Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  After the funeral and his outburst of self-blaming, self-pitying grief, Arnoldo reacted. He had moped in his room until it was over; but that afternoon when Joe asked him whether he would come down to dinner he answered, “Have the dressing bell rung at the ordinary time.” When it sounded he went up to his room. Joe helped him to change and remarked to himself, as the toilet proceeded, “He’s as careful now as he was in the best days.”

  Arnoldo looked at himself carefully in the glass when he was ready, and, in the corridor and down the grand staircase, faced and followed himself as he appeared approaching, in turn, in each of the mirrors, from the moment he appeared as a distant figure until he confronted his life-size full-dress self. After dinner he read a little while in the library. Then, fetching his cloak and changing his shoes, he went for a stroll in the moonlit garden. When he completed his promenade for the second time, he saw the lights go out in the main house. The servants had cleared and washed up and had gone over to their own quarters. He left the grounds by the small western gate and walked swiftly to Marian Gayton’s.

  She was still up when he knocked. She did not say, “It’s a long time.” She had heard of Mrs. Heron’s illness and death and, as he had not written, she had taken for granted that he was not free to come. They had hardly exchanged a single letter in all the time they had known each other; even these missives had been no more than a note or two from him stating when he might be expected. She felt that with nurses in the house his returning late at night would have been noticeable.

  Now he had come as soon as possible, and his appearance showed that he was obviously prepared to carry on their secret tableau-romance. She had recently felt tired and happened that evening to be up late partly because she had a faint hope that he might call and partly because she now slept poorly and was less restless when seated reading than lying down in the dark.

  He did not speak of what had happened but of his plans. “I’m closing the house for a little, letting the servants go. I’ll be away for a while, just getting a change of scene. I feel I must get away. The life was, you know, in spite of all the care taken by—my mother, rather confining. I must, as it were, stretch a bit”—he flexed his tightly upholstered arm in its close-buttoned black silk sleeve, “and see myself out of the part I was asked to play.” He was looking at his five-generations-ago figure in the glass. “I’ll tell you when I’m back.”

  She did not question. She felt too tired to try to pierce by questions into his plans. The shock of his mother’s death had evidently turned him in even further on himself. He seemed far more in a dream than ever before. She watched him as he remained gazing at himself in the mirror until she herself seemed to feel a trance-state creeping over her. Well, she would have to wait, and could wait, until he came back—literally and metaphorically.

  She turned to the door and opened it. The night air came in, making her cough. The sound roused him. He joined her at the door—he had picked up his cloak and put it on as he crossed the room.

  On the porch he bent over her hand, making a bow and saying only “Au revoir.” Then when he was in the road he turned back. “It’s not worth while, giving you my address,” he said. “I may be back any day and then we’ll talk plans.”

  The dark cloak made it hard to follow his figure as he walked down the road in the shadow of the bordering trees.

  As he woke next morning he found that his wish to leave the house had become peremptory. As soon as he was up he sent for the servants in turn and paid them off. It was as he did this that he realized most fully his position. She had left him nearly all her money. He was suddenly transformed from complete childish dependence to an independence which few people achieve even in later life. He realized that with these small strokes of the pen he was making his whole close-framed environment give and change.

  She had made a place which was planned to, and which did, imprison him in himself by making him return on himself by reflection. He’d heard—he remembered as he waited for the last couple of elder servants to come in and be paid off—that tigers can be kept quite easily and safely in cages of planking which they could rip to pieces, provided that they cannot see any light between the boarding. They just don’t know that they can escape. Well, he’d broken out of the vicious circle of self-reflection in which she had kept him snarled. She had almost drowned him, he considered. It was a neat way of suffocating him, sewing him up in these neatly tailored suits, which were really sacks in which his full self couldn’t strike out, and then pushing him into this pool of mirrors where he must sink.

  When everyone was paid off but Joe he sent for him to do an errand in town. While Joe was gone, Doc the mailman called. After taking the mail and thanking Doc for his condolences Arnoldo suddenly said, “I’m leaving for a little while. My final plans are uncertain. Might I leave the house keys with you, as the servants are going?”

  “Why, of course; I’ll hold your mail if you’ll give me some idea how long you’ll be away.”

  Arnoldo saw that he must decide on a date. “Oh, about a fortnight,” he said.

  “Very well,” said Doc. “When’re you going?”

  Again he had to decide. “Oh, I’ll give you the keys tomorrow when you come up with the mail.”

  “I’ll be glad to help,” said Doc, turning away. “Poor fellow,” he reflected, “he’s pretty alone in the world now. Wonder whether Miss Gayton and he’ll ever manage to make a marriage of it? Perhaps she might, but perhaps he’s been too mothered.”

  Joe came back with his commissions completed and took his parcels up to Arnoldo’s room as he had been told. Arnoldo, waiting there, thanked him and told him he would see him in half an hour in the library. The parcels contained a cheap store suit, a shirt with a stiff, paperlike collar, a tie, a pair of standard shoes, and a common felt hat. Arnoldo quickly changed from the linen suit he had been wearing that morning. He felt the grittiness of the poor-quality serge, the papery crackling of the cheap cotton shirting, the harsh feeling of the artificial silk tie, the clumsy unyieldingness of the stock-sized shoes. He would not look in the glass, but with a certain relieved disgust he felt how unrelievedly ugly the whole rig was. Anyhow, all the old restraints were gone.

  “I’ve been groomed and stalled like a thoroughbred; now I’m free to lose myself again in the common herd,” he muttered to himself as he left the room.

  He would not, however, face Joe as with him he made rapid arrangements to move all the silver to the bank’s safe-deposit. They worked quickly and in silence. Late that afternoon he gave Joe a handsome check and remarking, “I may be sending for you when I get back,” got out of the difficulty of a permanent parting.

  He waited a while alone in the library, and then went quickly to the back of the house where he could look across unperceived at the servants’ quarters. Yes; Joe, dressed, he had to own, in extremely good and smart modern style—he looked down at his own suit, already beginning to wrinkle, crease, and sag—was already getting into a taxi with some smart luggage, to drive back into the present world. The taxi drove out the side drive; he could see Joe leaning back smoking.

  “How quickly,” he thought, “an act is over for a secondary and merely ‘character’ actor. It isn’t so easy for the principals to shift their parts and change their roles—no, not even to change the scenery,” he ended aloud.

  He had entered now the small back staircase leading to the wine-cellar. He closed the door after him, switched on the light, went down to the cellar itself and knelt down at some new cases which were lying on the floor and remained working at them. It was dusk when he emerged again into the upper house. His hands and clothes were dusty, but he did not wash or dust himself. His step was a little unsteady. He wandered into the middle of the big hall, then slowly turned and looked at the dim row of figures which appeared in vanishing line in the mirrored reduplications. He fumbled in his pockets and found a small rubber-hafted screw driver in one. He flung it against the mirror in which he was looking. The rubber
end hit the glass and bounced the tool, with a little clatter, onto the floor.

  “Can’t even make a ripple in the pool,” he muttered.

  He turned aside. A lean couch of white-enameled woodwork and tight blue silk upholstery stood along the wall. The beam of the rising moon gave it an added elegance. He flung himself on it seeing, hearing, and feeling his cobwebbed and dusty, clumsy shoes rasp and soil the satin. He stuffed the little neat pillow under his neck. The stubble of his beard frayed at it. He pulled his tie free, dragged at the buttons of his suit and fell to sleep. By the time the moon had moved so as to light the head of the couch, he was over on his back, his mouth open, snoring in alcoholic sleep.

  He found himself wondering why the bedclothes were so twisted; the bed, too, he must have slid down in it—his feet were bent against the foot. He began to wonder why Joe had not roused him—he must have drawn the window curtains—with one’s eyes closed one knew that the room was full of light. He swallowed, closed his mouth, and opened his eyes. He remembered. At once he was awake and clear, though his head throbbed.

  He heaved himself round and sat on the sofa. He looked at his watch—five A.M.—wound it carefully, remembering that he had forgotten to do so last night, and at once started upstairs. He kept his eyes on the carpet as he made his way. Once there he opened the wardrobe and rapidly made a heap in the middle of the room of everything which the wardrobe held. He wrapped up the pile in a sheet which he took off the bed. Shoes and boots he thrust into the two pillowcases. Then he remade the bed and, with these large bundles on his shoulders, made his way downstairs.

  When the house was being reconstructed, Irene Ibis, with one of those sudden retractive economies of rich people, had refused to have a new oil furnace.

  “Why, it’s good, and part of the place, and I think wood—and there’s plenty of it around here—is healthier for heating than oil. The fumes of oil are unpleasant.”

  So the old log-burning furnace remained, against his will then. He was glad now that he had been overruled. He went, however, again to the wine-cellar before going down the furnace steps. He had dumped his large white bundles in the little back lobby where the two staircases to the two basements met here at ground level. He came up from the wine-cellar with a box containing fragments of wire, foil, and broken glass.

  “Like the remnants of a Christmas tree; and now for the harlequinade costume,” he grunted to himself.

  He opened the large bundle, in among the clothing scattered the contents of the box from the wine-cellar, then retied the bundle and went with it down the furnace stairs. On reaching the surface again he looked at his watch.

  “Only five-thirty. After I’ve shaved—if I haven’t forgotten how to—there’ll be time for a hot bath.”

  The electric razor dealt faithfully with his mustache and whiskers. By the time he had finished, the water in the bath-faucet was running hot. As he lay soaking he reflected that after all he was probably a man of action. “I’ve been held back, arrested. Every man has one inalienable right—freedom. It’s a moral duty to break away from tyranny, however sacrosanct. Give me liberty or give me death.”

  He felt that the neat way his clearance had also given him hot water with which to clean himself from the mess and stains of clearing-up, showed his power to combine two things in one act, and was also in some way symbolical of his freedom, a sort of act of manumission.

  “I wash my hands of the whole silly play,” he remarked aloud, “with water heated by this ‘bonfire of vanities.’” He was pleased with his mixture of literary-historical allusions.

  As he dried himself he felt fresh and new. “The morning mists are gone: the sun arises,” he sang the aria gaily. The words were precisely true. All that had happened was that a dream and a dreamer, who had become, through a rooted illusion, nothing but a dream herself, had melted away. She had ceased to be real, and so finally she had vanished. That was the literal truth of the matter and any other attitude toward it—such as remorse—would be simply unreal, part of the play-acting which was over for good.

  He cooked his own breakfast leisurely in the large white kitchen.

  “I own the place now,” he continued his reverie, reminding himself of his actual position. “It’s just one of my properties. It doesn’t own me. I can sell it outright for anything it will fetch.” The idea of throwing it on the market pleased his fancy of liberation. “I can do exactly as I like. Perhaps I’ll come back for Marian—probably—but I needn’t if I don’t feel like it. There’s no one to make me do anything any more. I’ll just wait until I feel like doing anything.”

  He did, however, start and go at once when the front-door bell rang loudly above his head. Doc was there in the big portico.

  “You’re getting under way quickly,” he remarked.

  Arnoldo could only think to reply, “When you’ve made up your mind to go, you’d better get going.” He took Doc around, showing him the keys of the various doors that led outside.

  “The silver’s in the safe-deposit at the bank. I’ve left nearly everything else as it is. There’s little else of an easily-carried-away sort, worth anyone’s stealing.”

  The handing over was soon finished. They locked the back doors and went again to the front.

  “This lock,” said Arnoldo, as they stood by the front door, “will latch of itself when I pull it to as I leave.”

  He shook hands with Doc who, pocketing the keys, went off on his round. After packing a small suitcase he gave one more look around the big silent rooms across which the broad, slow swathes of sunlight were passing, seeming slowly to sweep the whole place and to show that there was nothing remaining. Then he snapped shut the tall, narrow leaf of the hall door and walked away without looking back.

  Chapter XIV

  Doc was pleased with himself. Having half an hour to spare, he dropped in to see his wife.

  “Where’ll we put these?” he queried, holding up the bunch of keys.

  She took them and locked them up in a small bureau. “You’re evidently pleased, boy?”

  “Well, everything’s all right now, isn’t it? Dr. Hertz said to me, ‘She’d never have acclimatized,’ and I’d add, on my own diagnosis, she’d only have gotten more and more difficult and less and less happy. No; that was a release.”

  “And the young man?”

  “Oh, when he’s stretched himself a bit he’ll come back all right, and settle down, and I’m still betting on whom he’ll settle with—and even if he doesn’t and just clears out, why, the city’s left with a fine ‘improvement’—who knows but some day it might be the town museum and art gallery.”

  “You run on, boy. How do you know that if he left the town the house it wouldn’t prove a white elephant with no money to keep it up? He’s no money-maker—a rolling stone that gathers no moss.”

  “He may have wished to be but she kept him pinned down—and a rolling pin, you’ll allow, does gather dough!”

  She laughed at his wisecrack.

  “It’s true enough,” he went on, pleased with his witticism’s reception. “I know it. She left him perhaps all her money, certainly a lot. Well, I must run on. You keep the keys. He’ll be back soon.” On his beat through town, Doc, bringing mail to a house, fell in with Dr. Hertz coming out.

  “How’s our town health?” he asked.

  “Oh, good as usual,” answered the professional, “too good for me. If it wasn’t for the outsiders I wonder whether I could live! Mrs. Heron was one of our foreign liabilities. We must expect that. Their white cells seem to overcompensate for fear the red ones would be getting too flushed in our sunshine.” The professional joke pleased its maker but it was too technical for Doc.

  He gave a conventional chuckle and sidestepped with another question: “Any other alien ailing?”

  “Yes, another case of failure to acclimatize—Miss Gayton, at the school. Wish you’d look in and get your wife to go and cheer her up. She’s lonely, and that’s bad for that sort.”

&n
bsp; “What sort?”

  “Oh, you should have spotted it. You’re the long-range, single-shot diagnostician,” laughed the doctor.

  “Well,” retorted Doc, a little nettled, “she’s always kept herself out of my range—hardly have set eyes on her.”

  “Anyhow, they’re not easy to spot,” said Dr. Hertz with what was meant to be conciliation but was received as patronage. “Arrested T.B. cases I don’t think anyone could diagnose simply by eye.”

  “She’s seemed all right? Held down her job at the school, I understand? And surely all this grand out of doors of ours, that’s fine for her, isn’t it?” Doc felt a personal affront in this young woman’s weakly response to the beauty which he felt that in some way he owned or stood sponsor for.

  “Yes, all this sun is fine, if they can take it. But the pulmonaries often can’t. And if they get down they don’t seem to be able to get up. If you can cheer them up, often they’ll take hold and get on their feet again. But anyhow I’m sending her up for a thorough over-haul and check-up. She’ll be away a week or so. Call in and see her when she’s back.”

  “Be sure I will.” Doc chugged off. Well, often marriage put a pining girl on her feet more quickly than any other treatment. Doc felt that here he was certainly quite as wise as the professional. Why, hadn’t he read the other day in a bit of a magazine as he was carrying it on his rounds that eighty per cent of T.B. cases were psychological. He didn’t want to cross swords with one of these young men who never could see anything unless it was safely out of the body and in a test-tube, but that did not make him doubt he knew as much about any disease, about which anyone could say that it was “psychological,” as any degreed practitioner.

  His car therefore took him to that border of the city where Miss Gayton lived. He turned up the undeveloped road in which hers was the only house. School was out. He found her resting on her back porch. She did not seem much pleased to see him and his attempts to be gay and cheering evidently grated.