Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  Suddenly he snatched at a small drawer. In it lay a small sandalwood box. He remembered what was inside: a memory of when, as a gawky boy, still a boy but with the big feet and hands of manhood already sprouted, he had gone in New York to dancing classes given by an old, stiff, black-alpaca-gowned lady who taught girls and boys “proper ladylike dancing.” The boys had to wear black suits and don white gloves to dance with the young ladies. Yes, the gloves lay there, fine kid gloves, smooth and white as china.

  He slipped one on, remembering how tight they had been. He worked it on; the feel of the grip of the smooth, chalked inner skin on his fingers recalled his shyness when, in his first evening suit, he had put these on before asking for a dance. Now he saw his present dress, beside which that evening suit was as sloppy as a street-boy’s jerkin. The other glove was now on. He felt the slide of one kid-coated hand on the other. He nipped to the buttons at the wrist, tucking the ends under the wrist-ruffles. Yes, his hands had vanished. The last protuberances of the present had been smoothed away, as smooth as a drift of snow over old twigs. He turned and with a rippling step swung down the wide, smooth treads of the great staircase, to dinner.

  If she noticed, she was too cautious to remark. As he sat, he felt his new, smooth hand, without pluck or rasp, move over the close folds of his white silk vest. He raised his hand to the light, level with the candles. Their light gleamed on fingers and hand-back as smooth, featureless, and glossed as dead-white marble. The very pose of the concealed hand was controlled and fixed by the transforming skin that held it. He flexed the fingers slightly and found that they would take only a sculpturesque position.

  “Not a period of the clenched fist,” he smiled to himself, “but of the easy, open, untense gesture, openly untense because held with skilled stitching, buttoning, and lacing in an attitude of openness. After all, ruggedness is often only erosion; the diamond is the hardest of all, and yet it is the smoothest, and so open that you can see every aspect of it.”

  He touched his face with those fingers, which were now no longer his specific wrinkle-fingerprinted identities, but just part of a universal style, any sophisticated hand. Yes, that was so, for already the finger that touched his face was the smooth, urbane member, sveltely swallowed up by the costume. It was his face which to that touch was rough, his face which, last night, had been smooth to his rough fingers—yes, he must shave before dinner. His fingers strayed to his lip; even that felt rough. As he took them away he saw that even the nails hardly showed through the kidskin tips, only a hint, as a sculptor, not wanting to be quite untrue to nature, but feeling that nails were animal, only hinted at them, as he carved the final curve of the finger ends. His eye lengthened its focus, saw the flowers. They were hyacinths today, a classical flower which though they had that almost ammoniac scent had their almost artificial waxen-white ringlets of blossom. Then he saw beyond, through the flowers and the candlelight, his mother’s face. She was regarding him with a gratified smile and as he watched, blew him a kiss.

  “In return for yours,” she said.

  He remembered what he had been doing—lost in himself, that gesture of the fingers to the mouth; of course, to her watching, it was a signal of surrender, a blown kiss.

  “Well, I have surrendered,” he thought, drawing himself up and feeling the cunningly fitted captivity all over him at every muscle-move. And this time he raised his glass to her, holding its fluted stem with thumb and finger, then put it down and deliberately blew her a kiss.

  She felt that she had carried another position. He was all but encircled. But she was a wary enough strategist to know that it is just at that point that the foe, driven in, but not yet prepared to face the fact of unconditional surrender, may make a desperate sortie. Her ancestral experience was not misadvising her.

  He stuck to his costuming. He pretended to himself that he was still acting his part, but he knew almost to the threshold of consciousness that his part was acting, making, creating him. There was very often a sudden jar as he passed from one part to the other, from his day life to his evening life. But week by week, the original man, or weakling, was losing out to the new edition of a female Frankenstein’s invention—not a mechanical monster, not merely a tailor’s dummy, but a living mask created out of his body, his dreams, and her will and her dreams.

  A strange composite growth it was, most nearly related to those “split personalities”—such as the famous “Sally Beauchamp”—which, rising out of some level of consciousness which the original personality was too weak to employ or repress, finally become the person who owns the body. Still he would ask himself at those moments of jar, between what were becoming too separate states of consciousness, “How long will it be necessary to keep this up?”

  These moments, of course, were in the evening when the time to change was drawing near. At night he went straight to bed and woke the next morning without conflict. And always to those dusk doubts he would reply, “A little longer. I must be sure, quite sure that I have done everything quite rationally, yielding to her irrational whim. Then when I decide to break the issue will be clear.” The shift between the conscious and the subconscious is, however, not a steady flow. We change, but not by unbroken development. There are tides which appear as sudden reactions even to courses which we have long accepted. Then, if someone is directing us, he or she will strike at a certain moment, cutting off the channel through which the backwash enters and disturbs the established flow.

  Once or twice she had seen him, when they were sitting about waiting for the dressing bell, fingering his day clothes and fidgeting.

  Then one day he broke out, “I’ll go on doing it. But isn’t it rather spiderish to want to watch me in sheeny, tight-woven gossamer while you gloat at my helplessness, my very eyes turned in upon myself?” Then, becoming excited with his own words, “I’m drowning in a mirror: self-murdered by my own reflection! What a subtle suicide—to be swallowed by oneself! If I may not say what I am, at least let me call you Echo!”

  He had let his protest turn into a play on words. They both laughed a little at the weak classical jest.

  But she knew there was trouble to be met and she was quick and ready under her smile.

  “You know, the real trouble is in the changing,” she remarked judicially, as though they were discussing someone else’s indigestion. “You’re happy; you have never been happier than now when you’re free to fit and be in your right age. It is the constant relapsing into the sordid things of today that makes you uncertain. This house, its style and fashion we know is the sensible, rational” (she did not say “elegant”) “age. Why not stay in it? Then you won’t have the disturbance of returning.”

  “But how can I?”

  Her reply was carefully prepared: “I know you are spending too much time in the house with me. I do want you to be out more.” He listened. “This is riding country.” (She had almost said “not walking.”) “It’s safer and healthier.”

  He had been fond of riding, but till now she had shown no wish to give him a horse.

  “I’d love to,” he said.

  “Good. And for that you can have riding clothes which are so sensible that even the riding clothes of today haven’t degenerated much from them. And you’ll be all day in your right style—there won’t be any break.”

  She was right.

  “Does she,” he wondered, “know me better than I know myself?” “Or,” he questioned himself, as they drove up to the big city to the historically informed costume-tailor, “is she recreating me? When the whole of my life and person, every moment and every square inch, has been varnished over so that nothing of the old-modern can show, then I’ll be like Achilles if he had been dipped all over; there’ll not be a spot where the dart of today can enter.”

  Somehow likening himself to an invulnerable hero made him feel more willing to hand himself over, a body to be dressed. Certainly her alliance with the clothes-artist was now so firm that they talked openly before him of the arrangem
ents they had already made. Colored plates of costumes when everyone rode were ready to hand. The two directors chose and he did not cavil at a charmingly severe design. In a week it was brought alive in actual materials, in another week it was delivered. She had already bought for him a chestnut mare which, with its new harness, looked so handsome that he felt half his uneasiness about the new day dress, melt away. Such a mount needed to be ridden in style.

  His last hesitation was overcome by another gift, of another companion. The day the suit arrived, there came to the house someone to look after his clothes. He was to have a valet. The staff till then had been two colored male servants who waited at table and a complement of females. They dressed the part in their quiet liveries. But Joe, the new valet, was not merely period background; he was more of a tutor in style, so enthusiastic was he that Arnoldo should always be perfectly turned out. There was something about the mixture of friendly impudence and willing servility in his manner, the feeling that it was all a huge joke and yet somehow a piece of acting wherein one must not laugh in the presence of the audience, that created the precise atmosphere of pretense—and yet of effective three-dimensional pretense—needed to carry out the strange charade.

  After a couple of rides Arnoldo felt quite at home in his period day-clothes. A new large mirror had appeared at the end of the corridor leading from his room to the stair-head. When he asked Irene about it, she said that the end of the passage was dark and the mirror made it lighter. Anyone coming down the corridor had a full-length view of himself for thirty feet or more. It was a clever move: he found it impossible not to watch himself as he came out dressed, no longer an evening figure, a kind of wraith visible only at dusk, but in the broad daylight, dressed for outdoor exercise. The house was epitomized and linked with the open air by the white-and-fawn figure that strode toward him, the figure of a hunting squire, a figure and character inside which he could safely forget that he had ever had any other appearance, any other standards.

  The riding, too, soothed him. Out of that still house of mirrors where he could not help watching himself—to see the anxious eyes peering through the vizor—and knowing that she watched him, away from it and with the large, inhuman country moving around him and the big, unconscious animal moving under him, he could, if not forget himself, be far less self-conscious.

  One day, however, his ride brought him back to his old self with sudden shock. He was cantering down a trail and, rounding a clump of trees, saw unmistakably Miss Gayton walking ahead. He could turn, but she must have heard horse’s hooves and would glance back and see him, in his stylized riding clothes, running away. He would see it through. As he caught up with her, she turned, showed no surprise, and as he drew rein, patted the horse’s neck. Dumb animals have a fourth use, beside being pets, slaves, and food-victims—they are often admirable bridges, tactful hyphens between two of the creatures of speech temporarily deprived of the use of their tongues. He swung easily out of the saddle, the advantage of being able to act the horseman almost compensating for the disconcertingness of appearing suddenly as a fashion-plate rider out of another century. They walked side by side for a while, trying to chat about natural-history subjects as though they had been meeting as usual. But he was unable to get rid of his self-consciousness. He felt his polished boots with their wedge-heels slip and stumble on the ground. His mother was right: this was not walking country. The horse, too, pulled at the reins and dragged him.

  He was grateful to her when she remarked, “Your lovely mare wants to finish her gallop. We poor little creatures who totter on our hind legs are no company for the speed-makers.”

  “The mare does need exercise,” he allowed, springing into the saddle. “She keeps me pretty busy,” he called out, as a kind of parting excuse, as he bowed to her and cantered off.

  He was thankful that she had let him go, sent him off. True, for the very first second when he had recognized her, as he was in self-forgetful ease then, he had felt real pleasure. But the moment after, he had remembered what he was, what he had become. He had accepted a part to play, had allowed himself to become an actor in an act in which she had no part. She could not come up on that stage without bringing the performance to a standstill. You had to choose, and, surely after sufficient consideration, after weighing which of the two women he ought to please, he had chosen. Any shilly-shallying now, any hesitant return, or even daydreaming of the past, even for an odd half-hour out in the woods, could only be fatal. It would bring back all the old conflicts and miseries and quarrels and almost hatreds. No; he had chosen his bed; it was certainly the most comfortable he could have picked. On any other he would simply be restless, longing to get back to the down pillows and silk sheets. No; he would lie on it and, if he kept quiet, soon he would fall asleep; soon he would forget there was any other life but this.

  Chapter VIII

  Certainly their life appeared stabilized, arrested. A routine, as daily identical as a recurring decimal, seemed to have established itself. The colored servants aided the curious conspiracy. Like children, they loved the fantasy and supported it in a number of ingeniously childish ways. They liked their liveries and yet understood that in a way they were taking part in a secret of which the town should be kept in ignorance, or at least not be fully informed. They felt a loyalty to the queer couple who had taken them out of the “labor market” and put them back into the world of personal relations. They began to play, with the enthusiasm of born actors, the part of retainers.

  This was Mrs. Heron’s final triumph. Arnoldo was completely surrounded—more, she had carried him off his feet. He now no longer had any purchase on, no contact with the contemporary world which went its way outside the grounds of Plantation House, beyond the grill of its tall gates. The house was now not merely a pure period piece, a museum.

  She had said when she was beginning her attack on him to reduce his stubborn and discordant appearance to his surroundings, “We can’t be caretakers of domestic decrepitude. However well the face is lifted, the eyes, the old eyes, give away the real age—and we are the eyes of this lovely oval. If we don’t come up to its standards we ourselves would only become shadowy ancients. But if we live up to the house we shall share in its rejuvenation, for its style is certainly more vital than ours today, and the style you live is the most powerful autosuggestion, either for health or decrepitude.”

  She believed what she said and so did her staff. For in the period house were moving period servants, living with delighted conviction the life the house evoked. There could be no doubt that they believed such a way of living to be sensible, pleasant, rational; and if they did so and his mother believed it to be, why should he not consent—how could he continue to demur, to hold out? He still sometimes felt a sudden, unexpected shudder as he would, approaching it, catch sight of the stately house emerging from the trees, a congealed dream.

  “The beautiful sarcophagus,” he would say over to himself; “the eater of flesh,” he translated the stately Greek word for coffin into its real terms. “The whited sepulcher, in which I have been persuaded to inter myself.” Then he would add, “These are my cerements”—with a histrionic self-pity he would look down at his severely artistic clothes or study a pose of himself in one of the long mirrors, as though a Romney or a Lawrence had come to life. So, adding a romantic overtone to his classic style, he was able still to have a double life, without his self-pity ever stirring him to revolt.

  He knew that all these phrases he said over to himself were mere phrases, not equal in worth to one gilt button on his clothes. The words were the theatrical things, far more than the perfectly consistent construction of the past in which his “mother” had framed and suited him. He had only to think of the actual life outside the gates—the shoddy, sloppy life of the contemporary world that called itself actual but had not a touch of real originality—its decayed convention of dress, of manners, of romance, its drugstore instead of the coffeehouse, its cars instead of blood-stock, its cinema instead of th
e salon, its radio instead of conversation. Why, out there, there was nothing but starved, tattered remnants, decayed fragments of the age and life which he was actually living. The vigor and flower of that great century of reason, good sense, good taste—which had given rise to the United States as one of its “potting out” experiments—that splendid tradition was now in decay everywhere but in this one house. Perhaps nowhere else in the whole world was this splendid convention still in bloom. Maybe he was doing his duty, like a uniformed sentry keeping a watch. Anyhow, was he not making a center, a pivot for the life of some half-dozen persons who, if he failed to play his part, could not live their lives as it was clear they were happier living than they could otherwise be? Yes, he would check any revolt in himself with the sense that he was sacrificing himself that others might be happy.

  Of course it did not stay still. That is the nature of true life. A perfect restoration keeps as it is, until once more it goes back to the formless material out of which it was first shaped. But life goes on. Life is far more destructive than death. The life they were living was shaping them. If they had revived the life of five generations ago then it must start once again developing itself. It might not lead again to the twentieth century but it must develop into something further. As usual, it was Irene who went ahead and he followed—after a hesitation.

  When first Mrs. Heron said in front of him, “When the master wants his coffee,” he had started and felt that this was going too far. But when he received no support, when it was quite obvious that the staff felt that this was quite right, he began to feel that it was he who was wrong. Even strong-minded missionaries have left it on record that when they had lived for a number of years alone among African Negroes who had never mixed with whites and who therefore still took for granted that the world was alive and not dead, the solitary modern mind began to weaken in its unsupported convictions and it soon became natural to assume that events were caused always, not by blind laws but by conscious, if unseen, intelligences. Arnoldo was anything but a strong-minded missionary. So, soon, when Joe the valet slipped in a “Massa” behind the short, abrupt “Yes,” he felt it sounded amusing enough to be let pass.