Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  But even more care was spent on the interior; indeed, there more had had to be done. The staircase had been a haphazard way of reaching the bedrooms. It was torn out, like the tongue from a medieval false witness, and in its place was set a magnificent spiral flight of broad, shallow steps edged by a sweeping rail of fine metal. Everything was white and silver save for dark blue carpets, dark blue upholstery, and dark blue borders to the vast white curtains which hung from ceiling to floor beside each of the long windows. Upstairs the same simple but telling scheme was carried out; only one room was left unfurnished, a big north room which evidently had been used as a bedroom in hot weather.

  Both “mother” and “son” seemed agreed on having at every turn a sense of spaciousness. The great hall was fine enough in all reason now, with its sound and wide proportions let show in every direction, but, as though they still felt the need to expand after leaving the shrinking North, they put two ceiling-high mirrors on each side. As you entered you knew you were in a room which gave an uncommon sense of spaciousness; but when you reached the middle of it you saw, right and left of you, an interminable vista of similar stately rooms proceeding like a cloister built for that imaginary Thelema Abbey, where everyone was to do as he pleased, conjured up by the mind which created Gargantua.

  While they were working at this reconstruction—or revivification, as they preferred to call it—the two were always together and in fine spirits. For a week or so after arriving, Mrs. Heron had seemed tired, but once the house-work got under way she seemed to revive with it. They were always going up to the big city, buying things for the place. And she herself began to show the effect of the place in another way. She began gradually to adopt a style which was certainly liker to the fashions of the time which the house represented than those of today. Her dresses became long, high-waisted and high-shouldered. She certainly looked stately in her great high rooms. Often she remarked that the house required that of them, that they could spoil it all by being too obtrusively as the slipshod world of today had made them. Once or twice she seemed to be urging on him that he shouldn’t become too easygoing in this easy climate and she referred to that apocryphal Englishman who preserved his British phlegm from evaporation in Central Africa, solely by the device of changing into a starched shirt and full evening dress for his solitary jungle-surrounded dinner. She said she hoped that the house might help him to see himself and how well set up he might be. Certainly in those great, empty, mirror-searched rooms it was hard to avoid oneself, and also to avoid seeing that, perhaps, one was needing a little camouflage, like a rather dusty beetle which has crawled onto a fine new white tablecloth.

  He did evidently humor her a little, and they had some talk about a housewarming, but he always asked her to postpone any such plans until the house was completed. His mood fluctuated on this matter and so did hers. Sometimes she pressed him, and they made, on several of their visits to the big city, some calls on a tailor. She had now been looking after his wardrobe for some time.

  Finally he seemed to resist. The outdoor climate of the South seemed to win against the indoor, reconstructed style. He worked at the house devotedly but seemed to become more and more an outdoor person as he did so. He would bathe and change into a tuxedo in the evening—he conceded that, as she always dressed in the evening and they dined in some state with her lovely silver in use. She had, too, brought in a number of well-trained colored servants and put them into quiet, stately liveries so that the house was really inhabited, not “caretaken.” He would look at them in the evening and at her. But he still fought, now that he could have it, against himself being sunk, as she herself had sunk, right into the picture itself.

  “I expect perhaps I only wanted the past because the present was so poor,” he said to himself. “Or perhaps I want to eat my cake and have it, to be in the picture and at the same time to be an onlooker free to move about if I want and to break up the tableau vivant when I will.”

  He saw that she was disappointed and that the disappointment told on her. She began to lose her energy and verve. He knew it was because of his refusal to let her picture jell; because, right in the center of it he stood, and he stood out, would not come in, would not complete her pleasure by becoming nothing but the completing part of this revivified life. Part of him still wanted to—“Perhaps if I’d been by myself I should have done all this and become in every way part of it; perhaps it’s her fault in pushing me and managing me. But then, but for her, I’d never have attempted it at all.” Part of him wanted, more than anything, independence. “What is all my love of the past but a wish to be for myself on my own?” She tired; and he, once the house was finished, spent his new energy out of doors.

  “’Spect she’s a semi-invalid,” said the mailman, who was called Doc mainly because of his practice of diagnosing his deliverees. “Meet her walking down their drive to get the mail from me and I guess I know a heart-walk when I see it. Why, there was old Simpson, ’member, up past the Episcopal church on Fifth; I saw he was ‘hearty’ long before he or his doctor did.”

  Certainly Mrs. Heron wasn’t looking quite so young as she had when she arrived.

  “The warm climate,” said capable young Dr. Hertz, when she consulted him. “One needs to acclimatize even to an improved climate,” he added smilingly, “and to go slow with all this additional citrus. Many people are allergic to oranges in the quantities and rich qualities we have here.”

  Young Heron, however, seemed to find the warmth and semitropical conditions stimulating. As his mother became more lethargic he became increasingly active. At first they had kept very much together. There were all the trips that had to be made to the big city for the innumerable things which had to be bought for the house. And she even used to go with him on excursions into the lovely wilderness surrounding the small, shapely city. But gradually, as their respective energies diverged, he went off by himself and she spent nearly all her time in the spacious garden.

  Certainly she was moping. She had spent so much energy and care on this transplantation of themselves; she had made such a dream of what they would do; she had worked with such resource to bring it about. And, outwardly, there it was. When she had first seen the house she had been sure that it was the thing, that she and he would be able to transform it into a perfect setting for their lives. It had been a wrench for her to break her connection with the circle she had brought round her in the East and to come to quite a new place. But she had banked on the calculation that by so doing she would be able to start a completely new life with him which would more than compensate.

  She had thought out every detail, even to the name “Heron,” which would link up nicely with the name she was dropping, would keep her in touch with her bird-emblazoned silver and sound really nicer than Ibis, for which she still had no liking. And all her plans had gone perfectly; every object she had decided to have and to place, she found and it fitted. Indeed, only one thing was lacking in the radiating wheel of ordered, reconstructed elegance with which she had surrounded herself—that was the pin, the clou, the living figure which was to stand at the focus, everything revolving round him, everything reflected in him. She had estimated that all Arnoldo needed to sink into a completely encircled life was the environment which she had created for him. But the fact remained that though he had been interested, as interested as she had been, in getting ready the white-and-silver cage, when she wanted him to come in and stay in, he refused.

  It was not that he neglected her. He would come back and tell her what he had seen. He had never been in the country before, and this southern country seemed to appeal to something in his blood. Natural history became a great interest with him. The fauna of the place roused his curiosity. The snakes especially came to have quite a fascination for him. An old fellow who collected rattlers and showed them off to people in a small plot by the main highway showed him how to manage the reptiles.

  “They’re simply reflexes,” he said. “A kind o’ rubber-and-gristle-clockwo
rk.”

  The thought of this deadly but stupid creature being able to be managed but, if one made a false step, able to kill one in a particularly agonizing way, amused Arnoldo. He liked the tarantulas also. It was like looking at an ordinary spider with your eyes become magnifying lenses. And of course that normal-sized but amazingly malignant arachnid, the notorious black widow spider, delighted him. You could keep it in a pillbox—a little black spot which if it bit you in the right place might be your death.

  He tried to interest Mrs. Heron in this new hobby of his, but as she was already disinclined to be friendly to this southern climate even at its friendliest, she was immediately frightened by its hostile species.

  “Take them away,” she cried petulantly. “They are dangerous and disgusting. They are filthy things to have about. Why must you bring into this beautiful place these horrid vermin from outside?”

  “Surely not disgusting,” he would reply in a way which provoked her, for she was convinced he did it as a revolt against the standards of taste and beauty which she had thought they both shared. “Surely not disgusting? Look at the rattler’s markings and his movements—he’s a fugue in motion. And the poor tarantula with his beautiful black fur. While this poor little black widow”—he held toward her a small box with a piece of cellophane quite loosely tied over the top—“that cardinal red inset on the neat black body is handsome coloring, you’ll allow.”

  But she wouldn’t allow anything.

  They were still mother and son, but they were discovering sides of the relationship that the early deaths of both their mothers had hidden from them. The world of sentiment is very unwilling to allow it, but quite as much as in any other relationship—from marriage through all degrees of friendship—in the mother-and-child relationship, what begins as impulse must, if it is to last, be developed by an increasingly understanding intelligence. Otherwise that which began as an effortless symbiosis—two beings involved equally in a common need for each other, and so, by satisfying their own need, each supplying the other’s demand—must end, not as reciprocal satisfaction but as an interlock. The natural link, if left to itself, hardens with growth into a handcuff.

  Mrs. Heron did not like being left alone, she who had had a small court of company, and in a place where she felt unsuited. Her son did not like leaving her alone. But he found that he was always more cheerful with her when they had been absent from each other for a couple of hours or even half a day. True, she was more difficult when he returned, but his increased energy more than made up for her complaining lassitude.

  The Aumic elders, though naturally they would not intrude, took a discreet, well-bred interest in the Plantation House’s personalities and of course made a few shrewd speculations. It was, after all, a fairly familiar pattern—the capable, middle-aged, rather tired mother, and the son, after years, no doubt, of companionable care and, maybe, having been rather retarded, beginning to go just a little faster and farther than she could now manage.

  “’Spect,” said Doc, the mailman, sitting in the drugstore after finishing his daily delivery, “he’ll be looking for a wife one of these days. The setup up there is one of the varieties of human behavior,” for Doc was as much interested in psychology as in medicine proper, and often said he could tell oncoming trouble in a house just from a general impression he got from the kind of handwritings that appeared on their mail. “It’s normal enough, if not overcommon. Man in that position’s like a late-flowering species o’ plant—none the worse for that.” He chuckled and looked along the counter. “Any of you girls would be doing well for yourselves. He’s a healthy fellow. I’ve met him miles up the canyon hiking. Lonely men make good husbands.”

  “Well, you’ve made a good husband and no one would call you lonely, you old kibitzer,” laughed the store proprietor, coming up and clapping Doc on the shoulder.

  Everyone laughed. Doc’s wife often called out after him in the street, “Is this one of your home days or will you be spending it all on the sidewalks?” He’d tumble out of his car, walk a block with her with his arm in hers, and then rush back again to “delivery.” If ever there was an out-of-doors extrovert, a man to whom “privacy” was a close-locked word, Doc was he. Still, like most public-minded men, he was much more discreet than most people guessed. He knew, as all good mixers know, that if you are about all the time and really like human beings and being with them, you must pass on only what is likable. Otherwise, quite soon, people shun you. As he would say to his cronies, “You’re not a mixer; you move, like lemon juice in milk, breaking up the milk of human kindness into isolated, sour, suspicious little curds.” So, like all born diplomats, Doc talked all the while and so some people thought he talked all he knew. But under the obvious wisecracking, Doc kept his shrewd observations so much to himself that few people even suspected that he made them. Naturally he saw a lot—whisking suddenly up to people’s doors, running across them in side roads, scanning, as he had to, their mail. But only his wife shared any of those confidences which he felt it better that Aumic should not know, and yet on which—to prevent Aumic’s prematurely knowing and getting upset over—he felt he ought to have preventive advice.

  “Y’know, I’ve seen young Heron,” he said to her, “couple of times he didn’t see me. Both times he was out—at dusk time—with that young nice gal who’s just come to the school—a quiet gal, and clever.”

  “Well, you yourself said, boy, that the girls should look out. He’s due for marriage and it seems a sound choice. Girls that attract unmarried mother-held men. I’ve found are usually the oversurfaced and under-brained sort.”

  “But why should he be so—discreet? Nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “You’d never understand a shy man. You told everyone we were engaged before I’d said more than I’d consider the possibility.”

  “Oh, but I knew—I’m a diagnostician and a doc doesn’t ask whether a patient’s heart is right. He listens for himself and lets what the patient says just go by!” They laughed with the easy pleasure of shared successful memories. “Still,” continued Doc after a moment, “I am a diagnostician and that’s why I’m consulting with my partner. We’ve got the good of this grand little city at heart, and you know how often I’ve come to you when I saw that first little symptom in some social snarl which made me uneasy.”

  “You’re right,” she answered. “You’ve a hunch, no doubt. But still, even you may be wrong, specially with a sort so unlike yourself.”

  “Well, I’ve put it on record. I’ll keep my eyes open. We’ll see.”

  Chapter V

  Doc was right. Arnoldo was both in a kind of love and a sort of resentful fear—a bad mixture. He and Miss Gayton had met casually. They had both been walking up the canyon looking for the brief, extraordinary outbreak of wild flowers—blossoms springing from the harshest soil and from stems which look like ribs and veins of rock itself and yet with petals of a delicacy no rich garden flower can show. Even the stony-looking succulents and the fierce cactus then produce blooms which in gloss, bloom, and frail gentleness seem to be the outcome of a sudden wish to compensate for the forbidding impression they have made all the rest of the year—as a harsh businessman will suddenly make a gesture of perfect, unstinted generosity.

  She was lonely too. The intense brightness of the place, the open friendliness of everyone, made her feel pale and gauche. She had come out West from New England because of a pre-phthisical condition, but she had one ground for hope—the optimism of the full consumptive was certainly not hers. They met several times. No doubt each went to the same place with a certain growing hope. But they made no rendezvous.

  He made a psychological bridge for her. He, too, was lonely. He felt no wish to make contacts with Aumic civics, and his grand home was turning for him into no home at all, but a sort of vacant prison. But he had come quickly to love this southern wilderness and gradually, with his help, she learned to see its beauty. About this new interest of his he had no wish to be secretive. In f
act, after they had been meeting off and on for a month or so, he remarked to his mother that though the town didn’t seem to have anybody in it who’d be much company—at least for people who cared for the past and its culture—he had run across a newcomer whom he thought she might find quite intelligent.

  “Where is she from?” Irene had somehow suspected that it was a woman.

  The answer, “Somewhere in New England,” which he thought might please, he now saw was also a piece of unwelcome news.

  “I’d rather not see anyone from back East.”

  “But the woman’s quite lonely …” He paused; that too was wrong, more wrong. You can’t use for another the plea of loneliness to awake compassion in a woman who herself is feeling that you are failing in your full duty to make her feel un-lonely.

  Irene saw, however, even more quickly than he, that she was making a mistake in making him feel that she was wanting to be unfriendly. She compelled her voice, though not her tone, to say, “She will be very welcome any time she would like to call,” and then, letting her suspicions explode obliquely, “I expect she is pretty wretched in a miserable, upstart little town like this, a pathetic little piece of pretentious stucco standing in this gaunt desolation!”

  Certainly it would have been wiser to let the matter drop. But Arnoldo had no intention of dropping his new friend. She was a fresh interest for him, different from the girls he had known, and of course very different from the woman to whose company it now seemed he might be confined. He saw, further, that if he did not drop Miss Gayton and if she did not meet Mrs. Heron, then the affair would grow, would have to grow, unpleasantly underhand. He knew he would find that too exhausting to continue. Sometimes he told deliberate lies, quite carefully constructed ones; but he always had to have quite a number of good reasons for taking so much trouble and as the reasons were apt to change, he found it very hard to keep up a consistent mendacity.