Murder by Reflection

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Murder by Reflection

H. F. Heard

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

TO

C
HRISTOPHER
W
OOD

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, impatient 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.