Murder by Reflection (15 page)

On the day they had settled, a day on which she had no school, he dressed with his old enthusiasm, announced that he would take a long ride, probably call in at Kermit's on his way back, and they might expect him in the evening. He rode off as though to go up into the hills. Then, when he had reached the abandoned olive grove, he followed her instructions and made a long detour through scrub-oak country and little glades over which occasional winter flood-rains had spread fans of gravel. At last he recognized the turning point she had told him to look for, a new concrete culvert meant to channel the cloudburst rains. Following this, he came to a small arch which spanned it. There was visible a line which evidently marked the limit of some real-estate layout. A canter along this through a glade of oaks led to where, at right angles, a small road ended. Yes, there was the house she had described as hers. He dismounted and led his horse to the fence which made her back yard a small garden hemmed off from the trees.

She was waiting for him, gave the mare a couple of apples as he fastened the bridle to the fence gate, and led the way into the house.

“No one would come out as far as this,” she said. “Even the crank who built it, left it. I thought I was lucky—now I know I was.” Then, rather quickly, “Even the mail is delivered to a box well down this road and after it's turned off toward the town.”

It was, he thought, one of the happiest days he could remember. They were secret, secure, sufficient. True, the little house was a queer, cramped setting for their type of romance—they who were to be the expression of a spacious elegance, but, at least for the present, they were enough in themselves. And it was not too solemn; indeed, it was great fun.

“You mustn't disarrange my cravat, or let a drop of coffee fall on my buckskins, or even leave powder on the velvet collar or fingerprints on the gilt of my buttons. Joe, my mirror-valet, would detect these little blurs on my bandbox brightness and know that his work of art had been tampered with!”

They laughed. Time changed softly into top-gear. He told her not only of what he thought a life of style should be, how art should and could be present in every detail. He spoke of his scientific research.

“I'd like to help.”

“Well, I don't see why we shouldn't do part of the work here.”

It made the affair less specifically an “affair” if they shared work, and scientific work, as well as art. He had not ceased to need as many reasons as possible for anything he did.

“I'm checking up on the radiation output of certain new tubes. It would help quite a lot if you could do part of the work that's just record-keeping. They'll run on the house current.”

He told her of his philosophy, or that collection of milling thoughts which, as they circled in his mind, gave him the impression of having thought things out or around.

“We're all looking for some complete expression,” he said, “but it can't be found in a moment. It's a matter of refining down—of streamlining, in fact,” he said, looking down at his clean-cut garments. “Gradually, as we cut back and pare away, we find what we are looking for—the essential, structural, salient lines.”

“Finally
the
line,” she said.

He was pleased that she had followed him, but did not want her to go too far.

“We must have touch and tact and feel our way and know where to stop.”

Again she was intelligently willing to take his point and lead: “Someone told me,” she recalled, “that there were occasions when they had to take away a marble from Rodin. He would have gone on carving, graving, polishing until nothing would have been left.”

They laughed again.

Indeed, it was so easy a day that even when they were discussing his theories of life, most of their conversation was light, hardly needing to be spoken; most of the sentences could be “smiled off.”

He kept, though, a certain sense that time was passing, which is perhaps easy for a person who never wholly lives in one world, or in one present. He was not going to spoil his day by having to hurry home, arrive late, not have time to relax but feel during dinner nervous and suspicious of Irene's suspicion. Always his chief pleasure had been recollection: the actual moment was too tense, too full of irrelevant detail which, he could not compose around the central experience. He was determined to avoid having the bouquet of this event spoiled by having to “bolt” it. He told her well in advance, arranged to send her a typewritten note about the next meeting, brushed himself down, and went out of the house.

The mare was a little restless and, when he was mounted, showed her impatience by a good deal of prancing. Even when, to give her more room, he wheeled her round and let her come out into the roadway from the woodland edge where she might have knocked him against a tree, she flung up her heels a bit and finally, out of high spirits, neighed loudly. As he circled around on her before she broke off into a gallop toward the woodland, he had had a glimpse right down the road to where it turned to join the thoroughfare. In that moment he saw, passing across the opening, a small worn car. It was some distance away but there was no doubt of it, and looking out of it, up in their direction, was Doc the mailman.

“What silly luck!” he said to himself angrily. “And if I can recognize him inside that weatherbeaten car, how much will he have recognized me, mounted and fitted as I am! And he'll know what I'm doing up in this corner! Damn!”

He gave the horse a sharp cut and galloped off, only waving to Marian.

Yet as he sat at dinner in the ultra-civilized setting where he was placed as master, it seemed silly to drop an affair simply because a gossip might report on it. On the other hand, why spoil everything just because of wanting a little more? He could meet her in the olive grove; that was safe. He revolved the cut-glass stem of his wine glass between his thumb and finger, feeling the sharp prism edges blunted to his touch through the kidskin, watching the red reflection of the wine thrown like a bloodstain on the white of his hand.

Suddenly he thought of a way out. Why had it not occurred to him before? He became bright and entertaining. Mrs. Heron was happy. It was a delightful evening. He asked her to play—when had he last done that?—turned over her music, himself volunteered to sing a ballad; he hardly ever sang, though he had that easy kind of Italian tenor which she liked. She had wanted him to have lessons. But always his self-consciousness about being managed, educated, “produced,” together with his laziness, gave him sufficient reasons for refusing. This evening, though, she was as happy as he had been that afternoon. He sat up with her, asked her to take a stroll out in the moonlight along the formal garden. When they came in she was tired.

“We've had a lovely time,” she said. “I feel you are content.”

He took her to her door, kissed her good-night, and shut it softly.

The house was quiet. The servants had already gone to their quarters, out beyond the stables. He switched off the lights. The moon was illuminating the house. In his room he took from the wardrobe a long, dark purple cloak, with a high collar, designed to go with these evening clothes. He pulled on a pair of supple-leather top-boots and went quietly down the stairs. In the hall as he passed between the two high, opposed mirrors he caught a glance right and left of a dim army of cloaked figures passing rapidly across the long, shadowy cloister out into an invisible area that lay ahead of them.

It was not far, if you went the direct way by the road along the edge of the town, and anyhow, walking at night, free, alone, and going to meet one's confidante, it was light going. He was amused when he thought of how he would give her a pleasant surprise. The night was warm and heavily scented by the orange groves. He threw back his cloak. He could see himself striding along. The moon showed, walking beside him, the shadow-figure of an “elegant” of more than a century ago.

“What is time?” he thought; “isn't the present whatever we choose to make it, if we are sufficiently independent and don't let others choose for us?”

Arriving at her house he was going around to tap at the bedroom window. There was no need.

From the shadow of the porch he heard her say, in little more than a whisper, “This is the dream-real!”

He was glad she wasn't frightened or excited.

His pleasure was complete when she added, “Yes, stay where you are for a while. The moonlight is perfect. You don't look flesh and blood, at least of this muddy age.”

After a while he came into the shadow and sat down on her bed. She stroked the ruffles on his wrists and laughed softly as she touched the smooth kidskin of his hands. She let her fingers just outline his face and hair.

“That is a perfect theme for a dream,” she said quietly, dismissing him. “Come some other night.”

It was a queer romance, or rather it was that paradox, true romance, the fancy that banishes all actuality, that deliberately chooses reflection instead of reality.

In this way he visited her a number of times. Sometimes they were completely silent from the beginning of the visit to the end. Once he persuaded her to get up, dress, and walk with him. The late waning moon was up. Its decayed mirror, distorted and stained, yet with its silver light of illusion, lit them as they promenaded.

“We might be on one of the Parades in Bath five generations ago,” he remarked. “We have just seen at the Theatre Royal that last amusing comedy of Mr. Sheridan's. That clever young woman whom you spoke to in the street when you had both been buying ribbons and were on the way to the Pump Room—take care, she may put you into one of her novels one day; she has come from Winchester with her family; they are called Austen.”

“Don't be too lost in the past,” she pleaded. “We have as much right as they to use the form they used and be ourselves in it.”

That turned him to talk of his feelings for art, science, his philosophy, his religion.

“It's helped me, this strange life,” he said. “For the real struggle is not to know that the common-sense contemporary muddle isn't real—that's so easy to prove. The thing, and it is the only thing that matters, is to
feel
that to be true. Then you are free. I'm nearly free. Because, by making use of an appearance which all people now living say has disappeared, is no longer real—an appearance far more rational than the present rag-bag appearance—I have lifted myself out of the present illusion.”

“You can pull yourself out of water by climbing on ice,” she agreed.

“Rather a cold metaphor,” he said.

And they were, they both found, feeling chilly. A small cool draft of air was moving around them. Their sparse dress seemed to cling dankly to their limbs.

She whispered, almost to herself, “Dear dead women with such hair, too”—hers had never been abundant—“What's become of all the gold …?”

He knew the lines and concluded for them both, “I feel chilly and grown old.”

“You must get home,” she said.

He fetched his cloak, bent over her hand, and hurried off to his bed.

On almost the next visit he brought from under his cloak a small parcel.

“This is one of the tubes I was telling you about,” he said as soon as they met. “I want to measure their radiating power. They are remarkable in several ways. There's a good deal still to be found out about them, I believe. I'll show you how to fix it.”

They went inside. He stripped off his gloves, made a connection with some flex, and plugged the line into a light socket.

“Now turn out the light.”

She switched it off. Their eyes took a few moments to become accustomed. Then they saw the place lit with the peculiar eerie violet-green of the vacuum tube, and saw themselves.

“The moonlight, beside this, is gay and warming,” she said.

“Well, you'd expect to look ghostly, lit by rays most of which go through your flesh as through a dirty mist and only recognize your skeleton as having any real profile,” he smiled.

The effect was certainly gruesome. The living teeth fluoresced, dimly phosphorescent in the cavity of his mouth; the dead ones—he had a couple in fronts—appeared black. The whites of his eyes also shone a dirty, dense yellow, while his face seemed a faint luminous green with shadows of heavy mauve. His hands, too, looked like the tentacles of a submarine creature with green jelly-looking flesh, the hairs on the backs like a thin black moss, the nails yellowish claws.

“You look like a wraith—as though a living smoke with smoldering sparks in it were possessing a costume left in a deserted house.”

“Don't be romantic. Switch on the light. This isn't art; it's science.” The light clicked on. “Now I'll show you how to make the readings. You can leave it on when you are out. If it runs your current bill up, let me know. I'll pay the extra.”

He busied himself for some time making the fixture and showing her what he wished her to do. Almost as soon as he had arranged it as he wished, he said goodnight and left.

The work with these new tubes really intrigued him. The more he checked up on them, the more he felt that their properties were not yet fully understood. Several times he said to himself, “I believe I may add something to the world's knowledge along this line.” He was pleased with himself: “Now that I am really free of the present, perhaps I shall contribute something to the future.” He began to think of himself as a famous discoverer, one whom the world would want to know—more eccentric than Edison; more like Cavendish, Cav endish the British aristocrat—immensely wealthy and of the right, the Regency period, living a recluse in his stately house, making his strikingly original discoveries in science and hardly caring to preserve the results, hardly caring if a soul knew; or Tycho Brahe, the great Scandinavian astronomer, who now has the largest crater in the moon named after him as his monument—what a monument, a sheer circular wall two miles high, embracing the area of a small state within its bounds—Tycho Brahe, who used to dress in his most splendid suits in order, properly attired, “to give court to the stars.” This picture of himself as the stylist and the researcher satisfied him more than any notion he had as yet had of himself—the man lost in discovery and yet, out of the corner of his eye, a deeper side of him engrossed in watching the picture of himself as the absorbed, stately, stylish genius.