Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  After a pause I felt that there was still one question to be settled. It was, of course, personal, but we had been at such a height that I felt I could raise it, we could look down on it together and I didn’t much care what answer he gave.

  “Mr. Mycroft,” I asked, with, I think, some considerable detachment, “one small human mystery remains. Why did you ask me to come with you on this final trek? Perhaps it is because I’m a bit sobered by the scale of things on which we or you have been working, but, you know, I cannot flatter myself that you brought me along on this final exploration because you thought I should be an invaluable companion and fellow worker.”

  “That is frank and courageous of you,” he replied, “and your frankness deserves as much openness from me. Yes, I did bring you along not because I felt you could help me out in an awkward corner but because, considering all you knew—and remember that Intil had paid you the same compliment, though in a rather pointed way—I felt I owed it to those who employed me to keep you in sight until this matter was finally cleared. I can now be sure there could be no leakage, for you are the only man alive who knew of the secret.”

  I was not sorry that we had had out our final personal issue and when it was laid; and it left no inflammation on the skin of my amour-propre in that aseptic scene, we were silent for some time. The curtain was down on the human tragedy; or rather, the little apron-stage play was over and the backcloth went up, showing the immense Void against which our pains and pleasure and opinions, I had to own, were invisible. We were silent for I don’t know how long. Silently stars came up over the rock-rim, and went down silently; and silently the meteor gifts coming in from outer space and the long-wrecked fellow planets were ground to a glowing dust and their deadly power denied us, as the edges are taken off from children’s and lunatics’ table-knives.

  Next morning Mr. Mycroft said, “I return to report the case closed: proceedings quashed by a Higher Court. The Element, as I call it, has recalled an element too high and powerful for us yet to be trusted with it.” We parted, he going east and I west. Whether his lofty speculations are right or wrong, I don’t venture to decide. The whole thing was too big for me. All I know is that his big check did turn into hard cash; all I know is that I was very glad to get back to nice, manageable human-made puzzles and to exchange for an exhausting companionship with a supermind my daily duel with Miss Delamere.

  “Hope you’ve had a good vacation,” her cigarette semaphored to me as she handed me the large and satisfying mail on my return. “Vacation,” I thought, “that means a vacancy, an emptiness.” I thought of that hole out of which the most terrible force conceivable had radiated itself away—where a solid chunk of supercondensed power which had punched a hole in the rocks had then turned back into nothing.

  “Yes,” I said, “just attending to Nothing rather opens the mind.” She could not hear that I used a capital for the first noun.

  THE ADVENTURE OF MR. MONTALBA, OBSEQUIST

  INTRODUCTION

  from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  (Vol. 6, #24, September 1945)

  In 1941 The Vanguard Press published A TASTE FOR HONEY, by H. F. Heard. The secret of the book’s chief character was cunningly kept—by the publishers, by the reviewers, and by the connoisseur-enthusiasts who praised the book so highly. Christopher Morley wrote: “What delight this tale holds for every true detective-story lover,” and nominated the book as “the most enchanting crime story of 1941.” Vincent Starrett called the book “the most original contribution to detective-story literature in many years.”

  What was the secret of Mr. Heard’s character? Well, he was a detective named Mr. Mycroft; he was first met in beekeeping retirement; and although a certain name never once appeared in the book, it became increasingly certain that Mr. Heard had written a full-length pastiche of The Great Master Himself.

  The following year, 1942, Mr. Heard brought forth another full-length adventure of Mr. Mycroft—REPLY PAID. Again the acclaim was thunderous. Christopher Morley put it brilliantly when he said that “for tastes that are Baker Street and Irregular, Mr. Heard’s work is as good as Mrs. Hudson’s curried kedgeree.”

  So your Editor, aware at last that the game was afoot, sat down and wrote to Mr. Heard. Why not a short story about Mr. Mycroft? Mr. Heard replied, in effect: Why not indeed? And one otherwise bleak and windy morning a large envelope arrived containing “The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist.”

  Reader, you have in prospect an experience both rich and strange; for there are many remarkable features about this story. It is, if it pleases your fancy, a pastiche of He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named, with Mr. Mycroft playing the role of The One and Only to the hilt, and Mr. Sidney Silchester doubling for the muddleheaded medico. Or, if you prefer, you may ignore the “association” possibilities and accept “Mr. Montalba, Obsequist” as that rare type of crime story which combines pure detection with pure fantasy. The real and unreal are seldom compatible in a single short story: straight detection is usually earthbound, grounded by the realistic demands of cold logic and credibility; fantasy, on the other hand, has wings—it may soar into the stratosphere of the weird and even the supernatural. Does Mr. Heard successfully emulsify the oil-and-water of realism-and-fantasy, where so many before him have failed?

  But perhaps the most remarkable facet of this story is Mr. Montalba himself—rather, what he stands for. Surely Mr. Montalba is the most amazing undertaker ever to appear in print—and his mortician’s parlor the most stupendously grandiose ever imagined. Is it possible to be mordantly witty, mortiferously whimsical, about Death itself? Judge for yourself Mr. Heard’s curious and out-of-this-world approach is not for the squeamish; nor is his gruesome taxidermy for the queasy.….

  Further Comments on Mr. Montalba, Obsequist

  After reading an advance proof of your Editor’s introduction, the author, Mr. H. F. Heard, denies that “Mr. Montalba, Obsequist” is fantasy. Mr. Heard’s arguments are both interesting and convincing. We are passing them on to you because, if you’ll pardon the pun, we think the author should be heard. He writes: “I maintain the Montalba plot is not fantasy for (a) ‘Aeternitas’ was an actual German invention and I have actually owned a specimen bought in Berlin; and (b) the trick of getting into catalepsy can actually be learned, and the person can stay without breathing for long periods; again, I actually knew a man who could do it as a demonstration. Why then say the story is fantasy?” Why then, indeed?

  The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist

  by H. F. HEARD

  I nervously took a pinch at the bell-chain. From inside the house there answered a deep musical clang. “If you take a pinch they give you a knell,” I tittered to myself. I always fall into puns when I’m nervous. I also always notice a number of irrelevant things—I noticed that the house was really in too good taste. The door was mahogany polished till it was like tortoise shell. Its rich tawnyness was framed in a beautiful mellow freestone, Naples yellow in tone, obviously too perfect in grain ever to have come from a quarry: the façade rose in perfect proportions right up to a balustraded cornice where, against a powder-blue sky, stood at decent intervals elegant high-shouldered urns. “A gentleman who is really well-dressed,” I quoted to myself, “always has on one thing that is old.” The house was a brand-new piece of traditional art.

  A sound made my eye come to earth. The door had opened. In it stood a man illustrating, better than the house, my remark. He was dressed in a morning suit made of the finest clove-grey worsted, a silver grey cravat at his neck, grey kid gloves on his hands. He had already remarked, “Please enter.” I had done so and a colored servant in a maroon livery had “relieved me” of my hat and cane before I had my wits sufficiently about me to begin:

  “I’ve come …”

  “Only too pleased to show you,” sheared off the body of my explanation and I found myself being ushered slowly down a long passage while, in contrast to our processional pace, a flood of the quickest and strangest �
��patter” I’d ever heard pouted voluminously into my ears.

  “This way to the Obsequarium.”

  “The what?”

  “Ah, you don’t know? Le mot juste, I think you must allow. It came to me in a moment, and with it I knew I could give le coup de grace to all competition. It’s patented, of course—as is, naturally, the process. But what’s a process without a name? Indeed, I believe that had I to choose to make my way with either the process or the name, I’d choose the name. Of course the process is fascinating to a technician and naturally one has the specialist’s interest. But how could the public? They want a word and what is more they demand a non-descriptive word. Our profession is a key profession just because of that. We undertake”—the word was just a little raised—“to make possible for people to mention the unmentionable. There’s where I saw my opportunity. The others were content to follow public taste or, if you will, dis-taste. I was the first to show that fashions could be made. If in finery, why not in funerals? The profession was clinging to the past. The black mourning tradition? What was all that but a confession of defeat—cover up everything, have the event at night, keep everything in the shadow. I was the first to say, ‘We solicit the closest inspection. We take the public fully into our confidence.’ Indeed the time was overdue for a break with tradition. Morticians! Funeral Homes!! I know they meant well. But you know to what place the way is paved with good intentions. They wanted people to face up to death and be soberly bright about it. But these good fellows were more than a little out of date. I saw that. There’s now no need for the public to face up to death—at least, not to anyone else’s. Aeternitas settled that! You didn’t know about Aeternitas? Of course this is an age of, specialization. Still Aeternitas did rather step over frontiers. It was a German invention. They used it, with considerable commercial success, at the big Berlin Zoo. How? “Take an inmate home. Have a permanentized pet.’ There they lay, curled up in solid sleep—cats, dogs, lion pups, rare apes. The Zoo casualty list had been capitalized—a loss turned into a profit. The dead paid for the living. More, there wasn’t a limit to size—a beetle to an elephant, it was all the same. There wasn’t any taxidermy trickery about it. No, what you got was a real animal—so real that if you chose to cut it right through, you’d find cross-sectioned every bit of it, every organ. That, I own, was what set my mind on it. You know all that romance about hearts kept in gold cases and vases. Well, of course, you could have a piece—excuse my anatomical expertism—a piece of gristle, but a heart—No. But with Aeternitas—why, I saw at once there was the real thing, shapely, the plump curves, and hard—well, not as stone but as a good plastic—stand up to any amount of handling and quite a moderate amount of not too bitter tears without even losing its gloss. But why stop at hearts—why not go straight for wholes? Who’d carry a heart about in a vase when they could have the departed entire, sitting at home! Grim? No grimmer than a photograph! Grimness, gruesomeness? All that, I do assure you, is vieux jeu—the frisson of an age which had to be macabre faute de mieux. Aeternitas is the triumph of sanity and sanitation over false and musty romance. That was my first stroke. ‘Meet your dear one again at my reception parlor, and take him back home!’ ‘Why leave him in the tomb when you may have him at the table?’ From that it was only a step to parties.”

  Mr. Montalba threw open the door at the end of the long passage along which he had discharged his soliloquy. The chamber was large. Through high windows on the left a flood of golden light—far more mellow than our common-or-garden sun ever emits—poured, in slanting rays, onto a fine Persian carpet. It was possible to see through the window. The ground outside it sparkled smoothly snow-white.

  “Cosiness set in purity,” whispered Mr. Montalba in my ear, “that’s what we want when we are”—he paused, not so much to get the word as to see that I did—“adjusting to the new relationship.”

  On the side from the window was a cheerful fireplace where logs which had reached a perfect glow of incandescence continued indefinitely to candesce. The appositeness was so obvious that he only waved a kid-gloved hand toward it. Two fine Sheraton armchairs were drawn up each side of the hearth. Each was occupied, the occupants gazing meditatively at the glow.

  “Perfect lighting for a restful impression—the gentle flickering light gives a sense of peace without any solemn rigidity. You see, the smiles seem almost to play. We flatter ourselves on our smiles and feel they deserve the best of lighting to bring them out. Anything set would be worse than a droop. We aim at a quiet playfulness and I am sure you will agree that we have hit it. When the loved one returns home, permanently”—the word was stressed—“we always arrange the homecoming. We have planned a series of ‘settings’ to suit every purse, from the simplest ‘cosy-corner’ just for one inmate to the family wing to be built on to mansions. We have just completed quite an ambitious design—the old family butler is seated in a small back room looking contentedly at some perfect rustless-steel replicas of the family silver, with his polishing cloth still in his hand. In the front room are the grandparents each side of the fire, with a few spare chairs for relations who drop in for a few moments—or come for good. Upstairs, at the piano, is their daughter, the charming consumptive, and turning her music, the young man who when she became permanent, for a while went quite to pieces, but now is perfectly recollected, composed. Keats would have found his Grecian Urn surpassed—‘For ever will he love and she be fair.’ In the room above is the nursery, presided over, as it should be, by the dear old family nurse brooding over the little angel in his crib and the two-year-old gazing with childish solemnity at the fire.”

  “I’m not the Press,” I got out at last.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Mr. Montalba’s style changed in a twinkling. “Forgive me. We’ve only opened lately in this new mansion and of course we have roused much intelligent curiosity, I thought you were from a woman’s magazine. But,” and he already had my fingers between two grey gloved hands, “you had come for an appointment? You have a dear one ready or nearly ready to be permanented? Oh, please don’t start—yes, we like a little notice. Sometimes I drop around and make just a study or two from life—get the pose, you know. Many people make all arrangements with me—in advance. Then I can—how may I put it—avoid any awkward little hiatus.”

  At last I broke through this millrace of commercialized Lethe.

  “Mr. Montalba,” I said, “I have called to ask if you have received the—the remains of a Mr. Sibon?”

  “Remains!” He breathed out the word as a smoker resists at the first whiff a base tobacco. “Please, please, quite the unhappiest of words. ‘Relics’ even have about them a quite unnecessary flavor of abandonment. ‘Form’ is the word. Everything we say and do is in good form, indeed the best. We receive the Form—an obsequious touch or two and ‘Not marble’s self nor the gilded monuments of princes can compare for lasting quality’.”

  I stuck my ground.

  “Have you the Form of Mr. Sibon?”

  “A relation?” He cooed.

  “No, no, only an acquaintance.”

  “Well,” he became confidential, “of course it’s really very unprofessional, Mr.… Mr.?”

  “Mr. Silchester.”

  “Mr. Silchester, we have to have our rules. I’m sure you’ll understand. Next of kin have their rights, though I’m glad to say we so win confidence that they nearly always waive them. For all others—yes, even for blood relations—nothing till the opening day. Still, I will make an exception on your behalf. I don’t mind telling you that from the moment I saw you, I saw you might have—I like the ecclesiastical word; our professions so neatly parallel—a vocation. Yes, Mr. Sibon is here, resting.”

  “He’s alive then?” I’m afraid I blurted.

  Mr. Montalba became arch, “‘Resting’, I said,” he corrected me. “Life is such a rush now. Always keeping up and keeping up appearances. And now he will be kept up. The upkeep is practically nominal. We include a ten year guarantee and inspection
service with the initial costs.”

  “When did he die?” I shot in.

  “Again I’m being so very unprofessional. My heart over my head, you know. But why shouldn’t I? You’re not the Press. And, I can’t help it, I love a fellow enthusiast, as I see you are. Mr. Sibon was among the first of my clients to avail himself of our ‘advance service’; when he felt that he was, as we put it, losing form, he sent for me. So I was able to be at his apartment when he—again a phrase we have put into circulation—handed over. So advisable for the transformation to have, as I have said, no hiatus. No, he hadn’t been indisposed long. Just a little palpitation. It makes the calm all the more appreciated, by everyone, when the heart has been altogether a little too febrile.”

  He paused and then put his fat grey glove on my shoulder. It settled there like a heavy hot pigeon and then gave me a gentle push. His other hand pressed the panel of the big apartment’s third wall. It swung back and he pushed me through. In my ear he whispered, “You are privileged. You shall see a newcomer before he has been actually fitted with his setting.” The door closed behind us. We were in a dim passage with faint pink lights in the ceiling. Out of it another door opened. A light switched on. The room, its apricot glow lit up, was small but painted a cheerful rose. It contained only one article of furniture—a chair. But that was a comfortable one. And so the occupant seemed to find it. Dosing easily in it was—I knew at once from my previous visit to him—Sibon. I stepped up quickly and touched him on the shoulder.