Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

“Let’s go and see it now.”

  They went up and inspected it immediately. It had been a fine room, and they were right—it had pretty certainly been used as a large and cool bedchamber in hot weather. Faint discolorations showed where a big bedstead had stood against the south wall, its foot facing the windows giving out on the mountains.

  She arranged everything for him, going a little beyond all his wishes and caring nothing about expense. She felt certain that this was the final settlement. After this he would have a complete, and a completely dovetailed life. His every need would be supplied and yet not one of them would take him outside the circle of activities based on the house. She had thought every detail out, even to have ready a number of “hospital suits,” so that he could change into these when he worked in his new studio or laboratory. He had asked to go on with his radio work. He particularly wanted to take up again research on short-wave effects and results to be obtained with new valves and tubes. He seemed full of a new kind of interest, fresh from his long absence from science. He was obviously happier than he had been for a long while. At last both sides of his life were balanced; he was stabilized.

  She was happy, too, so happy that her vigilance could relax. His work kept him actually in the house—often he did not go riding for days. She did not mind that often for the whole day, until dinner, he would stay in his white linen suit, coming down to lunch in it. Joe, of course, was shocked, and a quarter of an hour before luncheon would steal up to the room to say that there was just time to change before coming down to the meal. But he told the boy not to bother him and, as Mrs. Heron confirmed it, Joe submitted.

  One day, having ordered some special parts, he went down to meet Doc whom he saw bringing up the parcels, which would have to be signed for. Doc felt that here was offered him a perfectly sound and safe opening.

  “Radio research?” he queried.

  Arnoldo was in his white linen laboratory clothes. He felt the professional effect.

  “Yes,” he said. “Now we’re settled in, and have finished making over the house, I’m going to try out a few experiments I’ve been wanting to make.” Then, as Doc stood about a bit and to be silent was awkward, he added, “It’s amateurish work, of course, but not many people are working on it anyhow—one’s rather out on a lone trail.” That, he felt, would be a polite way of explaining their aloofness.

  It gave Doc, however, his opening. “There’s a researcher who lives as quietly as you do, ’way up the canyon. He was wanting to meet someone like you—said so to me just the other day.”

  That was textually true, though, of course, in its context it would have sounded different and less attractive.

  Arnoldo hesitated. He had honestly become re-interested in radio. He had found it a very good antidote to an overdose of “living art.” He found that it was mainly the fact that he had had to make his scientific work pay that had made him so willing to drop it. Now he was free to follow up any of those questions and problems that stand just off the beaten track of commercial practice. He was clever enough to have been able to raise quite a number of intriguing questions. He was neither sufficiently skilled technically nor mentally able to solve them. He had opened a number of lines and closed none. He did want to talk them over with an expert. Besides, it might well be a way of having some place to go to away from this large, self-reminding house.

  “It would be a real kindness to Irene,” flashed through his refractive mind. “I’d be fresher to play up to her wishes in the evenings, and she’d be easier in her mind as to where I was when out of doors.”

  Aloud he said, “I’d like to meet your friend.”

  “Good,” said Doc. “I’m finishing up my delivery in that direction. I’ll tell him you’ll be dropping up some time.”

  Pleased with his diplomacy, Doc chugged off in his Mercurial chariot. Arnoldo went back to his upstairs laboratory. He turned to a piece of work on screened valves in which electrons—such was the theory—are deflected by a fin of metal in the tube. It was a nice point, where the problems of ultra-optics meet riddles of auditory radio—just the borderline where a semi-professional may wander half lost in amateur speculation, half hoping he may light on the trail of something quite big and businesslike. It fitted in, too, curiously well with Doc’s suggestion that he should consult with a neighboring researcher. He felt that he couldn’t actually get further himself, but with a little help he well might. He turned to the mail which he had brought up with him. The parcels contained some interesting vacuum tubes he had sent for, seeing their description in a technical article. They were said to be quite a departure—tubes of intense radiating power, which might revolutionize his subject.

  “They’ll be interesting to play about with,” he thought. “I expect the men who made them don’t yet know half they could do.”

  He intended, however, before trying them out, to go and question the researcher who was living so close to him. That visit nevertheless was postponed. His power of concentration had never been great and the chance of playing with a new toy distracted him. He found that with some of the new apparatus he could bring about an effect he had read of but never actually experimented with himself. He could cause the emission of waves of a very moderate length, waves which had the amusing quality that though of course invisible they could be reflected just as light is reflected. You could emit a beam of them at one corner of the room and, standing in the opposite corner with a piece of flat metal in your hand, you could “flash” them back so that they would make a set in another corner start playing. He entertained himself with these rather simple experiments for a few days. Then when he thought that he would really collect all his data and take it up to the recluse-researcher, a queer thing happened, at least a queer thing for him. He suddenly felt oddly unwell.

  He had never experienced the feeling before; indeed, he had uncommonly good health, a cold in the head being almost his only experience of illness. He did not want Irene fussing over him, so, early one morning, having made an appointment, he slipped down to Dr. Hertz’s office. The routine examination had not gone beyond the band around the arm with its numbing grip when Dr. Hertz asked, “What have you been doing?”

  Arnoldo recited a life of blameless routine.

  “A convalescent might be safe on that,” remarked the doctor. “Quiet study, fair and regular exercise, regular meals, early hours.” Then, “By the way, what is your actual study?”

  Arnoldo told him of his radio research.

  “No excitement or strain there,” said the doctor, more to himself than to his patient. Then, with a sudden interest, “You said radio research? Are you interested in short-wave?”

  Arnoldo said that he was actually working with some fairly short waves.

  “Waves that can be reflected as light is reflected?” asked the doctor.

  “Yes,” replied Arnoldo, a little surprised.

  “Then I have it—but only by chance. It’s outside my subject. It was a friend who is the physician to a big radio research corporation who told me. That’s a relief; there’s no ground for alarm. I can tell you now what your diagnosis shows so far. It needn’t alarm you. You are running a very high blood pressure. It would be an alarming symptom if one couldn’t make out what had caused it. Fortunately we know. At the corporation I’ve just mentioned they had just the same thing. Men reported feeling sick and my friend found they were all running these odd blood pressures. But he also found that all of these patients had been working with a particular wave-length for radio research in reflected-beam work. He warned them off that particular wave-length and they were all normal in a few days.

  “You must drop that piece of research, Mr. Heron. The wave-length which is dangerous to us, the ‘forbidden lines,’ are, it seems, quite small. Well, you have discovered, or rather rediscovered, an interesting linkage between physics and physiology, and I am glad to have been able to point out its significance to you. Just drop that line of research and you’ll feel your old self in a couple of days
. Of course, if you held on, you might have a stroke at any time, and anyone who didn’t know this queer link-over would be puzzled out of their lives as to how a healthy young man could go off with ‘apoplexy’ as though he were a ‘five-bottle’ sexagenarian.”

  They both laughed, the doctor with the pleasure of having made a neat diagnosis, the patient with the relief of knowing that he would be all right with no worse treatment than shunning a few wave-lengths in research.

  The fact that he could not go on with that research—for the doctor had been proved right; as soon as that work was stopped, Arnoldo began to feel normal—made Arnoldo anxious again to visit the recluse. It took about two days for him to feel quite healthy, but on the third morning as he awoke he felt that nothing would suit him better than a ride up the canyon with an interesting discussion at the end of it.

  “I’m going out riding immediately after breakfast,” he said to Joe. But he disappointed his retainer by refusing to wear his fine riding coat. “It’s too hot. The sleeved silk waistcoat will do over this shirt.”

  And with this “undress” Joe had to be content. It was a compromise—in the house-style but still casual enough to pass as a variegated version of one of today’s loose varieties of dress. So “turned out” he felt that he wouldn’t be self-conscious with a new acquaintance.

  Certainly when he arrived he was received casually, almost as though he had called before. The Hermit remarked only that he was glad that the city’s mailman-master-of-ceremonies had been able to introduce two recluses, and then took him at once into the laboratory.

  “Oh, I thought you were a radio researcher,” said Arnoldo.

  “Well, just as all sunbeams come from the sun, so all research in radiation is converging on a common focus.”

  They ranged up and down the advance points of radiation research.

  “I’m sure,” remarked Kermit, “most of the big researchers are constantly making much bigger breaks-through than they guess. When man chipped a stone he was more or less aware of what he’d done. But when we start splitting atoms by the million, I’ll bet we’re sending shudders, intangible but profound shudders, right through things, right through our bodies. Look what happened with X-rays: nearly all the first researchers ‘burned’ themselves to death with a ‘fire’ which isn’t visible, audible, tangible.”

  “Yes,” Arnoldo was able to break in. “I’ve had experience of that just now myself. It kept me from calling on you before. I was working with a belt of short waves, and they hit back on me. I was running quite a high blood pressure, it seemed.”

  But Kermit did not seem to wish to leave his own line of thought to hear about his visitor’s symptoms. He turned to a shelf and took down a couple of books.

  “These are Kilner’s and Bagnall’s work on human radiations, and here,” hunting in a file, “are a number of papers, on those other vital radiations, the controversial Mitogenetic Radiation.”

  Arnoldo was offended at the Hermit’s disregard of his own interesting contribution. He wanted to talk about himself and his own little problems. Now that he was in a scientific atmosphere, he began to long once more for his stately hollow house, that great nacreous shell, of which he was the precipitation, the pearl; that series of mirrors of which he was the central focus. He brought the talk to his particular research, as to how he might investigate a wave-length beyond the one which had proved dangerous. The Hermit made a couple of helpful suggestions and Arnoldo rose.

  “Must you be going?”

  “I have to get back. My mother is not very strong.” Then, with his usual nervousness, having won his point, he feared he had been precipitate, rough, felt he should say something to end the interview easily: “Perhaps you would come down to see my little laboratory one day?”

  “Gladly.”

  The Hermit felt that he must discharge his promise to Doc, though the opening had not been promising.

  “Well, I must be getting along home.”

  Neither wanted to see the other again but both knew that they would.

  Chapter X

  But Arnoldo did not get along home, though when he had left the Hermit he had intended to canter straight back and, washed, brushed, coated, and cravated, a joy to his mother, to Joe—yes, and to himself—to take his place at the head of the table and at the center of the perfectly proportioned, three-dimensional picture.

  As he rode past a small olive grove he saw Miss Gayton seated at the foot of one of the trees. He reined in his horse, sprang down, and led it toward her. He could explain why he did so only by the fact that she was, both here and in his mind, exactly halfway between the pure scientific atmosphere he had just left and the climate of applied art into which he was going to re-plunge. He felt sure of himself as he strode toward her. She had appeared when his mood was exactly at that turn of the tide when he felt she would understand him. Ten minutes before he would have been too scientific; ten minutes after he would have been too self-centered, too artistic.

  He threw the bridle over a cut branch of the olive and, leaning against the trunk, looked down at her.

  She seemed equally at her ease and, without any restraint, remarked, “I believe I was wrong about the big house. I thought it would be too big for you—that it would swallow you up. But if that was so, you have won against it. You have made it come alive and be your plinth, not your prison.” The speech seemed a little school-ma’amish, and quite possibly prepared, but, if so, he was even more prepared to accept it.

  He encouraged her to go on, with, “It was an experiment worth trying.”

  “I’m glad you’ve had the courage to stick to your style, for it is your style.”

  They talked for a little while about the period and the house and how thought and expression, style and idea must be related. He did not suggest that she should call again and he knew she understood.

  As he rose he said instead, “I must be getting back, but I shall be coming this way next Thursday to visit a man up the canyon. Perhaps we could have a stroll then? Maria the mare seems to like this spot.”

  He was cheerful at lunch and told Irene about his visit to the fellow researcher. She was cheerful, too, and when he suggested that he would like to show his laboratory to Kermit she was obviously pleased.

  “Ask him any day, and make him stay to tea. I am sure, if he is interested in photography, he would like to look over the house and grounds.”

  On Thursday morning he told her that he was going up again to Kermit’s and would ask him to tea for some day the next week.

  “Don’t wait lunch for me; I may stay on. He’s showing me some work which may help me in mine.” She was quite agreeable.

  As he rode through the olive grove he caught sight of Miss Gayton. She was standing by the tree where she had been before. But surely there was something different about her? As he came closer he saw what it was—her hair was dressed differently. Before, she had had a sort of wave down across her forehead—not a becoming style, he had thought, at least for her shape of head. That had gone. Her hair was parted now in the middle, brought back and tied in a coil by a fine fillet of gold ribbon.

  Now, standing near her, he saw that the change was not confined to her hair. The sloppy jacket and slacks had gone. She was wearing a long, pale-yellow dress of lawn. Finely pleated, it fell, from where it was gathered at the breast by two gold cords, straight to her feet. She had on well-cut sandals of tooled leather. She looked fresh and cool as well as classical. He noticed how her straight nose, which before had seemed a little too long, now was suited by her new hair dressing; the straight, cleared brow and the chiseled line of the nose gave her a Greek profile. He saw, too, how much better she held herself. In her hand she held a sunbonnet.

  “You look as though you had come out of one of Jane Austen’s novels,” he said. “Am I to call you Emma or Miss Bennett?”

  “I’ve come over,” was her reply.

  “Come over?”

  “I told you. I’ve seen your point. The fi
esta, I think, made me realize that the poor present has found itself out! If we’re not to be dragooned and uniformed we have to have a style. The French are right: The style is the man—and the woman. If we stand for a way of life, we must stand for it—not lounge about listlessly. We stand for rationalism, for the way of life that made this country a model for the world, but from which it’s been drifting away. And we have a style. We needn’t go Spanish and bad baroque. We needn’t wait to be stripped to a dismal shirt by a dictator. We needn’t wait to be uniformed if we’ll revive our own tonic fashion.”

  It was, of course, just the kind of thing which Irene had said to him, on his inspiration. But now it sounded different, again. He suddenly felt at his ease. He realized that he had been frightened of her because he thought she would laugh at him for venturing to dress in a specific style. They sat down together. He was quite ready to take up the theme and instruct her.

  “You see, that was the rational, streamlined age. You can’t really age it; it never gets out of date; it’s just style at its best, most finished, most functional. All our present so-called functionalism is simply angularity let rule humanity. It can never reflect itself in costume—which all living architecture always does—as the Adams’ style in building gave rise to the clothes we are bringing back.”

  “I came across a saying of Michaelangelo’s the other day,” she was able to back him up, “that architecture can never be understood without the study of anatomy.”

  “That’s it: the tailor makes in cloth the theme-model which the architect renders in masonry.”

  After that he never felt ill at ease with her again. His two needs, self-admiration and someone to mirror him, were met. He was free to fall in love again after his fashion, and he did. She would echo him, but as soon as he wished for a short rest from that reflection he found in her a charming variation on his own theme. When he was tired of unison she could harmonize quite entertainingly.

  They parted when he had just time to get up to Kermit’s place and back in time to change for dinner. As they parted, for the first time a definite appointment was made, a clear clandestinity recognized.