Murder by Reflection (2 page)

Miss Irene Ibis—he had always wanted an opportunity to see inside her house. This little “literary sub-verb of New York,” as he called it, was largely controlled by this large lady, with the large, the handsome mansion and the large, the magnificent collection it housed. He had often heard of her silver and had sometimes seen pieces of it at loan exhibitions. But that house was not easy to enter. Even when his aunt had gradually risen until she was a member of the Fine Arts Society, it was made quite clear to her that she was a member of so select an association that its meetings were almost under the seal of sacred secrecy. The idea of introducing a poor relation to a fellow member's house just on the strength of the fact that he happened to like fine art—well, that, of course, would only show that the Committee itself had made an error of taste in electing you. And when you recalled how long they had considered before deciding to take you “on approbation” you could hardly put them in such an awkward position. Nor, if you did, was there any doubt that they could retrieve the error you had so tactlessly pointed out, and retrieve it wholly at your expense. Aunt Gabrielle's caution, her patient, circumspect strategy was therefore not to be caviled at. Now it had carried its point. He was invited to go to tea and view the collection.

Chapter II

Irene Ibis at first had fought against her name. She first became aware of it at school. “I.I.,” they called her. “You bet, I-bis” was one of the worst of the waggish playings on her patronymic and it stuck. She was foolish enough to show that she minded. It nearly wrecked her adolescence. But just as she was subconsciously considering whether a nervous breakdown wasn't the stylish way out of the high-school situation, her father broke instead—in health not in finance. She was able to give up her time to nursing him, or, rather, to superintending his nurses, as her mother was already dead. And when after a few years of easy invalidism—at least for his attendants—he followed his wife, he left his daughter so much money that it was manifestly worth seeing whether, with it, the world might not after all be bearable. Certainly it showed at once that it wanted to be. So after a few weeks' doubt the feeling that one ought to change one's name changed into the determination to brazen—or rather to gild—it out. She would move, of course, from the vulgar, almost Middle West, city where she had been born. In a cultured environment the uncommon is not considered ridiculous—rather, it is regarded as interesting.

In the East she soon found that “literary sub-verb” where her wish to please, to be cultured, and to pay showed her that she might hope soon to be one whose wishes were law. Her appearance was really more against her than her name. She was birdlike, but not in any bright, trilling way—instead, she resembled the more developed of the pigeons. So, though the men and women whom she met showed no objection to her name, none of the men evinced the slightest wish to make her change it. She had, then, for years a busy social life but no home life. Her house was simply the gallery in which her collection was set out and she was the unsalaried caretaker. She was alone.

Gradually she found that state exasperating, as exasperating as at school she had found her name. She did not want a husband, she did not want to be married in any way, but she did want someone about the place—not a companion, a wretched little shadow of herself—but (it was her daydream) a grown son, one whom she would not have the trouble to rear, ready-made as it were, and, further, made for this one purpose, one who would never want to go on growing but would stay at her side. Again she asked herself, Could not money, discreetly disbursed, do something about it?

She was no fool. She knew what she wanted and she saw what men wanted. They wanted the woman who stood back of them, whether wife or mother, to have something outstanding. Looks she could not give; and as to wealth, the second desideratum, too many who had the first had that second also. Besides, no familiarity more quickly and certainly breeds contempt than the familiarity which comes from handling your familiar's money. The third thing is rank. Many a man has allied himself with a plain and poorly endowed woman just because the woman was able to look down on other women, and has respected her because she was better bred.

Once she had thought this out, Miss Ibis took the appropriate steps to appropriate rank. She moved again—but this time temporarily—East, to London, England. There she sought out that queer little brick building which, half like an antique country house and half like a bank which has seen better days, looks out on one of the noisiest and ugliest of streets. In this residence there (literally) “hangs out” that queerest of surviving colleges, the College of Heralds. These antiquarians in nothing but surnames decided, after due search and due pay, that Miss Ibis could not lay name or claim to being part—however outlierly—of any family that had once been so demonstrably illiterate that it could not sign its name but only indicate it by its mark. So Miss Ibis could not carry anyone else's arms, even “in a lozenge,” or “quartered,” or “impaled” or “differenced.” The Ibises, whoever they were, were obviously birds which had kept away from all the heraldic rookeries and heronries, hawk-mews and martlet-eaves.

Such a concession to archaeological truth, however, did not discourage the gentlemen of the tabard. They had the right not merely to show where the last trickle of an ancient honor ran; they could say, “Here new honor, at least to esquire level, rises.” And they decided that anyone so willing and able to pay for the search for the possible right to carry someone else's decorations should not go empty away. Too good historical scholars to say that Miss Ibis could documentarily be proved to be even the most oblique—even batonsinistered—descendant of some medieval gangster, who preferred rather to shoot his way into wealth than to earn it, they were right loath to discourage such zeal for gentility. For another handsome sum they gave Miss Ibis a handsome “coat” all of her own. She was right. She need not brazen her name out, she could emblazon it. She now had a proprietary right in the bird. It was her Crest. It was to appear “all proper” and “gorged with a ducal coronet”—which sounds as though the bird was heavily dressed and had swallowed that head-bauble with all its metal strawberry leaves, but means in herald-argot that the bird was to appear in its natural coloring with the crown not down its throat but round its neck. The motto, too, gave their invention an easy opening. Ibis pictorially was without doubt a bird—“of the wading species”—and linguistically the same word was a good Latin mono-verbal description of a go-getter.

So equipped, the bird-crested lady returned to the town of her adoption. Her friends asked the questions. She did not have to open the subject. Miss Kesson was naturally the first. She was quite an antiquarian and claimed to have traced half a dozen local families through old Bibles back from their present cultured prosperity to the extreme poverty of small artisans who had left their living in England to follow their conscience into the wild.

“What a lovely design!” she remarked. “Where, dear Irene, did you find such a treasure?” She was examining her teaspoon, which on the splay of its eighteenth-century handle now carried, “an Ibis regardant, all proper, ducally gorged, on a field vert.” Of course you knew that the field was “vert” by the small dots and scratches which marked the little mound on which the costly bird was mounted. On a waving scroll underneath, you read the newly honored name “Ibis.”

“When I was last in Britain the College of Heralds found that I had the right to carry coat-armor.” The sentence had been carefully prepared against the question. But now that it was launched it sounded heavy.

Mrs. Maligni—of Italian extraction—looked up. “What is that?” Then, looking at her own spoon, “Oh, you have a decoration, an honor!”

“Well, it's not quite that.” Miss Ibis was able to make elucidation and further assertion sound like disavowal. “It really has nothing to do with anything I've done personally. I called at the College of Heralds to make some inquiries”—she hoped it sounded accidental—“about family trees and they became interested in mine.”

“Doesn't the motto tell us something?” said Miss Branch, whose forte was decipherment.

“Well, yes,” allowed Miss Ibis. “The Heralds felt that it was quite a happy name because, as they said, it ‘told' both as an emblem and a motto.”

“Oh, I see,” broke in Miss Branch. “How cute. Latin, of course, and so hopeful!”

“Yes,” said their hostess with demure assurance. “They said they felt that cultured American families looked forward as well as back. A motto meaning ‘You will go' is, I think, a charming message of good will from the Old World to the New.”

Then all the silver was inspected. It had always been good; Miss Ibis had collected with cost and taste. Though the true collector might have been hurt to see a jejune crest cut into a fine old piece, Miss Ibis' taste was not so impractical as all that. Mrs. Maligni was even more interested than Miss Kesson. Miss Kesson, after making quite a good amateur effort to describe the crest in herald's language, went on to ask about the escutcheon and then to talk of similar cases where fine old American families had, quite casually, pursuing selfless archaeology, come upon their own ancestral roots far away in medieval Europe, so they could rightly style themselves the cousin of a French marquis or a German prince.

“As Saul, seeking his father's asses, found a kingdom,” cut in Dr. Lang, the dry literary member of the group. The rest weren't quite sure whether Dr. Lang, in bringing in that particular allusion, had not perhaps let the hollow-ground razor of satire inflict a slight cut. Certainly Miss Kesson was checked. Everyone was therefore quite pleased when, in the little pause which showed, like the epicenter of an earthquake, that there had been a subsurface jar, Mrs. Maligni broke in enthusiastically. Mrs. Maligni was not the most popular member of the group—far from it. But it was clear now that her un-English lack of restraint was just the right balm, thick and sweet, for their hostess' half-alarmed feelings.

“I don't know a thing about all the details. But I do see it's just right. It kind of brings out what one always knew was there—like looking up a reference and finding you had quoted correctly after all.” Everyone smiled, except Dr. Lang. “It puts the cap on it all.”

“I think that is quite a happy way of describing a crest,” graciously conceded Miss Kesson, who felt that momentary liking we always have for anyone who has just extricated us from a slight awkwardness. Everyone smiled audibly—that physical amiability which, spreading so far as to part the lips, actually causes, in males, a chuckle. Mrs. Maligni felt that she was a success—a feeling to which, as she was unfamiliar with it, she yielded. “Dear Miss Ibis, do you think I might some day bring round my nephew to see your wonderful silver? Now that it's properly”—she paused to get the proper word, and decided—“enhanced, I feel he really mustn't miss such a wonderful experience.” She sensed that her audience regarded her as pushing; so she hurried on, “He's so deeply interested in art and history.” Then, feeling that she had gone too far, she ended weakly, “Of course, I know, perhaps it would be too much trouble.”

Irene Ibis was kind in the normal female way. That is to say, she was frightened of, and defensive with, her female friends; fond of them, really and of course; more, she needed them and they her, but that need is something like that which a rabbit's lower and upper teeth have of each other—of something to grind against—a neat and necessary balance of resistances. And, besides that, the normal female kindness between women who feel themselves equals, she had the normal female kindness which women have, as naturally, toward anything or anyone who is not equal, who is “down.” Mrs. Maligni had begun by pretending that she was an equal—one who could make requests which couldn't be refused, one who could stand up to the exacting pressures of balanced equality. She had ended by owning that she was not. Irene Ibis switched over, was switched over by her nature, from defensiveness to protectiveness.

“Why, Mrs. Maligni, of course you may.”

She let her eye flicker round the other faces, feeling—she almost remembered the exact context—something like Ahasuerus when, to the surprise of his court, he extended his scepter to the intruding suppliant Esther.

A week after, therefore, Mrs. Maligni presented herself at the Ibis home. Irene had been, right down in her mind, not at all unwilling to see the nephew. Of course if Gabrielle Maligni had asked in an offhand way she would have had to refuse. But when her maternal instinct made her able to feel a wish to be kind to the woman who was “not really, my dear, quite one of ourselves,” another aspect of that broad-belted instinct was glad of the possibility of seeing a little further into the Italian woman's family. She found that she had wanted to see this nephew for some little while. She had several times heard his aunt talking of him, how intelligent, cultured, handsome he was. She had overheard the remarks because to whomsoever Mrs. Maligni made them they were received in a silence which threw them into relief. Moreover, Mrs. Maligni had not a soft voice and her use of polysyllabic superlatives was certainly “Low Latin.” Yet there is no smoke without fire, and now she was to see the lambent young spark.

Her first impression was one of agreeable surprise. His aunt was properly bashful; the nephew, on the other hand, was unexpectedly, quietly at his ease. “You might almost say,” she said to herself, “that he had
savoir-faire
.” Certainly, whether or not he knew how to carry things off in general, in that particular environment he was well able to take a courteous lead. His knowledge gave him plenty of openings. Without seeming to lecture—indeed, mainly by asking her questions, and seeming to defer to her information—he kept on adding to her knowledge. She was interested in all that he could tell her of silver and its styles: of how this piece was a particular joy to see, for he suspected (though, of course, he was only an amateur) that it must be an early Jacobean piece, originally from Oxford, which had escaped the great melting down when the University lost its “plate” and gained its title of the City of Lost Causes, by backing Charles I to the extent of all its silver; that piece—yes, it was really Elizabethan—a little treasure. Well, he was glad to see the ibis on it—a properly “exemplified coat” instead of that vulgar piece of eighteenth-century stage-scenery emblazoning which some ignoramus had stuck on the other side of it. He called the Ibis addition “a rightful completion of an otherwise unfinished work of art.”