by H. F. Heard
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Murder by Reflection
H. F. Heard
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
TO
CHRISTOPHER WOOD
A PORT AFTER CLARET
Chapter I
Through the Looking-Glass was propping up Henry James’s The Sense of the Past. The two books, slanted against each other, made a small “straight-sided” arch on the mantelpiece. So, peering through this squint, you could see into the mirror behind it, and behind that you could see into the mirror which was behind you and facing this mirror, and so on until it became too dark to see the farthest uncountable chamber. You could go on down that ever dimmer arcade, in which the window on your left gave less and less light and the shoulders of the observer became more and more anonymous—anyone’s shoulders—and finally only a shadow suggesting a shoulder—until you forgot in which of these many rooms you actually were, until you were sure there was no one room but only a long passage going on inscrutably in either direction lit by an interminable row of windows.
The reason for peering through the angle made by the two books was that then you need not be disturbed by seeing your own present face. Then you were just an eye, some hair, and a suggestion of a shoulder. The books masked your topical appearance. The reason for choosing these two books was just as clear. Dodgson, the mathematical romancer, escaping back into childhood, and Henry James, the metaphysical novelist with his nostalgia for the past, were perfect “supporters,” as heralds would say.
Through the Looking-Glass had always haunted Arnoldo Signorli as a real possibility, ever since he had read it as a child. Here was a perfect, quick escape from the sordid present. But he never wanted to go into a completely magic world, nor did crystal-gazing, “scrying” in a glass to see the future, intrigue him. He knew what he wanted—an escape from huge, harsh New York of today into the past, the leisured, cultured, ample but neat past, when all living, from the hand you wrote to the shoe you wore, from the façade of your house to the fob at your waist, was all in one consistent style. So when he came on Henry James’s Sense of the Past it completed, complemented, the Alice book. Here was the same theme dealt with by an adult, one who wouldn’t accept the present but who knew how to create convincingly, accurately, with detailed realism the place that Arnoldo wished to visit.
These two volumes made, therefore, the trestle-bridge with which he crossed Time’s stream. As soon as he read James he rearranged his room. It was small and dim and he had hardly any money to spend for interior decoration. But he was able to manage in a way. His old-fashioned apartment had a large mirror over its mantelpiece, reaching up to the ceiling’s cornice. The room was transformed by the simple device of putting an equally large mirror on the wall opposite the fireplace. “How much larger it looks,” said his landlady, looking at the finished effect.
But that, of course, was the reverse of his intention. He had abolished the room. By reflection he had radiated away its stuffy, little, present-confining walls. He was free—as soon as he had shut the door and shut off his present appearance by putting up the mask of books—to gaze down the corridor and to imagine that in one of those dimly-distant chambers he could see a figure move, a figure belonging to the age to which he knew he belonged, the age of style, when to be in the grand manner was normal, when to be polished was to be anonymous, and to be sloppy and slack—that was outré.
All this was, however, mere daydream. He never dared mention it to a friend, not even to his admiring aunt who had helped him through life, had helped him with capital to the small radio business by which he lived. So today, his vigil over, with one further scan to see whether by autosuggestion he could conjure to appear in one of those dusky rooms even the shadow of a figure in the great past style, he sighed and stood up.
The movement shook the shoddy mantel. Through the Looking-Glass slid on its side; The Sense of the Past flopped over on the recumbent Alice.
The mask had slipped: Arnoldo saw himself looking at himself, inescapably here and now.
He turned with a sigh and looked round the small interior. Beside making these mirror sham-vistas—“magic casements,” of course, he called them—he had done what he could to make the place alien to today. The actual window had its mean proportions disguised—he liked to say that he had lifted its face; he had certainly raised its eyebrows—by giving it French Empire curtains which narrow-flanked it from floor to ceiling, their hems with classic borders brushing the floor, their heads neatly crowned with an elegant pelmet on which the same formal scrollwork repeated itself. The carpet was of a similar design, a big wave-scroll made the broad selvage; the center showed, in rather coarse tapestry design, La France, a large, vague woman making a large, vague gesture of display. He had also been able to pick up a glass-fronted cabinet in white and gilt wood. On its shelves were his real treasure: an Empire silver teapot; six spoons of the period; a couple of candlesticks; and a Battersea-enamel snuffbox in which he actually kept snuff—never taking it, but renewing it when it smelled stale—a kind of unkindled incense to show that here at least a still living past lingered and was loyally worshiped. The elegant lines and curves of these objects pleased his hand as much as his eye. He would take them out and carefully polish them with chamois leather and rouge powder and then replace them in their shrine. The Battersea was not a first-rate piece. But it served a certain purpose. He had a friend who had an outstanding example, perhaps unique. The friend, being eccentric, would lend him the treasure now and then for a few days. His commonplace piece then served the purpose, he liked to think, of making its aristocratic cousin feel less banished when it came on a visit.
As he raised himself from peering into his shrine he thought, “I’d rather have been a liveried valet in those days, for then I might have lived in the houses where these things were everywhere about one, where one actually had such objets d’art to look after, never seeing anything that wasn’t art—even the clothes one would have brushed, the boots one polished, the hats one glossed would have been of equal elegance.”
His eye wandered to the wall opposite the window. There, above two stiff cane-seated chairs in which anyone who sat must have sat at “attention”—the slightest lounge and you would skid from their smooth, unwelcoming support onto the floor—hung two prints. The one was from Ingres’ painting of Napoleon as First Consul; the other was of Simon Bolivar. They presided over him like twin deities making him feel secure. Here was heroic action in the Old World and the New—in each case in the grand style, not lavish, but with that neat and polished finish which is truemuch money that it was elegance.
Yet today, as he inventoried his retreat, he sighed. Was it really worth while? Didn’t it make things really worse—this hole-in-the-corner revolt against all the actuality outside? Every time he went out to his work he had to suffer the same shock between his trade, radio, that made all the noises of the vulgar world knock against his mind, and this pre-commercial world which he felt was his true home.
He turned and went down into the street. While going along to his place he could go in a half-dream; but once in his little store, with the workshop at the back of it, he had to dismiss the past. Yet, he reflected, there’s nothing against science. Those people of the past, of the clear-cut style, they’re the very ones who’d have appreciated all the science that radio’s built on. They were the last people to be really streamlined. It’s our style, not our machines, that have gone wrong.
The telephone rang.
“Another damned customer, who knows nothing of science or style, complaining,” he grumbled to himself as he made his way to the harsh, im
patient little bell. “Bet it’s either that he’s so little ear that he thinks the set’s tone’s bad, or so poor an eye for form that he thinks the Regency cabinet is too plain!”
“Yes!… Oh! It’s you, Aunt Gabrielle! Oh, not really! That’s wonderful of you. Yes. Yes. I’d always wanted to. Thought you said there wasn’t a chance. Yes, I’ll be able to go with you—count on me. Next Thursday? Yes, I’ll have time to have my custom-made suit pressed.”
He put the instrument back on its rest. His mood had been somersaulted from the “low” it had sunk to as he raised the telephone to a real “high” when he put it down. Aunt Gabrielle was really a good friend. Often he had feared her wish to manage him, but when he wanted something badly she it was, generally, who managed to get it for him. She had raised the money for him to start in business and she had shown a wish to manage the business for him. But he had made it clear that he would repay her loan and must be let do so in his own way. Being Italians, there was the family feeling, He needn’t consider that it was being done for him, but because he was the only son of her dead sister, who had been a widow some years before she had died. And this introduction which he had wanted so long—there again Aunt Gabrielle was, undoubtedly doing what he had asked, but she had taken her time in doing it. She wasn’t giving him that hand-up until she had secured her own footing firmly enough and to spare. And she must also have been sure that he would do credit to the family. In the right Italian manner it was done for the family. Well, he would and could play his part.
Miss Irene Ibis—he had always wanted an opportunity to see inside her house. This little “literary sub-verb of New York,” as he called it, was largely controlled by this large lady, with the large, the handsome mansion and the large, the magnificent collection it housed. He had often heard of her silver and had sometimes seen pieces of it at loan exhibitions. But that house was not easy to enter. Even when his aunt had gradually risen until she was a member of the Fine Arts Society, it was made quite clear to her that she was a member of so select an association that its meetings were almost under the seal of sacred secrecy. The idea of introducing a poor relation to a fellow member’s house just on the strength of the fact that he happened to like fine art—well, that, of course, would only show that the Committee itself had made an error of taste in electing you. And when you recalled how long they had considered before deciding to take you “on approbation” you could hardly put them in such an awkward position. Nor, if you did, was there any doubt that they could retrieve the error you had so tactlessly pointed out, and retrieve it wholly at your expense. Aunt Gabrielle’s caution, her patient, circumspect strategy was therefore not to be caviled at. Now it had carried its point. He was invited to go to tea and view the collection.
Chapter II
Irene Ibis at first had fought against her name. She first became aware of it at school. “I.I.,” they called her. “You bet, I-bis” was one of the worst of the waggish playings on her patronymic and it stuck. She was foolish enough to show that she minded. It nearly wrecked her adolescence. But just as she was subconsciously considering whether a nervous breakdown wasn’t the stylish way out of the high-school situation, her father broke instead—in health not in finance. She was able to give up her time to nursing him, or, rather, to superintending his nurses, as her mother was already dead. And when after a few years of easy invalidism—at least for his attendants—he followed his wife, he left his daughter so much money that it was manifestly worth seeing whether, with it, the world might not after all be bearable. Certainly it showed at once that it wanted to be. So after a few weeks’ doubt the feeling that one ought to change one’s name changed into the determination to brazen—or rather to gild—it out. She would move, of course, from the vulgar, almost Middle West, city where she had been born. In a cultured environment the uncommon is not considered ridiculous—rather, it is regarded as interesting.
In the East she soon found that “literary sub-verb” where her wish to please, to be cultured, and to pay showed her that she might hope soon to be one whose wishes were law. Her appearance was really more against her than her name. She was birdlike, but not in any bright, trilling way—instead, she resembled the more developed of the pigeons. So, though the men and women whom she met showed no objection to her name, none of the men evinced the slightest wish to make her change it. She had, then, for years a busy social life but no home life. Her house was simply the gallery in which her collection was set out and she was the unsalaried caretaker. She was alone.
Gradually she found that state exasperating, as exasperating as at school she had found her name. She did not want a husband, she did not want to be married in any way, but she did want someone about the place—not a companion, a wretched little shadow of herself—but (it was her daydream) a grown son, one whom she would not have the trouble to rear, ready-made as it were, and, further, made for this one purpose, one who would never want to go on growing but would stay at her side. Again she asked herself, Could not money, discreetly disbursed, do something about it?
She was no fool. She knew what she wanted and she saw what men wanted. They wanted the woman who stood back of them, whether wife or mother, to have something outstanding. Looks she could not give; and as to wealth, the second desideratum, too many who had the first had that second also. Besides, no familiarity more quickly and certainly breeds contempt than the familiarity which comes from handling your familiar’s money. The third thing is rank. Many a man has allied himself with a plain and poorly endowed woman just because the woman was able to look down on other women, and has respected her because she was better bred.
Once she had thought this out, Miss Ibis took the appropriate steps to appropriate rank. She moved again—but this time temporarily—East, to London, England. There she sought out that queer little brick building which, half like an antique country house and half like a bank which has seen better days, looks out on one of the noisiest and ugliest of streets. In this residence there (literally) “hangs out” that queerest of surviving colleges, the College of Heralds. These antiquarians in nothing but surnames decided, after due search and due pay, that Miss Ibis could not lay name or claim to being part—however outlierly—of any family that had once been so demonstrably illiterate that it could not sign its name but only indicate it by its mark. So Miss Ibis could not carry anyone else’s arms, even “in a lozenge,” or “quartered,” or “impaled” or “differenced.” The Ibises, whoever they were, were obviously birds which had kept away from all the heraldic rookeries and heronries, hawk-mews and martlet-eaves.
Such a concession to archaeological truth, however, did not discourage the gentlemen of the tabard. They had the right not merely to show where the last trickle of an ancient honor ran; they could say, “Here new honor, at least to esquire level, rises.” And they decided that anyone so willing and able to pay for the search for the possible right to carry someone else’s decorations should not go empty away. Too good historical scholars to say that Miss Ibis could documentarily be proved to be even the most oblique—even batonsinistered—descendant of some medieval gangster, who preferred rather to shoot his way into wealth than to earn it, they were right loath to discourage such zeal for gentility. For another handsome sum they gave Miss Ibis a handsome “coat” all of her own. She was right. She need not brazen her name out, she could emblazon it. She now had a proprietary right in the bird. It was her Crest. It was to appear “all proper” and “gorged with a ducal coronet”—which sounds as though the bird was heavily dressed and had swallowed that head-bauble with all its metal strawberry leaves, but means in herald-argot that the bird was to appear in its natural coloring with the crown not down its throat but round its neck. The motto, too, gave their invention an easy opening. Ibis pictorially was without doubt a bird—“of the wading species”—and linguistically the same word was a good Latin mono-verbal description of a go-getter.
So equipped, the bird-crested lady returned to the town of her adoption. Her friends as
ked the questions. She did not have to open the subject. Miss Kesson was naturally the first. She was quite an antiquarian and claimed to have traced half a dozen local families through old Bibles back from their present cultured prosperity to the extreme poverty of small artisans who had left their living in England to follow their conscience into the wild.
“What a lovely design!” she remarked. “Where, dear Irene, did you find such a treasure?” She was examining her teaspoon, which on the splay of its eighteenth-century handle now carried, “an Ibis regardant, all proper, ducally gorged, on a field vert.” Of course you knew that the field was “vert” by the small dots and scratches which marked the little mound on which the costly bird was mounted. On a waving scroll underneath, you read the newly honored name “Ibis.”
“When I was last in Britain the College of Heralds found that I had the right to carry coat-armor.” The sentence had been carefully prepared against the question. But now that it was launched it sounded heavy.
Mrs. Maligni—of Italian extraction—looked up. “What is that?” Then, looking at her own spoon, “Oh, you have a decoration, an honor!”
“Well, it’s not quite that.” Miss Ibis was able to make elucidation and further assertion sound like disavowal. “It really has nothing to do with anything I’ve done personally. I called at the College of Heralds to make some inquiries”—she hoped it sounded accidental—“about family trees and they became interested in mine.”
“Doesn’t the motto tell us something?” said Miss Branch, whose forte was decipherment.
“Well, yes,” allowed Miss Ibis. “The Heralds felt that it was quite a happy name because, as they said, it ‘told’ both as an emblem and a motto.”
“Oh, I see,” broke in Miss Branch. “How cute. Latin, of course, and so hopeful!”
