Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  Besides, he had no intention of marrying. He knew that marriage would create a frightful storm and cut him off from all those luxuries which were, of course, already almost necessities. His mother gave him everything he asked. He didn’t mind—indeed, he rather liked—going to her like a boy who does not think about money but only about getting the particular thing he wants; and she apparently seemed to like paying for all he wished, like a devoted mother. She never gave him a lump sum, but took a vivid interest in everything he wanted and often went with him to see him buy it and to advise him about it. Still less did she ever suggest settling any money on him and, from the mixed motives of the childish wish to be dependent and not to be bothered with money and the fear that if he did ask she would refuse, he never brought up the question. His letting her even see about his clothes and come to the tailor with him, pick the cloth and discuss the cut, had indeed led largely to their present silly but sharp little difficulty. It was the occasion, if not the cause, of their growing tension.

  Meanwhile he still liked drifting, enjoyed the sense of filial dependence, and the fact that he was a kind of perpetual guest in her house. So he disliked very strongly the thought, about which he had no doubt, that she would say “No” to any attempt he might make to have a life which she did not control. Marriage must mean that, and therefore it was out of the question. But he did not see why it should come into the question. He could continue to see both women and, if possible, see whether they could get to like each other, and then see, further, what might come of that. So he rationalized his drifting. Drifting, however, is one of the surest ways of doing what is not intended—in Arnoldo’s case, of falling into deep love.

  Miss Gayton was intelligent, sensitive, sympathetic. She listened while he talked, and her answers and questions were really contributive. They stimulated his mind. He was ready to face the fact that he had found a charming companion and someone he could enjoy all by himself, for she seemed quite unable to make friends in Aumic itself.

  “Perhaps it’s knowing most of the people as parents,” she explained, when she came to tea and she and Mrs. Heron had made a fair Opening by sharing their joint inability to make themselves part of the town life.

  The elder woman was soothed by the younger’s quiet deference. On entering she had come over to where the lady of the house sat, making it quite clear that she did not expect the chatelaine to rise to greet her. But this remark was not happy and the sky of converse became overcast.

  “How do you mean?” the putative mother inquired.

  “Well …” She was just going to say, “you see so much of the parents reflected in the children,” when she saw that this would be taken ill here. She hesitated, and her hostess read the silence almost as though she had spoken the repressed words.

  She turned the subject and spoke of how she had disliked the place when she first came—these hard azures and dense yellows, so different from the soft greens and grays of the North; and then the monotonous lack of seasons. Mrs. Heron agreed. But to the further attempt to show how this more highly pitched beauty might become likable, there was no response.

  Arnoldo sat uneasily at hand. He feared that Miss Gayton might say that he had made her see this unfamiliar loveliness. She was, however, too intelligent, and, after a few more cautious exchanges, the women parted without the elder’s even making a general proposal that they might meet again. He felt his heart harden against his mother when, as soon as he returned, she remarked, “I don’t think that girl showed much sense in choosing teaching as her profession. She hasn’t a taste for it.” He felt that the remark was meant to draw him, so he kept silence; but it was the unfriendly silence of declined battle.

  And when he next met Miss Gayton (after the call they had parted in silence, both sensing that to be heard talking in the hall would be undesirable), she was as helpful as Irene Ibis (as he found himself thinking of her) was unfriendly.

  “Your mother quite naturally didn’t feel very much at home with me. I’m thoroughly a New Englander and realize her feeling. She felt there was no need for us to meet just because we are both out here and feel a little stranded, when back in the East she would not feel that she had to ask me to her house.”

  He protested that his mother was tired, not very well, and had become something of a recluse. But he knew, and Miss Gayton knew, that henceforth it was pretty certain that they would have to meet, if they met at all, unofficially, if not clandestinely. Miss Gayton, too, was frank about her feelings. She told him—and this surprised him more than a little—that she didn’t like the house.

  “I’ve no doubt it’s in perfect taste but it’s really too perfectly done. I suppose that’s again my New England conscience which dreads not only all extravagance but perhaps even more …” She paused for a word, or rather, to examine the word which she had intended to use. Then she decided she had better say it. “Any sort of acting. The house with Mrs. Heron seated in it in formal state, gives me an uncanny sense of a theater stage-scene set for some play that is about to begin. The lights will go out and all that will be visible, the only persons visible, will be the costumed actors playing out a plot. Today will have disappeared. And I can’t help feeling that not only is it a piece of make-believe that is being performed but that it is somehow an uncanny drama that is staged. I know that sounds, in itself, a bit theatrical. But I think I’d better say what I feel.”

  Her remark stirred the conflict in his mind, and he was not sorry that of his two lives, the one with this new friend and the one with his mother, the one should be completely out of doors and the other in its chosen setting. He realized that he had always known that Irene would never let him have another woman friend. Just because their relationship had been platonic, parental-filial, all the more would she be suspicious of any other friendship. Secrecy has this disadvantage, however, at least for those who like a quiet life—it heightens excitement and makes, like hide-and-seek, the most ordinary passerby someone to be shunned. Arnoldo had tried to avoid Doc the mailman. Trying to avoid a public person made him feel that he was doing something guilty; feeling the sense of guilt moved him to find an inner reason for the outer reaction. Miss Gayton began to seem not a quiet relaxation, a gently affectionate relationship, but a romance. Once that happened the days of quiet, casual conversation were numbered.

  She was far too intelligent not to sense the change and far too lonely not to wish not to notice it. She carefully avoided mentioning Mrs. Heron again. They stuck to natural history; but, as he had found in his silver-reflective intimacies with Irene, now with Marian Gayton it was the same. They talked of the desert wild flowers and the successful struggle they made to carry out their inner wish to express beauty—of course they meant themselves. They speculated on why as some species of animals have aged they have become helpless and malignant—all snakes, he told her, had limbs until the close of the Eocene; no snake was poisonous before the Miocene—but they were not thinking of forty to sixty million years ago but of today.

  But “today” lasted for months—into another year; the wild flowers came again. Mrs. Heron was in better physical health.

  Dr. Hertz remarked, “I give you newcomers a year. The first couple of months you feel that you would like to sleep all day and wonder whether you haven’t lethargica encephalitis; the next quarter you’re out in rashes and queer little urticarias and we’re asking, ‘Do you know poison oak when you see it, or are you allergic to limes?’ The next half-year you can run a pretty little scale of undulant fever, and we question the milkman (though of course he’s safe), and then wonder whether a Rocky Mountain tick could really have managed on its feeble feet to cover all that distance, find you, and bite you. And, then, after a year, you get up and say it’s the finest climate in the world and tastes as good as it looks.”

  But Mrs. Heron did not respond. The weather-glass of her temperament remained set at stormy, though her body refused to back it up any longer with obvious physical symptoms.

  Dr. Hertz
had his own opinion. For there are few better psychologists than an open-minded, hardworking, thirty-varied-patients-a-day physician. But, like most open-minded psychologists, he kept his mouth closed about the psyche. He talked of what he knew, the physique, and preserved a respectful silence toward “the psychic factor in the background,” the imponderable which no doubt is always shifting the weights, but itself cannot be put upon the scales.

  It was Doc who took steps, for, after all, Doc was the community’s godfather. He was fond of saying, “We’ve eight religions postal-registered in the place and the only power which can haul them up is the United States Post Office Department, and I, gentlemen, represent that encyclical power.”

  “Irenical, you mean,” said the Episcopalian minister one day when Doc had recited his favorite piece, on the sidewalk, to a group including that “clerk-in-holy-orders” and the Methodist minister, who were close friends.

  “Irenical is the same as Irene, isn’t it, and means ‘Peace’?” Doc asked in reply. “No, sir. When Uncle Sam feels that he must guard the people against what the pulpit may be overflowing into the mails, it isn’t peace he sends but that stiletto which slits open the ‘appeal circulars.’”

  The group laughed.

  Doc, feeling that he might be going a little far, sidestepped the subject by looking at a bunch of mail in his hand and reading aloud to himself, “Why, there’s the name Irene right enough. ‘Irene Ibis, c/o Mrs. Heron.’ Sounds like a rare roosting of big birds. I wonder who that Ibis can be. One never sees her, but maybe she’ll call one day and see her friend who’s been collecting her mail for her. She certainly gets quite a lot.” He swung into his little car and chugged up the street. “It’s true, though,” Doc continued as a monologue; “the ministers are all looking after their own flocks hoping they will feed them and so hoping they’ll grow at the expense of the other man’s fold. I’m the only person with the whole place for my parish and who knows something of everyone. And one likes ’em all—though some more than others, naturally. But the sours keep the sweets from becoming mawkish!”

  Doc had need to remind himself that, like Mercury, he was not only postal deliverer but also the messenger of the gods, “who make men to be of one mind in a house” and “who will not endure an implacable man” or woman. He had put the Plantation House’s mail in its box and had turned off by a side road to get back to the western end of the town. Passing down this dirt track he glanced at a still smaller road, hardly more than a trail, going off north; the trail marked the run of realtor hopes when the city should have a suburb on the first shelf of the mountain. His one glance told him enough. Young Heron and Miss Gayton were going up the lane. Diagnoses of mental condition, mental doctors say, can often be made quite easily at a considerable distance. Carriage conveys mood; physical poise signals mental state. Doc certainly could diagnose this condition at fairly long range. There could be no doubt as to the patients’ conditions. A human couple saunters in that way only if the two of them have found what they have been looking for—each other.

  When Doc reached the main north and south road he turned not toward the city’s west end, as he had intended, but in the opposite direction. The road soon grew steep enough for his little engine to have to change gear. Twice he crossed washes in the road and, after the last, the road changed gear too, down from a fairly good oiled pavement to a dirt track. When that, too, gave out abruptly, he dismounted and struck off on a footpath which climbed a steep bank on his left.

  It was almost as steep as a ladder, so if you made the grade at all you rose quickly. Then, after a hundred feet or so of this scaling, you reached an edge, finding yourself on a platform. A small level space ran from the edge, whence a fine view of the plain below was visible. On the mountain side the little plateau was skirted by a garden plot and bounded by a small, low house. It was one story, roughly but picturesquely tiled; the roof was held on pillars made from the boles of eucalyptus, the pillars themselves standing on a low wall of adobe brick. It looked as though it had grown out of the ground, as indeed all its supports had.

  “You there?” summoned Doc when he had gained the porch and his wind—which was not good for foothill work, as he was hardly ever out of his car; “It and I make one snail in shape and speed,” was one of his wisecracks; and he would add to his intimates, “It makes people easy and relaxed if they think you’re slow and friendly and they see they’ve got the better car and can pass you anywhere on the road.”

  “Come in, Doc,” said a voice from the shade.

  “Well, Hermit, and how are you?”

  A man whose name is Kermit need not be much of a recluse to get his initial pushed back three places in the alphabet.

  Doc walked across the shady front porch-living room, pushed against a door behind which the welcome had sounded, and was in a complete contrast. The front room was nature arranged with skilled unobtrusiveness by art: a few rustic bookcases; a huge hearth, almost like a natural grotto; a couple of big chairs where tree limbs had been induced with as little outrage as possible to their natural shape to accommodate comfortably the human frame. Against the wall ran a couch of the same construction, the hopelessly human touch of bedding avoided by the coverlet’s tawny color. As you passed you saw that this protective coloration was given by the bedclothes being, all of them, pelts—mountain-lion for quilt, coyote for blankets, and bear for the mattress.

  The back room, on the other hand, was science. You passed at a step from one world to the other. A steel-framed window properly screened ran the length of it, giving a good north light on a well-arranged laboratory bench. The side walls had racks and files. The floor was smooth gray cement. The Hermit, too, was dressed for this laboratory, in long white coat and rubber gloves.

  “This side measured messing and that side unmeasured meditation,” remarked Doc as an introduction. “Two lives only separated by a swing door.”

  “But it’s really one life, seen binocularly,” was the answer.

  “But why don’t you make it pay? You once had a nice photo business up in the big city and our tidy town hasn’t yet got a really good photo parlor.”

  “I’ll go back to making money when you’ll get a new automobile.” They both laughed. “But, seriously, photography now takes one away from the visible. What do we want to do with portraits a second-rate artist can always beat hollow, when now we can have insights which no human eye, not even Leonardo’s, ever saw?” Slipping off his gloves, he lifted down an album from a shelf. “Just look at these infrared photos of the plain—the view from the terrace outside. No human eye ever saw such distances and details. We’re seeing things, already at this step, as perhaps till now only an eagle or a condor has ever seen them. And here’s something not through an eagle’s eyes but through even odder sight—the night owl’s. He’s said to be able to pick up a field mouse because he can see the wave-length sent out by the heat of its body. Anyhow, that”—pointing to what looked like a night photo of a gleaming gothic archway—“that’s an electric iron standing on its back in a totally dark room. It was nowhere near red-hot. It’s photoed just by its warmth.”

  “Then why don’t you take up X-rays?”

  “I did, and found they were only a doorway themselves. The real photo frontier lies now far beyond all that useful but now routine skiagraphy. When I saw these”—he had taken down another album and was showing now big total-eclipse photos with grand corona effects—“at Mount Wilson I realized how much we have to shut down our eyes in order to see all that there’s there. Look at that streamer going out of the sun’s rim—a flame a million miles long which could lick up the earth and the moon, yes, and Jupiter and Saturn, if they came within reach of its lash, in one flick of its tongue. And we never even knew that the smooth, round sun ever darted out like that till we had these photos. And here’s a still further step.” He turned to a photo all dark, save for little whitish spots and patches on it. Against one very dim blur a white arrow had been etched. “That’s the faint da
wn of a new knowledge, a new sight.”

  “Don’t think much of your new morning, must say,” grunted Doc. He could take everyone’s enthusiasm for a little, but no one’s for too long.

  “All right, I’ll give you no more picture proofs why I’m not any longer in paying photography. But that little speck is a milestone. For some years an abbé astronomer in France said that he saw a nebula which no one else could find even when he pointed out the spot. He held out; they said ‘No.’ Then came a new kind of orange filter for stellar photography and, heypresto, as the old conjurers used to say, there on the plate was the abbé’s nebula. The old fellow had an eye sensitive to a color vibration we don’t see.”

  The human-interest story nearly held Doc, but his eye, ranging down the bench, caught sight of a brilliant crimson color.

  “Ah, what about color photography?” he asked. “There’s interest and money surely combined?”

  “Oh, those aren’t color prints. Those are done, or they wouldn’t be out in the light. They’re spoiled by the light. They’re screens, and I must burn them.”

  “Burn them?”

  “Yes, they’re the dicyanine screens with which some of the eclipse work is done.”

  “Pretty color. But you can’t take eclipse photos yourself?”

  “No,” said Kermit, and he hesitated for a moment. “No.”