereupon he laughed long and loud, and cried, 'The staff's broken over me now, you think, my boy, don't you? nothing of the kind, nothing of the kind!

I'm free now—I'm free! I'm free! And fiddles I'll make no more, boys! And fiddles I'll make no more! Hurray! hurray! hip-hip hurray! Oh! fiddles I'll make no more.'

This he sang to a hideously merry tune, dancing about on one foot again as he did so.

Horrified, I was making for the door; but he held me back, saying quite quietly and soberly this time: 'Don't go away, my dear young fellow, and don't imagine that these outbreaks mean that I'm mad. But my grief is so terrible that I can scarcely bear it any longer. No, no, I am as sane as you are, and as much in my senses. The trouble is, a little while ago I made myself a nightshirt, and thought when I had it on I should look like Destiny, or God.'

He went on spouting the wildest incoherences for a time, till he sank down, completely exhausted. The old housekeeper came at my summons, and I was thankful when I found myself outside in the open air.

I never doubted for an instant that Krespel had gone completely mad; but the Professor maintained the contrary. 'There are certain people,' he said, 'whom Nature, or some malign destiny, has deprived of the cover—the exterior envelope—under which we others carry on our madnesses unseen. They are like certain insects who have transparent integuments, which—since we see the play of their muscular movements -give the effect of a malformation. But actually they are perfectly normal. What never passes beyond the sphere of thought in us becomes action in Krespel. The bitter scorn and rage which the soul, imprisoned as it is in earthly conditions of being and action, often vividly feels, Krespel expresses in his external life, by extraordinary gesticulations and frantic movements. But those are his lightning conductors. What comes out of the earth he delivers back to the earth again; the heavenly he retains, and consequently apprehends it quite clearly and distinctly with his inner consciousness, notwithstanding all the crankiness which we see sparking out of him. No doubt Antonia's unexpected loss touches him very keenly, but I bet you that he'll be going on at his usual jog trot tomorrow, as if nothing had happened.'

And it turned out very much as the Professor had expected: Krespel appeared next morning very much as if nothing had happened. Only he announced that he had given up fiddle-making, and would never play on a fiddle again. And, it afterwards appeared, he kept his word.

All that I had heard from the Professor strengthened my conviction that the relation in which Antonia had stood to Krespel so very intimate, and so carefully kept unexplained—as also the fact that she was dead, most probably involved him in a situation of some gravity, from which it might be no easy matter for him to escape. I made up my mind that I would not leave H until I had given him the full benefit of my ideas on this subject. My notion was to thoroughly alarm him, to appeal to his conscience and, if I could, constrain him to a full confession of his crime. The more I considered the matter the clearer it seemed that he must be a terrible villain; and all the more eloquent and impressive grew the allocution which I mentally got ready to deliver to him, and which gradually took the form of a regular masterpiece of rhetoric.

Thus prepared for my attack, I betook myself to him one morning in a condition of much virtuous indignation. I found him making children's toys at his turning lathe, with a tranquil smile on his face.

'How,' said I, 'is it possible that your conscience can allow you to be at peace for an instant, when the thought of the horrible crime you have been guilty of must perpetually sting you like a serpent's tooth?'

He laid down his tools, and stared at me in astonishment. 'What do you mean, my good sir?' he said. 'Sit down on that chair there.'

But I continued with much warmth, and distinctly accused him of having caused Antonia's death, threatening him with the vengeance of Heaven. Nay more, being full of juridical zeal—as I had just been inducted into a judicial appointment—I went on to assure him that I should consider it my duty to leave no stone unturned to bring the affair thoroughly to light, so as to deliver him into the hands of earthly justice. I was a little put out, I admit, when on the conclusion of my rather pompous harangue, Krespel merely looked at me, without a word in reply, as if waiting for what I had to say next; and I tried to find something further to add: but everything that occurred to me seemed so silly and feeble that I held my peace. He seemed rather to enjoy this breakdown in my eloquence, and a bitter smile passed over his face.

But then he became very grave, and said in a solemn tone: 'My good young sir! Very likely you think me a fool—or a madman. I forgive you. We are both in the same madhouse, and you object to my thinking myself God the Father, because you think you are God the Son. How do you suppose you can enter into another person's life, utterly unknown to you in all its complicated turnings and windings, and pick up and follow all its deeply hidden threads? She is gone, and the mystery is solved!'

He stopped, rose and walked two or three times up and down the room. I ventured to ask for some explanation. He looked at me fixedly, took me by the hand, and led me to the french window, opening both panes. Then, leaning upon the sill with both his arms, and looking out into the garden, he told me the story of his life. When he had ended I left him, deeply affected and bitterly ashamed.

Antonia's history was roughly as follows:

Some twenty years previously, his fancy for making a collection of the finest violins of the great old makers had taken him to Italy. At that time he had not begun to make violins himself nor, consequently, to take them to pieces. At Venice he heard the renowned prima donna, Angela—at that time starring in the leading roles at the Teatro di San Benedetto. She was as unique in her beauty as in her art: and well became, and deserved, her name of Angela. He sought her acquaintance and, in spite of all his rugged uncouthness, his most remarkable violin playing, with its combination of great originality, force and tenderness, speedily won her artist's heart.

A close intimacy led, in a few weeks, to a marriage—which was not made public because Angela would neither leave the stage, give up her well-known name, nor tack on to it the strangely-sounding 'Krespel.'

He described, with the bitterest irony, the quite peculiar ingenuity with which Signora Angela began, as soon as she was his wife, to torment and t*****e him. All the selfishness, caprice, and obstinacy of all the prima donnas on earth rolled into one were, so Krespel considered, incorporated in Angela's little body. Whenever he tried to assert his true position in the smallest degree, she would launch a swarm of abbates, maestros, and academicos about his ears who, not knowing his real relations with her, would snub him, and set him down as a wretched, unendurable a*s of an amateur inamorato, incapable of adapting himself to the Signora's charming and interesting humors.