Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  “We’ve had a lovely time,” she said. “I feel you are content.”

  He took her to her door, kissed her good-night, and shut it softly.

  The house was quiet. The servants had already gone to their quarters, out beyond the stables. He switched off the lights. The moon was illuminating the house. In his room he took from the wardrobe a long, dark purple cloak, with a high collar, designed to go with these evening clothes. He pulled on a pair of supple-leather top-boots and went quietly down the stairs. In the hall as he passed between the two high, opposed mirrors he caught a glance right and left of a dim army of cloaked figures passing rapidly across the long, shadowy cloister out into an invisible area that lay ahead of them.

  It was not far, if you went the direct way by the road along the edge of the town, and anyhow, walking at night, free, alone, and going to meet one’s confidante, it was light going. He was amused when he thought of how he would give her a pleasant surprise. The night was warm and heavily scented by the orange groves. He threw back his cloak. He could see himself striding along. The moon showed, walking beside him, the shadow-figure of an “elegant” of more than a century ago.

  “What is time?” he thought; “isn’t the present whatever we choose to make it, if we are sufficiently independent and don’t let others choose for us?”

  Arriving at her house he was going around to tap at the bedroom window. There was no need.

  From the shadow of the porch he heard her say, in little more than a whisper, “This is the dream-real!”

  He was glad she wasn’t frightened or excited.

  His pleasure was complete when she added, “Yes, stay where you are for a while. The moonlight is perfect. You don’t look flesh and blood, at least of this muddy age.”

  After a while he came into the shadow and sat down on her bed. She stroked the ruffles on his wrists and laughed softly as she touched the smooth kidskin of his hands. She let her fingers just outline his face and hair.

  “That is a perfect theme for a dream,” she said quietly, dismissing him. “Come some other night.”

  It was a queer romance, or rather it was that paradox, true romance, the fancy that banishes all actuality, that deliberately chooses reflection instead of reality.

  In this way he visited her a number of times. Sometimes they were completely silent from the beginning of the visit to the end. Once he persuaded her to get up, dress, and walk with him. The late waning moon was up. Its decayed mirror, distorted and stained, yet with its silver light of illusion, lit them as they promenaded.

  “We might be on one of the Parades in Bath five generations ago,” he remarked. “We have just seen at the Theatre Royal that last amusing comedy of Mr. Sheridan’s. That clever young woman whom you spoke to in the street when you had both been buying ribbons and were on the way to the Pump Room—take care, she may put you into one of her novels one day; she has come from Winchester with her family; they are called Austen.”

  “Don’t be too lost in the past,” she pleaded. “We have as much right as they to use the form they used and be ourselves in it.”

  That turned him to talk of his feelings for art, science, his philosophy, his religion.

  “It’s helped me, this strange life,” he said. “For the real struggle is not to know that the common-sense contemporary muddle isn’t real—that’s so easy to prove. The thing, and it is the only thing that matters, is to feel that to be true. Then you are free. I’m nearly free. Because, by making use of an appearance which all people now living say has disappeared, is no longer real—an appearance far more rational than the present rag-bag appearance—I have lifted myself out of the present illusion.”

  “You can pull yourself out of water by climbing on ice,” she agreed.

  “Rather a cold metaphor,” he said.

  And they were, they both found, feeling chilly. A small cool draft of air was moving around them. Their sparse dress seemed to cling dankly to their limbs.

  She whispered, almost to herself, “Dear dead women with such hair, too”—hers had never been abundant—“What’s become of all the gold …?”

  He knew the lines and concluded for them both, “I feel chilly and grown old.”

  “You must get home,” she said.

  He fetched his cloak, bent over her hand, and hurried off to his bed.

  On almost the next visit he brought from under his cloak a small parcel.

  “This is one of the tubes I was telling you about,” he said as soon as they met. “I want to measure their radiating power. They are remarkable in several ways. There’s a good deal still to be found out about them, I believe. I’ll show you how to fix it.”

  They went inside. He stripped off his gloves, made a connection with some flex, and plugged the line into a light socket.

  “Now turn out the light.”

  She switched it off. Their eyes took a few moments to become accustomed. Then they saw the place lit with the peculiar eerie violet-green of the vacuum tube, and saw themselves.

  “The moonlight, beside this, is gay and warming,” she said.

  “Well, you’d expect to look ghostly, lit by rays most of which go through your flesh as through a dirty mist and only recognize your skeleton as having any real profile,” he smiled.

  The effect was certainly gruesome. The living teeth fluoresced, dimly phosphorescent in the cavity of his mouth; the dead ones—he had a couple in fronts—appeared black. The whites of his eyes also shone a dirty, dense yellow, while his face seemed a faint luminous green with shadows of heavy mauve. His hands, too, looked like the tentacles of a submarine creature with green jelly-looking flesh, the hairs on the backs like a thin black moss, the nails yellowish claws.

  “You look like a wraith—as though a living smoke with smoldering sparks in it were possessing a costume left in a deserted house.”

  “Don’t be romantic. Switch on the light. This isn’t art; it’s science.” The light clicked on. “Now I’ll show you how to make the readings. You can leave it on when you are out. If it runs your current bill up, let me know. I’ll pay the extra.”

  He busied himself for some time making the fixture and showing her what he wished her to do. Almost as soon as he had arranged it as he wished, he said goodnight and left.

  The work with these new tubes really intrigued him. The more he checked up on them, the more he felt that their properties were not yet fully understood. Several times he said to himself, “I believe I may add something to the world’s knowledge along this line.” He was pleased with himself: “Now that I am really free of the present, perhaps I shall contribute something to the future.” He began to think of himself as a famous discoverer, one whom the world would want to know—more eccentric than Edison; more like Cavendish, Cav endish the British aristocrat—immensely wealthy and of the right, the Regency period, living a recluse in his stately house, making his strikingly original discoveries in science and hardly caring to preserve the results, hardly caring if a soul knew; or Tycho Brahe, the great Scandinavian astronomer, who now has the largest crater in the moon named after him as his monument—what a monument, a sheer circular wall two miles high, embracing the area of a small state within its bounds—Tycho Brahe, who used to dress in his most splendid suits in order, properly attired, “to give court to the stars.” This picture of himself as the stylist and the researcher satisfied him more than any notion he had as yet had of himself—the man lost in discovery and yet, out of the corner of his eye, a deeper side of him engrossed in watching the picture of himself as the absorbed, stately, stylish genius.

  Certainly his time was now full. Every night he went over to Marion Gayton’s to get her appreciation of himself and his research. She was delighted to have some work she could do with him and kept devotedly at that he had given her. Every day he worked in his laboratory. His life was so full that it left no room for his mother. He no longer objected to being dressed as she liked, for he was dressing for someone else. But he had no time for the elde
r woman and she lost little time in resenting it.

  That last long evening they had spent together had been a climax. It had given her a taste of what she had always hoped would happen and from that moment all that hope had retreated and faded. Ever since, he had either sat silently reading until she went to bed, or had actually left her and gone up to work in his laboratory until he heard her pass outside the door, going to her room. That evening her happiness and health, his power to please her and his capacity to tolerate her, all had been at the flood. He had thought, perhaps, that the relief at finding he could get around her wish to encircle him would be enough to keep him carelessly, kindlily tolerant of the captor, or captress, whom he had out-toiled. He had come to learn that no one can live just on relief, any more than we can be content for more than twenty minutes with the wonderful sense, when an abscessed tooth has been drawn, of just not-having-toothache.

  The tide of their agreement was ebbing everywhere. She lowered; he sulked; the two of them, by a kind of reflection, set up a resonance. The simile which had so often been in his mind occurred violently again: “like the mouthpiece of a telephone put to the earpiece, building up an exasperating howl.” There had been many fluctuations in their queer friendship, this odd “commensalism,” each sharing the same table—the “mensa” of the lawyers but not the linked term, the “thorum”—but only really meeting at eyes’ range.

  “Well,” he thought, “she only wanted me as a thing to look at, a doll to dress.”

  But though he had so thought and so resented, mutual self-interest—the balance in favor of keeping on—had always brought him back. The scales swung, but in the end there they were, once again swaying opposite one another.

  Now, however, he was feeling that he had developed too many independencies, too many interests that, as in his science, he could not, and in his romance, he must not and would not, share with her. When the scales finally went off balance, as is the case when most balances have been too violently disturbed or misweighted—the fall-away was rapid. He found how much of his liking for her had been based on the fact that he liked being looked after, being admired, and having interests found for him. Now he had found a far more palatable admiration and also, at the same time, had an interest which was absorbing him, which she was too stupid to share and which her “rival” could understand and aid.

  Beyond her money he had now no further need of her. When we have no need of people we have required but at our best have never loved, when we are still tied to them, then there can develop a dislike which to the onlooker, easy and free, seems in its intensity of detestation to be almost insane. Arnoldo was very sane in his way; his self-love was circumspectly rational and always asking itself if it had a sufficiency of reasons for its slightest exertion; but he rapidly began to experience this curious, almost nauseating, disgust.

  Irene was certainly not a handsome woman, and time was, of course, doing nothing to improve her appearance, but neither was time doing anything out of the common course. She was aging, that was all. And to the natural lines of age were added the very human ones of age’s usual concomitant, discontent and disappointment. Age and disappointment are not pretty but they may be appealing—but not to a man in Arnoldo’s oblique position. To Arnoldo, she seemed to be becoming a species of ogress. She was now to him nothing short of repulsive. He could no longer bring himself to kiss her that formal good-night which had been their settled custom. She said nothing, and that did nothing to remedy the acute dislocation of their lives.

  The colored servants, with their inborn histrionic sensitiveness to their “leads’” moods and play, hung around in a kind of listless expectancy as some animals await a thunderstorm, or as the Chorus in a Greek play nods its head at oncoming disaster. Joe was changed, letting fall his rendering of himself as the exuberant valet. He and Arnoldo almost entered into a tacit conspiracy to let everything slide and only keep up the minimum of appearances that Mrs. Heron required. It was a performance no longer “in the round” but only something rigged up to show to one lonely woman occupying the proprietor’s box. Indeed, had he not wished to be in stylistic form every evening for Miss Gayton, he might have broken away completely from his wardrobe.

  He found it a growing relief to be out of the house altogether. Had Kermit now called there would have been no fear that he might report not being visited. But, as he had in duty to Doc to see the young man when he called, he felt that he had no need to go down to the big house as well. The invitations were not pressing, and he had sent the colored photographs down by Arnoldo. They were good, but Mrs. Heron, who was naturally not getting easier to please, complained that they did not do justice to some of her color schemes.

  “I am glad,” she remarked, “that those special photographs he took of me close to the mirror evidently failed. I am sure they would hardly have been happy.”

  As usual, Arnoldo preserved silence. There is an offense against discipline in some armed forces called an impertinent silence. On that charge Arnoldo could have been “crimed” every day, and undoubtedly in Irene’s mind he was.

  Often he would bring back from Kermit’s bundles of scientific journals. If she asked him to stay with her after dinner, when he had showed signs of going upstairs, changing, and shutting himself in his laboratory until she had retired, he would grunt an assent, fetch a sheaf of these periodicals, scatter them around his chair, and sit among the litter, reading and noting. It vexed her sense of propriety, the lovely room made to look like a paper-chase track. The incongruity of this modern untidiness obtruded painfully on her carefully constructed tableau.

  She was watching him one evening, with the slow sense of exasperation which can only be built up between two people who know that they are unable to “talk things out”—who are long past that stage, and because of that are always conscious that everything the other does is done to affect them. It is nearly the most awkwardly self-conscious condition which human beings can achieve. Suddenly, however, she perceived that he was not affecting rumpled, slipshod indifference just to irritate her. For the first time, she could not remember in how many days or weeks, she was aware that he was not aware of her—he was roused, strongly interested to the point of forgetting for the moment where he was. She had only time to switch her eyes away, before, as she had just been ready enough to foresee, he raised his eyes above the page to see whether she had noticed that he had momentarily forgotten her. She had a book on her lap and pretended to read. After a few moments she could see that he was collecting the scattered papers. He put them neatly in a pile by the side of his chair. His shoe, which was half kicked off, he drew on with a finger. He was sitting up, no longer sprawling. He was going to be pleasant.

  A moment before she would have been certain that there was nothing that she would have more welcomed. But as he swung toward geniality—as though they were the grotesque little man and woman in the toy barometer, joined together in a perpetual interdependent opposition—she felt herself swung back to resentment.

  “Would you play something?” he asked.

  It was a remarkable advance. She could not accept it.

  “Why this evening, after so long?” she asked, with a certain dull sullenness that should have sent him out of the room. Instead, she was really surprised by his rising and coming toward her.

  “Are you tired?” The tone expressed a real question, perhaps almost a concern.

  “Yes,” she said defensively, yet warily. She would not yield anything, at least yet, but she would not break off negotiations. “Yes,” she said again, and waited. She was divided between the resentment that wanted to have a scene and the self-pity that longed to be soothed.

  “I’m sorry; would you like me to read to you?”

  “Yes,” she was able to concede. “Would you read me some poetry?”

  He went over to the bookcase, picked out Elizabeth Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, drew up his chair, and began to read. It was too good to believe. True enough; she found incredul
ity rising like a fog and making the strong sentiment of the words take on a tinsel effect. The line of a poet as far unhappier in love as he was far greater in telling of it than the Portuguesing poetess, sounded harshly in her mind through Arnoldo’s soft tones: “Cold Reason shall mock thee As the sun from a wintry sky.” While he was still in the middle of a sonnet she rose.

  “I’m afraid I’m too tired to take in what you are reading.”

  Her tone was certainly tired and cold. He shut the book with a snap of finality, rose also, put the book in its shelf and, without coming back to her, crossed the room and held open the door in silence. He followed her up the great staircase; he would not come abreast. Once she paused, hoping that he would, but he remained a step or two below. At the landing, as she turned toward her room, she heard him stop and say “Good-night.”

  She would not turn back. She could see, dimly in the long mirror she was facing, his white-and-black figure in its evening clothes standing at the stair-head looking after her. “Good-night,” she said, looking at the reflection, and the echo, thrown from the glass surface, just reached his ears.

  As her door closed, he went downstairs again. He collected the technical papers he had been reading, switched off the lights, and went up to his room. He changed quickly into his laboratory suit, picked up the papers again, and went to that room. For an hour or so he studied, making small notes and comparing readings he had tabulated in some record-books, smoking nervously as he worked. Then he tidied up everything and sat for some time gazing at the wall on which a number of radio setups were fixed. He did not, however, seem to be looking at them.

  “Shall I?” he thought. “There’s no accident. Perhaps it was meant I should run across that.”