Murder by Reflection (23 page)

“How are such people to be supposed to count chances and say, ‘It won't pay me to murder!' No; Calvert, in his classic
Capital Punishment,
proved to the hilt, with statistical care, that community killing has never done anything to stop private killing. The only thing that stops murder and puts a real wall in its way is the height of the value we put upon life.”

“Then you're going to let me go?”

“Certainly not.”

“What, then, are you going to do with me?”

“I'm not going to do anything with you.”

“Except blackmail or white-mail me with your, ‘I won't speak, but if you don't behave I will' generosity.”

“No, nothing I can say can be of much use to you. I can say what it's no use doing with you. What you are good for, I can't say, for I can't call it out of you.”

Once again Arnoldo's eyes had gone back to his hand.

“Can nothing be done?”

Kermit, looking at him, suddenly saw no longer a mean little murderer. The actual words, which were of course only a reflex, did not register. Only the tone, the note, sounded in his mind. With the pitch of that whimpering cry another scene appeared in front of him—where he had last heard that hopeless whinny of trapped panic, a cry wrung from a creature of cruel caution by its hopeless distress. He was out in the woods. He had gone over to find what it was—a weasel caught in a trap. The trapper was evidently late on his rounds. The beast was
in extremis.
Its front feet were caught in the rubber-sheathed teeth of the trap—a trap designed so as not to spoil a good pelt. It had evidently been so held for a long while, for its strength was gone. When he approached, it only uttered its exhausted whine. He'd thought, as he looked down at it, “A mean beast, but mean because of its race. The little vermin couldn't help itself for pouncing on its prey any more than the trap could help catching it.” He had trodden on the trap-lever and the jaws relaxed their grip. The animal drew in first one numbed paw and then the other. It held them under its quivering body as the pain of the returning circulation racked it. Then with a great effort it put its weight on the damaged limbs and stumbled off for cover.

“If I had any right to do that, there's more right to do this,” Kermit reflected. “That little beast had killing in its blood and only Heaven knows whether it ever had the spark of a soul. This creature won't kill again; he killed because he felt trapped, and he has a soul—a soul which will hurt him like hell as
its
circulation comes back, hurt more than the weasel was hurt by its damaged paws or than he'll be hurt by his own damaged hand.

“Look here.” There was as much detachment in his tone—more, indeed, for he was now detached from his own disgust. “Perhaps I can help you—at least to help yourself. Look at it from this standpoint. You've always lived feeling that this life is a dream. Well, now's the time to have the courage of your convictions.”

“What do you mean?”

“You thought everything is shadow, and therefore to do away with the life-dream or dream-life of a dreamer wasn't really doing any irreparable harm. Well, in a way all the material world is a play of motions. Your body is simply a ‘dust-devil' of whirling atoms, themselves only small eddies of force, the whole spinning in a certain way and shape caused by a certain vortex of desire, which we don't understand. But we do know that our bodies are no more than sand-grains swept up by a passing wind.”

“Oh, I know we remake our bodies every seven years.”

“Not at all; now that radioactive atoms can be put into the body we can, with the Geiger Counter, track them moving about in the body and, at any moment, drifting out of that column of living dust.”

“Do you mean to say …?”

“I only want you to realize that your body is a shadow cast by something else.”

“You think I could think …?”

Arnoldo was again looking at his hand. He flexed the fingers. They felt firm; they felt healthy. Yet they were only streaks of a shadowy force, and in those streaks, those quiet ordered rays of radiation, already a deadly disturbance had begun. He had thrust these wisps of mist, these quiet columns of living smoke, rising like vapor in still evening air, into the tearing wind of radioactivity—and they were literally being blown away by the blast. But was it proved? “Seeing is believing, but feeling is knowing”—the old adage came into his mind. He didn't see, far less feel, anything wrong. Kermit's voice confirmed his thought.

“You can say, nothing has as yet happened and so nothing will. Of course there is no absolute certainty in life—only probability. I have shown you the probability. Now I'll try and go further and tell you how you might prepare for it. But one thing more I ought to add; perhaps it'll help you to make up your mind to face your body. I'll put it in a question. You didn't by any chance, ask Miss Gayton to help you with your
work
?”

Arnoldo seemed to rouse out of his lethargy. Fear again showed on his face.

“Why?”

“It is medically interesting. I understand that she came here because she had had old T.B. trouble 'way back East. She seemed to be all right here for a while. Then about the time that Mrs. Heron's trouble began she seems to have become unwell again. Of course it looked like a recurrence of the old T.B. But I understand that they are now sure that she is dying, if not already dead, of a disease which is often mistaken for T.B. and which may attack a T.B.-damaged lung—if the person should be exposed to conditions which are favorable for cancer. She has cancer of the lung, I have lately been informed.”

Arnoldo made no defense.

“We were friends and I did ask her to try-out for me one of the X-ray tubes.”

Kermit only added, “Now that the fate you started has engulfed two of the people closest to you, perhaps you will have the courage to stand up to your test, now that it is reaching out and touching you. Will you?”

Gradually Arnoldo listened. When Kermit had finished speaking some time had passed. Another considerable period was spent in silence.

Then Arnoldo remarked, more to himself than to the other, “It's a chance … and then, if the full penalty is after all exacted, I shall be prepared to pay for it. There's nothing else to do, to live for, I guess.”

In consequence, Kermit was not surprised to receive a month later a visit from Doc. Nor was he surprised that Doc was in good spirits.

“See, by taking a little care not only have we fended off any town scandal, but the city's gained a first-rate feature. I always said that might happen as the happiest way out, and I believe if you choose what you think to be the very best possible thing that can befall, it will befall. And I've gotten the very man for the place, too. He'll be happy keeping it up and showing people around.”

“Yes,” said Kermit. “I think that was the best solution. God only knows how long that house might remain unhealthy to anyone living in it.”

Kermit did not often go into town. It was perhaps as much as a year after that he was up at the end toward Plantation House. He had yet an hour to wait for some express parcels that he had come for. He strolled into the cool grounds where the caretaker was working. His “May I show you over?” was so obviously an offer meant to be accepted that Kermit fell in behind him.

“Few cities like this have such a feature! I assure you it draws visitors. Sure, the town itself has plenty of present attractiveness. But then so have a dozen other planned cities, like this, about here. But this gives us—as some visitors said to me only yesterday—background. And background gives the finishing touch, doesn't it?”

Kermit give the “assent of courtesy” which authorities on casuistry say need not necessarily be a “contractual consent.”

“Background gives, I always say,” said the guide, swinging back the tall leaf of the double front door, and waving him to enter, “atmosphere.”

The great hall was silent, the sun still throwing long, searching beams across its emptiness. Like, Kermit thought, the way a blind man will search with fringed extended fingers, seeking for some fine object that eludes him—the blind sun, like the blinded Polyphemus groping for his enemy. Yes, there was certainly atmosphere about the vacant place, but, surely, less of quiet reflection than of expectancy. They walked slowly along until the guide paused.

“Many visitors say to me, ‘You have Williamsburg beat.' I don't know about that, but I do know that just here you do have a kind of feeling as though you had gotten right back into the past and left the present as though it hadn't yet been born.” They had reached the middle of the hall. “I put the visitors just here and say to them, ‘Now, don't look at yourselves, but look over your shoulders; just sort of miss your faces and look right along your background!' And they see, just as we see now, right down those long corridors of repeated, reflected rooms!”

Kermit and he looked into the reflecting mirrors in silence for a while.

“It does seem, doesn't it,” said the guide, anxious to collect yet another visitor's impression, “as though there were a passage right down there, and often I've felt as though it would lead one right back into the past itself, if one could really slip into it.”

“Yes,” Kermit felt that a remark was required of him, “yes, people often say in old places, ‘If only these old walls could speak, could give an echo of the impressions that fell on them!'”

“That's just what a lady visitor said to me the other day. And then she said a clever thing which only a lady would think of. She said, ‘I suspect why we can't actually get back into that past'—we were standing just here—‘is because we are tied to the present by our appearance; our clothes are all that hold us back, are the only thing making us of this date and not that!' But though I'm proud of the place, they're not going to get me into fancy dress—as they do at Williamsburg. That'd be going too far.”

They walked on toward the grand staircase. The guide seemed to be wondering whether he should make a confidence, as they were alone.

“Tell the truth, I'm not so sure that if one did actually dress the part and live in the place one mightn't become a sort of living ghost!”

Then, seeing that he was not laughed at, he eyed Kermit, wondering whether he might share with this silent man all his impressions.

“Believe me, that's the honest impression I sometimes do get in the place. I go around, when I've locked the gates, and take a last look over. It's then still and quiet as though none of us busy moderns were born or thought of. And, really, I often stand here at the foot of this stair in a sort of brown study wondering whether it's real, all this—” He waved his hand to the perfect period setting which surrounded them. “—Or just my intruding self. I could fancy, then, that down these stairs, as real as life, came the real people who'd be at home here and who'd pass through me as though I were a shabby shadow.”

He was evidently more than a little pleased with his prose-period and, no doubt, future visitors would hear his fear of the past gaining in polish and patina. But on Kermit's ear it struck with an uncanny personal conviction. For wasn't it true that this house was demonstrably charged with energies which, though our senses could not record them, could affect us fatally? Was not this a clear proof that the “dead hand of the past” could be something far more than a phrase-with-a-creep-in-it? Hadn't resentment—the silent struggle between the wish to escape into the past and the fear of that living burial—actually caused these walls, was causing them still, to echo with death? A soundless echo but far more blood-curdling than any cry of agony.

He thought, “Invisible, intangible rays leave such a powerful impression; dig in and hit back in this way—why shouldn't the passions which set the rays in train, themselves leave traces, imprints, echoes? We're only now learning the full properties of X-rays and the invisible radiations which are quite close to the visible spectrum. The sensible, intelligent men, who designed the style of this house, they would have laughed at X-rays as medieval magic, necromancers' nonsense.”

So strong indeed was the impression of truth given by the old guide's eloquence that, when after a silent moment—which he felt was a fitting tribute to his evocation of the past—he suggested going upstairs, Kermit declined.

“No, thank you; perhaps another time. You have given me a wonderful impression of the place—quite brought it to life.”

Satisfied with the testimonial, the caretaker let him go.

Increasingly in the months that followed he absorbed himself in the study of radiation. He took up again the mitogenetic radiation—the powerful rays which a number of Russian researchers had for long been maintaining were given out by growing seeds, which could affect the growth rate of other seeds near them and so greatly increase reproduction. As is not uncommon in pure research work, it became unexpectedly practical. Living as he did on the borders of a national forest, he found he was soon able to give some useful information and advice to the rangers in the planting of seedlings.

One ranger he found to have much the same cast of mind as his own. They came to work together partly because in that particular of forestry research they could interact, but, equally, because they shared the same general approach to life and its problems. Their uniting interest was the new ecology, the study of the invisible balance and constant interaction of the whole of the forest life, how vegetable and animal, carnivore and ruminant, the organic and the inorganic, the visible and the invisible were in incessant reciprocation.

“We rangers,” said the forester one evening, when after some work in the laboratory they were sitting out on the little patio-plateau watching the light fade, “we're going through a revolution in our job. Few years ago we all knew what to do—how to thin, prune, clear; stamp out that plant or animal, protect these. But now, with the present shift and at the present pace, we'll soon be nothing but observers, watching old ecology manage its own elaborate accounts. Talk of double entry! Nature keeps account-books that are so elaborate, you have to watch for years before you tumble to the fact that she
is
an accountant. But, by gum and resin, she is. Though when she'll actually strike a balance …”