Murder by Reflection (7 page)

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 dawn 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.”

“Dicyanine,” Doc repeated the word. “Sounds like a cyanide to me. That's pretty queer stuff to have around.”

“Yes, it degenerates so quickly.”

“Um, it degenerates even quicker anyone it gets inside of!”

“Yes, a quick poison, perhaps the quickest; but capricious.”

“You're gassing gophers?”

There was another pause before Kermit said, “No. No, I'll tell you some other time.”

Perhaps, if he had been pressed, he would have told quite a bit then. But Doc was already surfeited with research. He wanted to get back to what he felt was the real stuff—his city and the “white-mail” he levied on it, his care for its character and the welfare of all its “souls.”

Kermit realized that: “You didn't, however, come to ask what I was experimenting with.”

“Oh, I don't know that I didn't. My job makes me have an interest in anything and everything.” Then, fearing that that might lead to a resumption of the lecture, Doc added, “And an absorption in nothing.” Doc, like others of his “profession,” didn't much like being counterdiagnosed.

“All right; come out where we can enjoy the view. I'm not busy now.”

“That's all right for you amateurs, but a sole city official has little time to spare.”

As Kermit followed out the city's godfather he smiled behind the great good mixer's back. Doc, however, not seeing the smile, strolled along. He was quite at his ease now that he had made it clear that he was not wasting his time, for he had officially seconded himself for his alternative duties, civic preventive peace work, as he liked to call it.

“Everything all right in the burg?” queried Kermit when they were seated on the log by the colonnade.

Given that proper invitation, Doc opened, “Always have found, Hal, that the onlooker sees most of the game.”

“Well, a wide-angled lens takes in most of the field.”

“All right; I want it turned on part of our city that ranges from the schoolhouse to the Plantation Mansion, and, if we can't keep it focused, we'll soon have all the city in the picture. You're used to taking people in—I mean sizing them up.”

“Well, one can't have spent thirty years of one's life looking at homely people knowing they hope they're handsome, and trying to make the camera not be too candid, without knowing something about human nature.” They laughed. “You used to say, ‘look pleasant, please.' But soon the good photographer dropped that phrase. Law of Reversed Effort, I believe psychologists now call it, but we photographers, I'll bet, found it out. As soon as you said that fatal word ‘pleasant' they'd look as though you were going to shoot them, literally. ‘Just feel easy' was the next try—why, that actually made them squint.”

“'Spect you're right,” said Doc, anxious to avoid another return to pure research. “I've noticed that if you come with special-delivery mail, how on edge they are even at that, and how they'll often be rude just because they've got a little fear of you as the official with the papers they can't read and are to sign.”

“Have you been disturbing someone, carrying them echoes of alimonial pursuit?”

“No. The case I'm talking over with you isn't that normal nuisance. Fact is, it's a bit out of the common—the eternal triangle, but this time stood on end.” Doc was pleased with this simile and waited a moment for his
mot
to register. “Hal,” he used to say to his wife, “can take an instantaneous photo but, living alone up there, you have to make every really good remark a time-exposure if it's to tell.”

“You mean ‘from one generation to another'?” The delayed reaction was after all not so lengthy.

“That's it. It's a little queer, maybe, to the layman, but psychologists know” (he nearly put “we” before the professional word) “that in fact it's quite a common behavior pattern. ‘Smother love' is the name that's now becoming popular for it.”

“Well, what can you do about it? They'll have to outgrow it for themselves. You can't make a chick hatch if it prefers to stay yolked!”

Doc disdained to notice the pun. “It's not as simple as all that, and I hope a man in my position doesn't interfere unless he has reason.” He paused. “I know which way scandal goes. It always follows the line of a real flaw.” He cleared his throat, for Doc was a convincedly conventional gentleman. “I have no evidence,” he said judiciously, “that Mrs. Heron and her son are blood relations.”