Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  He had said they didn’t know anyone.

  She had countered, “Well, why shouldn’t we be in style in the evenings? Why shouldn’t we put back the clock for ourselves and play the part?”

  That was when she began to modify her gowns toward the Empire style. She had not left him alone, had indeed got him so far as to have a full-dress evening suit made, “So that if ever we do give a house-warming costume party you can be in perfect taste.”

  He had fought against it in his usual indecisive, time-gaining way, the way that never settled anything. He hadn’t said definitely “No.” Indeed, one side of his nature liked the fancy as a fancy, a daydream made by magic weavers, not a thing of real cloth and stitches enclosing flesh and blood. He had fenced by saying that there wouldn’t be a tailor who could do the thing properly, and badly done it would be grotesque. Besides, if there were such sartorial skill out here, what would be thought of our wanting period clothes? This was, of course, a mistake; for she had gone off and found, as she usually did, precisely what she wanted. He couldn’t then refuse—at least to let her order the things.

  The tailors were big film-studio costume designers. They took the order quite for granted. Their antiquarian knowledge was far more thorough than his. In fact, they took him in hand as such a routine proposition that he lost his self-consciousness for the time being. He became interested and pleased with his transformation. The man who fitted him was quite a historian of style. He shared Arnoldo’s taste for Regency and Empire, and repeated a remark that Irene and he had often made to each other—that fashion just then really attained to the much-praised but seldom-practiced ideal of streamlining.

  “Perhaps the cleanest, most athletic dress ever designed,” the tailor remarked.

  When the time came for trying on, he remembered, he had been startled a little. But the fitter took it all for granted, helping him into an outfit which, he remarked, made carrying yourself well almost inevitable; “No need for drill if men were fitted with such a uniform.”

  “The James-Lange effect,” said Arnoldo, smiling off his self-consciousness as he saw himself in the long mirrors, front, side, and back; “physical gesture makes emotional response.”

  The tailor smoothed here, pulled there, patted a little elsewhere, and there he stood, his old dream come true, his little present self lost in an anonymous style. He was actually sorry when he found himself back again in the hugger-mugger of contemporary clothes.

  Yet when the suit of ceremony, in its many tissue-papered boxes, arrived home, he found that he could not, in cold blood, put it on. He snatched it out of its wrappings and felt easy only when, with a click, the tall white wardrobe had, shut on it. When Irene had asked for the housewarming date he had always procrastinated. When she suggested that he wear it at least one night at dinner, again he put her off. Finally she had given up asking.

  But now, one afternoon when the dressing bell was about to ring, she made the request she had long been preparing to renew. She was looking at one of her rings and remarked with apparent casualness, “I believe you are right, the ‘strength’ of real jewelry needs the background of finer material than is given by the common textiles of today.”

  He did not pretend to misunderstand the trend of her remark. “You think those links and studs I’m now wearing in the evening are too ‘strong’ for just a tuxedo suit.”

  “Would you just try what they would look like on the suit made to match them?”

  He had already made his decision, his typical decision, to do nothing until she asked, but to be prepared to yield this once more when she did. Well, she had. Without delay, he said, “Very well; it may take me a little longer than usual to change, so I’d better start how.” He left her without looking to see how she took it.

  He went to his room and as methodically as a soldier putting on uniform, he laid out all the garments and began to put them on. The ruffled shirt, true enough, carried the elaborate studs and links easily in its breast-frill and pleated wristbands. He began to draw on the suit itself—so close-fitting that he had to give all his attention to working himself into it, into the muscle-smooth “overalls” that buttoned at the ankle as closely as a glove at the wrist.

  As he rose from where, seated, he had been absorbed in this unfamiliar task, he saw himself in the long pier glass. His Latin pride in bodily display suddenly threw off his acquired, educated caution. “I look like a fencer,” he thought, with athletic delight. He snatched up the small white brocaded-satin waistcoat. It looked like a fancy scarf with its flourish of double lapels and pleating, but when he clipped it round him by its two small rows of gold-headed buttons it felt like the hold of a boxer’s belt.

  “This is man’s dress,” he murmured. “All those slop-clothes are just what they’re called, ‘slacks’!”

  He slipped his feet into the Regency pumps which had been ordered with the suit. The heels raised him a little. He paused a moment, taking a deliberate look at the general effect. The oldest of all lures beckoned to him from the glass as from a pool. He took the coat and, watching himself, he worked his arms into the glove-tight sleeves; brought out the ruffles at the wrist and at the breast; adjusted the high collar and cravat, feeling the close pressure making him hold his head and chin high.

  Yes, he was transformed. Indeed, so complete was the change that in the light of the gilt sconces in that room, in which there was nothing which a man of five generations ago would have found unfamiliar, he was certain that he was seeing at last his real self. Arnoldo of the mean little twentieth-century suitings, of the sorry little tuxedo—what a name!—was cast away as the butterfly discards and forgets its shabby, shriveled cocoon.

  He was ready to go down, but this time, with this ultimate concession made, he did not run away from his reflection, run down to report that he had complied. He stood and stared as at a remarkable stranger. He saw a figure “mounted,” with all its strong points heightened, the wide, high shoulders, the neck held high, the arm-muscles outlined by the skin-fit of the sleeves, the chest broadened by the shirt-frill and the wide folds of the double-breasted waistcoat’s lapels. And then, stopping well short of the waist, the clean, sharp, close line of the vest, below which was nothing but the long sweep of the glossy black legs down to the gleam of the patent-leather foot. The figure looked tall, “ready,” commanding.

  He was sure of himself, with a sudden kind of defiance. Something in him had suddenly been compressed, brought to a point, and hardened. “I feel,” he said aloud, “as though more than a century has fallen off me, thrown off with those old crumpled things.” He turned with the lightness of a runner and swung down the curving staircase which swept into the hall.

  She was there waiting for dinner to be announced. He was aware of her, standing with her back against the evening light looking up toward him. The level sun shone in his face. He paused on the lower step feeling like an actor, in the full floodlights, taking a call from the house that he cannot see but knows is scanning his entire pose. Then he stepped down and, like a dancing master, swept her a bow.

  She broke into laughter that was positively gay.

  “At last the house has found its spirit,” she exclaimed. “I knew it; as soon as you would ‘suit’ it, it would come alive. It’s Galatea to your Pygmalion. This isn’t any longer antiquarian,” she waved her hand to the stately room and corridors opening from it; “it’s living art.”

  He took her hand and turned her round. “And you an Ingres,” he told her.

  She took his arm as the leaves of the big mahogany doors opened and, bowing to them, the colored servant said, “Dinner is served.”

  The mood lasted well toward the close of the meal. As he sat down he found that he had to adjust himself to the elegant constriction of his dress. There was no lounging possible in clothes every garment of which was cut, sewn, and drawn to make the figure they wound carry itself at full pitch. Eating itself became an art in negotiated elegances. To have a frilled breast a couple of inches b
eyond one’s chin, to have one’s chin held unbendingly erect by one’s collar, one’s arm so taut-sleeved as to be hardly free to move beyond a right angle—this was all very amusing for a while. It was even amusingly disconcerting to find that if eating was an art which might be mastered with care—a feeling that revived one’s first memories of sitting at table girt under the chin with a big napkin and trying to wield a full-sized fork—digestion in this stimulating constriction might be even slower and perhaps have to wait.

  The sunlight was still streaming through the room and made the whole air of the place like some golden water in which the candles were only reflections of sunbeams striking a surface above their heads. She had to echo aloud her satisfaction, breaking the silence with her modern voice. “At last my dream is true. We have escaped what outside that window is called the present. I wish we could stay forever like this. This is the real—not that tired-out muddle we have left behind us.”

  He looked down at himself. Feeling and form, even hearing and smell, urged the truth of what she was saying. He saw himself encased in a complete reconstruction of the past. It had literally wrapped itself round him, a skin-fitting shirt of Nessus. It made his very limbs and figure conform to its impress and binding. But was that the truth about this change? It did not wrap him up in a disguise; rather, it had stripped off the clumsy swathes of the present, which like a vine had overwhelmed him, and now this clean uniform had him exposed in his true physical character. This was his real appearance. And what he saw, touch, at every surface of his frame, confirmed.

  Which was real comfort, the crumpled “weeds” he had discarded upstairs, or this costume? He felt the tonic constriction over every inch of his physique. From the support of the shoe on his foot to the hold of the suit on his figure, every breath made him conscious of this muscular, second skin’s demand that he hold himself aware of himself, aware of the presentation of his full self which the suit was cut to give. At each breath he could feel the gentle rasp of the high starched collar on his jaw, the brush of the coat’s velvet collar against the nape of his neck, the rustle of the pleated shirt front, the creak of the silk of the tight-fastened vest, even the rustle, almost an inaudible squeak, more a sensation where sound and feeling seemed to be merged, as the strong black satin of the “overalls,” as he crossed and stretched his legs, gripped and then skidded. At each breath he could smell the starched linen, the brocaded white silk, the black, dull-lustered satin.

  There was nothing of the old individual about him. He had stripped off the poor little persona, the sorry little mask which was all that he had ever been. He had escaped into a complete impersonality—into a character, apparently full-grown but with no history, no record, without a crease or wrinkle of past accidents and events to spoil the present’s perfect finish or to tell of any experience save this moment’s. He, the old Arnoldo peeping out, he knew neither his appearance, his sound—he was certain his step must have altered—his scent. “Even in the dark,” he reflected, “I shouldn’t know myself, for I shouldn’t know these new clean scents as mine.”

  The word made him think, “Thrown off the scent. Perhaps I’ve found sanctuary from the Hounds of Time by doubling back.” He raised his eyes which had been inventorying his metamorphosed body. The servants had left the room. The sun had gone. It was deep dusk. The sense of his being transformed became deeper. He began to feel a new sense of reality—this alone was real, there never had been any other life, any other moment. He alone was real; everything else was shadow, a mist in the middle of which he was precipitated, hard, timeless. The house, the woman in the dusk at the other side of the table, screened from him by the glow of the candles, they were simply the pale waxen mold which melts away when the bronze is cast. Again he caught the glitter of the prism in one of his jewels.

  “Appearance is everything,” he urged himself. “You can’t feel radiations, yet they can make and unmake the solid flesh which seems so stubborn and hard to dispose of.” He smiled. His hand was instinctively stroking the close fit of the “overall” of his right leg under the table, and then it strayed upward till he sensed it touch the tight satin of his waistcoat. He felt the skin of his fingertips’ cuticle, the edges of his nail, catch and rasp on the fine surface. He raised his hand absently to see if there was any visible roughness of the skin. In the light of the candles he saw his hand, his familiar hand protruding with its welted veins, its numberless fine creases and innumerable hairs each rising from its little mount of gooseflesh, his workaday hand, rising like the hand of a corpse out of a smooth, silken-surfaced pool in which it had been drowned, like the hand of a ghost thrust through a neat, newly-papered wall. It absorbed his attention, this hand swelling like a strange, coarse fruit from the stem of his close black silk sleeve and the pleated-lawn ruffle from which it emerged. He turned it curiously in the light, feeling his body strapped and folded in the suit of another century and only this one limb, this extremity of a limb, able to move, to turn, to beckon him. He saw the fingers, those queer gnarled fingers with their knuckles and nails, wag almost of themselves. He followed, as a captive may the movements of an exploring spider up near the grill of his cage, the tentative stretchings of these small barbed limbs. He looked where they were pointing. Just over the top of the longest he saw the flowers in the middle of the table. The finger seemed pointing them out. He had never looked at them till that moment since he had sat down, so engrossed had he been in his feelings of his body in its close-sewn sack. Now he saw them. They rose like neat, fresh little rockets out of a low silver bowl and reflected their demure nodding heads like small, red-eyed, white-coifed nuns. Their curious contrasting coarse scent came to him at the same time—and then the name—the pheasant-eyed narcissi.

  At that moment he heard her voice speaking to him.

  “The candles are in my eyes. Won’t you stand out here so that I can see you? You have made the whole thing come true. You’ve suddenly precipitated into a living whole all we have collected around.”

  He stepped out. He had begun to rise before she spoke. He was quite giddy with conflict. His shyness and his defiance of it had made him drink more than usual. His neck throbbed in its close-wound stock. He felt suffocated. At one moment he seemed to have no body, the dress seemed a hard enamel shell completely hollow within; at another he felt that he had swollen until every vein would burst. But he would go through with it. He had decided to dress the part and he could play it, or the dress would play it for him. He bowed to her, his hand to his breast. But as he bent over it he saw it again, his human, contemporary hand. The almost sudine smell of the narcissi caught his breath again. He raised his eyes. She was looking at him—old, tired, hungry. The suit was not made for kneeling, but with a clumsy effort he was on his knees, though they would scarcely bend in their constriction.

  “Get up,” she breathed heavily. “You don’t have to plead. You know that; I’m satisfied at last. I am content, content to see. You must, you will keep up the appearance—that’s all, that’s everything. I’ve recreated you—your spiritual mother. I’ve brought you to birth in this womb of the period to which you belong. Now stand—you must realize. You’re alive at last. Every evening you may, you will so come to life and at last really live. You can have no other life. And I’ll live by looking at you.”

  He rose with what was literally a staggering effort to his feet. She spoke with such conviction that his weak physical nature, which was indeed the softened wax already molded by the cast she had pressed him into, obeyed again its matrix. He looked down. There was a slight bloom of dust on his knee; automatically he flicked it off with his handkerchief.

  “It’s tiring,” he heard her say. “Thank you again for being so kind. Don’t wait for me. Don’t stay dressed if it’s uncomfortable.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and left her. In his room he undressed rapidly, but carefully put away the suit before he tumbled into bed and slept.

  Chapter VII

  He woke late. Yet she did not appe
ar at breakfast. After breakfast he went for a long hike, taking his lunch with him. On entering the house he went quietly upstairs to his room and lay some time in a hot bath. The little dressing bell sounded while he was still slowly drying himself in a mood of physical ease. He came into his room and saw his figure in the glass. “She shall have full satisfaction,” he thought. “I will go just as far as I resolved.” This was still his defense. He had been premature; nothing really need be decided as yet, and certainly nothing must be decided simply because of a sudden mood. He took out the costume and methodically donned it.

  “My livery,” he commented. “Soon I’ll find that I’d be lost without it, ‘not know my place,’ as they used to say of ill-trained servants.”

  But she had won, won so well that he was once again a willing captive, his “habit” had already begun to grow on him and become at least the possibility of a second nature. Indeed, as he dressed he was actually looking for any loophole through which the present might still get at him and, if not pull him back, at least give him a pull that might throw him again off the balance he was determined to adopt. He found it. As he dressed he kept noticing his hand again, that dark-skinned, twist-sinewed, hard-working hand. Indeed, it stuck out, denying all the effort that the rest of his figure might make.

  “The hand makes and unmakes,” he reflected. “It’s worse than Lady Macbeth’s case. My whole hand is the damned spot, both of them, old, rusted ground-grapples, holding me fast so that I can’t really get away.” He stood there a moment looking at himself, not resentfully but with a certain helplessness. And always his eyes ended up at those “ends” which hung down.

  “The Devil,” he thought of the old saying, “can change everything but his feet.” He looked at his feet, well shaped, shod and poised in their Regency pumps. “I can change everything but my hands, and they ring a knell which calls me back to the here and now. However much this fancy dress may try to magic-carpet me out of the time I’m caught in, these grasping hands will pull me back.”