Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  They met with this unspoken intimacy between them. Unspoken pacts grow quickest. They found, as is common, that once they had learned the language of allusion, they could speak more quickly and far more frankly than in direct words. They would look at a piece of silver—they had managed several museum visits, not only to the Metropolitan—and while studying it, they could (or she could, and she thought he did) each think about the other. And their remarks about art could be edged and fringed with references to each other’s taste, character, hopes, fears, history, and prospects. Rapidly they were getting to know each other; that is to say, each had in mind a clear picture, or rather, a three-dimensional figure, of the other. They began to do more than like each other’s company: they required it.

  Miss Ibis, as any woman so situated always does, began to look the better for the experience. She had never been quite undistinguished. Her main handicap, once you were past her defensive fear of her name, was that she was not the current popular notion of what female charm should be. She was large-boned, very much of a mother-figure, not at all the bride. But what if the need to be met was filial? Then Irene Ibis could have hopes. Hope, whatever may be said of it as a heart-tonic when it is stale, never did anyone anything but good when fresh. It freshened Miss Ibis to that degree that the cause of her rejuvenation began himself to be affected by it.

  Why had Arnoldo Signorli found himself in this position? We are all, in our characters, composites, made of mixed motives; as we are racially polymorphs, our norm made from crossing all sorts of oddities. But perhaps Arnoldo was excessively normal in this respect. Few people ever act for one reason alone. He often did not act at all because he generally required half a dozen reasons to get him under way. Such a character, however, once it is started, is apt to go along with a sort of momentum, an inertia of persistence. He had gone with his aunt because she had long made him think it would be worth going; he wanted to wear his good clothes in a place that matched. To this reason he was able to add another—that he and his aunt were, quite naturally, snobs. Miss Ibis’ heraldic heightening had added to this wish. Moreover, there was his strong liking for beautiful things of the past. Further, again, Miss Ibis was rich. He didn’t look ahead and think what might grow out of such a visit. He just felt, as there were numerous reasons for going and none against, he would certainly like to go and see what might turn up.

  Though his interest was art and the past, his profession of radio construction he quite enjoyed. It had given him just a sufficient number of reasons for getting into harness. It dealt with science and, as music was transmitted, art came in also. The trade itself was a varied one, with various sorts of contacts. Custom-built sets were his specialty. He designed and made the cabinets, too. He enjoyed complaining, but he had little difficulty in making his business go. He was able enough to have made money if he had chosen to build up his business. That he was still poor was not to say that he did not care for money. He liked it, perhaps as well as anything, but he loved to dream away a large portion of his time imagining how wonderful it would have been to have been born with it.

  Irene Ibis he had seen first out of a number of curiosities. He went on seeing her because, though the original curiosities—her house, her plate, her snob-value, herself as he had first seen her—had all been exhausted, new curiosities took their places. The house now interested him as a place of resort in which he felt increasingly at home; he advised her about adding new pieces to her silver collection: he liked to think of this dullish but not unimportant person as his private friend, a sort of superior aunt who was already ousting his first aunt. He was not, any more than she, thoughtless enough to think that the situation had any permanence in it. If she were not in love (he didn’t flatter himself that every woman would fall for him; he had had enough affairs to know that even mature women have their special fancies and will turn down one man far handsomer than another because that type does not move them), still in the end she would—not fall in love, but slide into it. He knew that by far the greater number of violent love affairs, that melt all the rails of life, begin with quiet interest, rise to a strong regard, and only then, like thermite, begin to emit the fusing heat of possessive passion. Love at first sight, nine times out of ten, is old love by the New Year. A love which is mainly maternal seems largely to feed itself, while boy-and-girl passion needs the response of its mate, a response which children, career, and other loves easily sap.

  Such was his trite attempt to be frank about the situation which had developed itself. He thought he saw it through. She would become his aunt—she had practically done so already—and then she would change gear, wish to possess him, and he would clear out. Meanwhile he was willing, desirous to go on teaching this teachable woman. With surprise he discovered that she really was teachable and, with quite as much surprise, that he had the gift-need to teach someone, to share his power of appreciation. He had often taken girls around to art shows, he now saw, to satisfy this need, but they nearly always watched him and not the thing he really wanted them to admire. Their foolish attempts to simulate interest vexed him. Perhaps that was why he had actually avoided full marriage. Certainly he would have required so many reasons for such a step that most women would have been twice married before he would have decided to ask them. Irene Ibis had attended to the things he showed her, had shown that she could appreciate them, and, further, could learn to appreciate them more. And now that he had become quite a little interested in her and thought he had her placed—which of course would have meant that his interest was at midday and soon would be in its afternoon—she changed.

  He felt it before he saw it. He felt that he was quite content to be with her even when he wasn’t teaching. Their conversation gradually became personal. Of course it began—who began it was no matter; which of the two fire-sticks makes the fire?—with his telling her about his mother, or her asking. She told him of hers. Mother memories are mainly suppositional, but they are good mirrors in which to see the best side of oneself. Mothers make mothers of their daughters and children of their sons—the female is made self-forgetful, the male innocent. Irene played her inherited part, Arnoldo his. Radiant motherhood is, like all popular clichés, an overstatement, but it refers to an actual condition. Motherhood as a rule is sane, cheerful, happy, serene, satisfied. Irene entered into something of all these positive states of mind; and her body, which had needed these temperament-tonics more than any other treatment, responded remarkably. Gradually Arnoldo felt that she was no longer just a nice enough person to whom one talked, as it were, across her body, in which old-fashioned sedan she sat. As when a stereoscope focuses, the two images he had had, of the body and of the person, came into one. She was her body: it fitted her, suited her, expressed her; she filled it well; it was a fine, motherly body on which one might depend as the outward and visible sign of her maternal devotion.

  She was naturally ready and steadier than he when he let his hand rest on the back of hers. They were arranging a silver tazza to stand on edge at the back of a cabinet. He stepped back to see the effect. Should it stand? It showed well, but it was an unnatural position in which to put that type of dish. He went forward again, putting his hands also into the mirror-lined shelf.

  He was taking the dish from her, saying, “You step back and see how it looks. I’m not sure.”

  His hands were on hers, his shoulder against hers. In the dark mirror at the back they could see their hands and arms. Their faces were too high to show. She laughed softly and naturally, without nervousness or strain—rather like the way, he remembered, his mother used to laugh when she had hidden from him, when he was four, and he had come into the room half thinking she must be there. Then, just as he had decided she wasn’t, back she would sweep the window-curtains in which she had been concealed and with that gentle laugh stand in front of him. Surprise and reassurance and welcome: the fun of being treated as an equal, someone to be hidden from, and the joy of being treated as a baby—to be caught up and hugged. The memory
nearly obliterated the present. Irene lifted his hands off hers, ran her right hand lightly up his arm, as she drew back, until, leaving his shoulder, her fingers just touched his face.

  Then she was well behind him saying, “You’re right. It can’t stand on end. We’ll have to put a big salver there instead.”

  That was all, but from that moment, without further explanation they went on the open path.

  “I’ve never thought of marrying really,” he said to her not a month after. “So many things are needed for marriage and I had hardly any of them.”

  Her heart gave her a little trouble at that. Though she had suspected that he couldn’t be married, she would not try and find out and she would not believe her hopes. But she kept now her head and the initiative.

  “Marriage,” she remarked, “is one way of attempting to solve the problem of happiness.”

  His reply to her large, easy sententious opening surprised her a little: “Yes, off and on I’ve wondered whether it mightn’t lie for me in religion.”

  “Isn’t art your religion?” she asked, to bring him home to their common interests.

  “No,” he persisted. “Religion and art are quite different, as different as beauty is from love—sisters, not spouses.”

  “There are many styles of love, and art; if you could really live it and be part of it as the religious live it, as they say, in a religious ‘habit,’ art then could be a real life and a full love.”

  He paused, evidently thinking that over. “Anyhow,” he finally said, “I can see that loves do blend into one another.”

  He became her younger brother, her grown son, and she, conversely, his elder sister, his companionable widowed mother. His chief feeling then was one of considerable rest. Several times he said to her that this must be like what a sound, unquestioned religion gave men—not a soft rest but a firm rest, not an excitement but a reliance. She was more deeply happy. That statement of his made her feel complete. It was only a little disturbed when he added, “Though I suppose mystics have something beyond.”

  “I’ve never really needed religion,” she said, “never understood why it was needed. Life means personal relations: if you find them you’ve found the meaning; if you don’t, you’ve failed.”

  Her assurance a little grated on him and he dropped the subject. Theirs were not passionate natures; physical relations meant little to them. He felt she would help him to make up his mind and to understand himself and his love of himself. He was glad to know that she was now fond enough of him to let him talk as much as he wanted about himself. As with art, so with himself, his girl friends had pretended to listen, but they only listened in order to turn the attention back on themselves. Irene would actually look after him, choose his clothes for him, and take a real pleasure in his appearance. She did not expect him to admire her, and she saw that as long as he could admire himself he would stay at her side, unallured by transcendental beauty or the bodily beauty of the opposite sex. They were both glad to have the awkwardness of bodily self-consciousness out of the way. In private he called her “mother.” They kissed each other in a quiet family way.

  But the clandestinity of the relationship soon vexed them both.

  “Why should we be forced to marry as the only possible recognized relationship?” he asked.

  “I certainly don’t want you to have to pretend that you are my husband,” she answered, smiling.

  “Yet,” he said, taking up the subject again a few weeks later, “we can’t go on forever in this grotesque way pretending that we haven’t done something we haven’t done and aren’t going to do.”

  “And already,” she confirmed, “people have remarked something. Here we want the rest each can give the other and we have to be almost as furtive and febrile as though we were both hunted by a wild, disreputable passion!”

  She laughed but he was glum. He had realized that she was really going to love him maternally—the offer was a good one; why shouldn’t he drift along in her wake? But then, did she really mean business?

  She herself was not quite sure. Would she really have to choose, to leave her house and the society she had built up round her and “elope”? Well, she had moved before, cut her cables and moved onto another coast. She could do it if it were worth while. She decided that it was, that she could and would hold him. She was frank and businesslike. She made it quite plain to him that she wanted to manage for him, to look after him in every detail, to make it possible, as they had once discussed, that he might live, as she put it, “habited in art.” They discussed it a number of times and each time each of them was more prepared to try this thing but, more convinced that going on as they were was no longer leading them anywhere.

  From the day of their final agreement, when she went in detail into the part which she wanted him to play and in which she said truly she felt he would alone be happy, she went ahead. He left everything to her. She planned methodically. She was a capable woman when her mind was set and she had never been so set as now. She saw ahead of her what she wanted—the life she was convinced he ought to have and which she was sure would alone make her happy.

  Chapter IV

  The city of Aumic is, some people would say, only a garden city. But it is a city with a plan, with proportions, with a style. Ten years ago cactus and brush spread over a “spill” from the Sierra escarpment which towers a wall of blue—powder blue at dawn, amethystine blue at sunset—five miles back. It was a lovely prospect, provided you were a creature who only needed to feast your eyes on visual beauty. But if you carry your eyes at the top of a body which, sixty-nine per cent water, demands constant replenishment—soft, as a water-sack is like to be, and so is easily punctured by thorns, is as easily scorched by sun, poisoned by poison oak, killed by snake venom, and sun-struck by generous overdoses of ultraviolet—well, then, visual beauty is in the same category as Nurse Cavell classified patriotism, “not enough.”

  The place seemed doomed to be left to such quick but color-blind eyes as are carried by gophers and rattlers, coyotes and jack rabbits, eyes more concerned to spy each other than to contemplate a large-scale, grandly colored landscape. But water came. Man, the walking pipe of water, piped his essential liquid onto the site. Groves and gardens appeared, orange tree and grapevine, lemon and melon; yes, grass-sward like an English cathedral close; cypress glades like an Italian Campo Santo. Here was the setting for a truly garden-girt city. Somehow the almost excessive friendliness of nature, once her dry reserve was broken through, seemed to stimulate man. Architects drew plans which rapidly gave rise to a charming hybrid of Spanish cloisters and Portuguese baroque palaces.

  Only the great width of the streets kept the place from coming together into a very convincing ensemble. As it was, however, everyone had more room and everyone’s yard became a garden. This spaciousness also kept people a little insulated from each other. The lots were large. Main Street did not dominate civic life.

  In consequence, newcomers were not too strictly inquired into and gossiped over. New people were always arriving, and were wanted to arrive, from thousands of miles back East. The oldest inhabitant could hardly claim much censorial right, as he was’ only a decade old himself. When, therefore, Mrs. Heron and her son Arnold Heron arrived and took the biggest house in the place, people who heard of it were quite pleased but not at all curious.

  There was one big house in the town, or rather, just outside it. Before the city had been laid out there was north of the site an attempt at a large orange grove. The owner of this had also been inspired by his surroundings, but, being a little earlier in his taste, thought of having a fine “colonial” house in keeping with his “plantations.” He was not very scholarly about it, but he did succeed in rearing a fine frame structure which, with its colonnaded porticoes and general proportions, gave, at least from a distance, the impression of something in the grand manner. But he moved when the city came along. The house had been too big for anyone else till now, was a little too far away to be quite n
eighborly, and was already becoming a little dilapidated. So, as far as they thought about it at all, the Aumics or Aumicians were relieved when the new Heron couple took it and began to renovate it throughout. It needed a deal of money put into it (it was said to have only one bathroom); certainly, if it were well done, it would make a distinct feature for that end of the town. You saw it, standing at the end of a fine avenue of palms, with the blue Sierra escarpment rising behind it, when you looked up the boulevard from the school and town-hall block.

  He had had something to do with radio and she collected art things, said the men who worked on the house. The Herons, though quiet, weren’t a bit exclusive. They didn’t import, for the decorating, some over-elegant young man from one of the over-big stores in the city fifty miles off. Local people got all the work and young Heron worked with them. He had enough taste, said the oldest carpenter, to have gone into the decorating line himself, had he ever needed money.

  So when they were settled in—for there is much to do with a large, shingle-roofed frame house which has been left untended for ten years and more—everyone felt that they knew the Herons and nobody minded that they lived very quietly and didn’t entertain or seem to wish to make friends quickly.

  Nor were they content, it turned out, simply to make the house take on its old appearance outside and give it a nice modern interior. They were evidently wishing to do something for the community in a quiet, unobtrusive way. For first they made the “front” and indeed all its fronts really “colonial.” The original builder’s notions had been a little vague. Now everything was made “periodly” correct—the long portico of pillars was perfectly proportioned; the tall hall-door and its flanking windows, sheltered under the portico, were made to the precise scale and decorated with that neat ornament to which the Brothers Adam reintroduced the polished world five generations ago. The garden was laid out with fine formality with long pools in which the façade was reflected, and across the end was reared an elegant worked-iron gateway with tall gateposts of white stone surmounted with urns on each of which stood a long-billed bird. The gateway made a sort of veil—not shutting out the house as you looked up at it from the city but making the whole perspective look longer and more stately.