Executioners: A Silent Murder

EXECUTION 20

“Have you heard?” shouted Mrs. Honeychurch as she toiled up the sloping garden. “Oh, Mr. Beebe, have you heard the news?”

Freddy, now full of geniality, whistled the wedding march. Youth seldom criticizes the accomplished fact.

“Indeed I have!” he cried. He looked at Lucy. In her presence he could not act the parson any longer—at all events not without apology. “Mrs. Honeychurch, I’m going to do what I am always supposed to do, but generally I’m too shy. I want to invoke every kind of blessing on them, grave and gay, great and small. I want them all their lives to be supremely good and supremely happy as husband and wife, as father and mother. And now I want my tea.”

“You only asked for it just in time,” the lady retorted. “How dare you be serious at Windy Corner?”

He took his tone from her. There was no more heavy beneficence, no more attempts to dignify the situation with poetry or the Scriptures. None of them dared or was able to be serious any more.

An engagement is so potent a thing that sooner or later it reduces all who speak of it to this state of cheerful awe. Away from it, in the solitude of their rooms, Mr. Beebe, and even Freddy, might again be critical. But in its presence and in the presence of each other they were sincerely hilarious. It has a strange power, for it compels not only the lips, but the very heart. The chief parallel to compare one great thing with another—is the power over us of a temple of some alien creed. Standing outside, we deride or oppose it, or at the most feel sentimental. Inside, though the saints and gods are not ours, we become true believers, in case any true believer should be present.

So it was that after the gropings and the misgivings of the afternoon they pulled themselves together and settled down to a very pleasant tea-party. If they were hypocrites they did not know it, and their hypocrisy had every chance of setting and of becoming true. Anne, putting down each plate as if it were a wedding present, stimulated them greatly. They could not lag behind that smile of hers which she gave them ere she kicked the drawing-room door. Mr. Beebe chirruped. Freddy was at his wittiest, referring to Cecil as the “Fiasco”—family honoured pun on fiance. Mrs. Honeychurch, amusing and portly, promised well as a mother-in-law. As for Lucy and Cecil, for whom the temple had been built, they also joined in the merry ritual, but waited, as earnest worshippers should, for the disclosure of some holier shrine of joy.

A few days after the engagement was announced Mrs. Honeychurch made Lucy and her Fiasco come to a little garden-party in the neighbourhood, for naturally she wanted to show people that her daughter was marrying a presentable man.

Cecil was more than presentable; he looked distinguished, and it was very pleasant to see his slim figure keeping step with Lucy, and his long, fair face responding when Lucy spoke to him. People congratulated Mrs. Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder, but it pleased her, and she introduced Cecil rather indiscriminately to some stuffy dowagers.

At tea a misfortune took place: a cup of coffee was upset over Lucy’s figured silk, and though Lucy feigned indifference, her mother feigned nothing of the sort but dragged her indoors to have the frock treated by a sympathetic maid. They were gone some time, and Cecil was left with the dowagers. When they returned he was not as pleasant as he had been.

“Do you go to much of this sort of thing?” he asked when they were driving home.

“Oh, now and then,” said Lucy, who had rather enjoyed herself.

“Is it typical of country society?”

“I suppose so. Mother, would it be?”

“Plenty of society,” said Mrs. Honeychurch, who was trying to remember the hang of one of the dresses.

Seeing that her thoughts were elsewhere, Cecil bent towards Lucy and said:

“To me it seemed perfectly appalling, disastrous, portentous.”

“I am so sorry that you were stranded.”

“Not that, but the congratulations. It is so disgusting, the way an engagement is regarded as public property—a kind of waste place where every outsider may shoot his vulgar sentiment. All those old women smirking!”

“One has to go through it, I suppose. They won’t notice us so much next time.”

“But my point is that their whole attitude is wrong. An engagement—horrid word in the first place—is a private matter, and should be treated as such.”

Yet the smirking old women, however wrong individually, were racially correct. The spirit of the generations had smiled through them, rejoicing in the engagement of Cecil and Lucy because it promised the continuance of life on earth. To Cecil and Lucy it promised something quite different—personal love. Hence Cecil’s irritation and Lucy’s belief that his irritation was just.

“How tiresome!” she said. “Couldn’t you have escaped to tennis?”

“I don’t play tennis—at least, not in public. The neighbourhood is deprived of the romance of me being athletic. Such romance as I have is that of the Inglese Italianato.”

“Inglese Italianato?”

“E un diavolo incarnato! You know the proverb?”

She did not. Nor did it seem applicable to a young man who had spent a quiet winter in Rome with his mother. But Cecil, since his engagement, had taken to affect a cosmopolitan naughtiness which he was far from possessing.

“Well,” said he, “I cannot help it if they do disapprove of me. There are certain irremovable barriers between myself and them, and I must accept them.”

“We all have our limitations, I suppose,” said wise Lucy.

“Sometimes they are forced on us, though,” said Cecil, who saw from her remark that she did not quite understand his position.

“How?”

“It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?”

She thought a moment, and agreed that it did make a difference.

“Difference?” cried Mrs. Honeychurch, suddenly alert. “I don’t see any difference. Fences are fences, especially when they are in the same place.”

“We were speaking of motives,” said Cecil, on whom the interruption jarred.

“My dear Cecil, look here.” She spread out her knees and perched her card-case on her lap. “This is me. That’s Windy Corner. The rest of the pattern is the other people. Motives are all very well, but the fence comes here.”

“We weren’t talking of real fences,” said Lucy, laughing.

“Oh, I see, dear—poetry.”

She leant placidly back. Cecil wondered why Lucy had been amused.

“I tell you who has no ‘fences,’ as you call them,” she said, “and that’s Mr. Beebe.”

“A parson fenceless would mean a parson defenceless.”

Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect what they meant. She missed Cecil’s epigram, but grasped the feeling that prompted it.

“Don’t you like Mr. Beebe?” she asked thoughtfully.

“I never said so!” he cried. “I consider him far above the average. I only denied—” And he swept off on the subject of fences again, and was brilliant.

“Now, a clergyman that I do hate,” said she wanting to say something sympathetic, “a clergyman that does have fences, and the most dreadful ones, is Mr. Eager, the English chaplain at Florence. He was truly insincere—not merely the manner unfortunate. He was a snob, and so conceited, and he did say such unkind things.”

“What sort of things?”

“There was an old man at the Bertolini whom he said had murdered his wife.”

“Perhaps he had.”

“No!”

“Why ‘no’?”

“He was such a nice old man, I’m sure.”

Cecil laughed at her feminine inconsequence.

“Well, I did try to sift the thing. Mr. Eager would never come to the point. He prefers it vague—said the old man had ‘practically’ murdered his wife—had murdered her in the sight of God.”

“Hush, dear!” said Mrs. Honeychurch absently.

“But isn’t it intolerable that a person whom we’re told to imitate should go round spreading slander? It was, I believe, chiefly owing to him that the old man was dropped. People pretended he was vulgar, but he certainly wasn’t that.”

“Poor old man! What was his name?”

“Harris,” said Lucy glibly.

“Let’s hope that Mrs. Harris there warn’t no sich person,” said her mother.

Cecil nodded intelligently.

“Isn’t Mr. Eager a parson of the cultured type?” he asked.