Executioners: A Silent Murder

EXECUTION 36

She closed the instrument.

“Not very dutiful,” said her mother’s voice.

Fearing that she had offended Cecil, she turned quickly round. There George was. He had crept in without interrupting her.

“Oh, I had no idea!” she exclaimed, getting very red; and then, without a word of greeting, she reopened the piano. Cecil should have the Parsifal, and anything else that he liked.

“Our performer has changed her mind,” said Miss Bartlett, perhaps implying, she will play the music to Mr. Emerson. Lucy did not know what to do nor even what she wanted to do. She played a few bars of the Flower Maidens’ song very badly and then she stopped.

“I vote tennis,” said Freddy, disgusted at the scrappy entertainment.

“Yes, so do I.” Once more she closed the unfortunate piano. “I vote you have a men’s four.”

“All right.”

“Not for me, thank you,” said Cecil. “I will not spoil the set.” He never realized that it may be an act of kindness in a bad player to make up a fourth.

“Oh, come along Cecil. I’m bad, Floyd’s rotten, and so I dare say’s Emerson.”

George corrected him: “I am not bad.”

One looked down one’s nose at this. “Then certainly I won’t play,” said Cecil, while Miss Bartlett, under the impression that she was snubbing George, added: “I agree with you, Mr. Vyse. You had much better not play. Much better not.”

Minnie, rushing in where Cecil feared to tread, announced that she would play. “I shall miss every ball anyway, so what does it matter?” But Sunday intervened and stamped heavily upon the kindly suggestion.

“Then it will have to be Lucy,” said Mrs. Honeychurch; “you must fall back on Lucy. There is no other way out of it. Lucy, go and change your frock.”

Lucy’s Sabbath was generally of this amphibious nature. She kept it without hypocrisy in the morning, and broke it without reluctance in the afternoon. As she changed her frock, she wondered whether Cecil was sneering at her; really she must overhaul herself and settle everything up before she married him.

Mr. Floyd was her partner. She liked music, but how much better tennis seemed. How much better to run about in comfortable clothes than to sit at the piano and feel girt under the arms. Once more music appeared to her the employment of a child. George served, and surprised her by his anxiety to win. She remembered how he had sighed among the tombs at Santa Croce because things wouldn’t fit; how after the death of that obscure Italian he had leant over the parapet by the Arno and said to her: “I shall want to live, I tell you.” He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to stand for all he was worth in the sun—the sun which had begun to decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win.

Ah, how beautiful the Weald looked! The hills stood out above its radiance, as Fiesole stands above the Tuscan Plain, and the South Downs, if one chose, were the mountains of Carrara. She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England. One could play a new game with the view, and try to find in its innumerable folds some town or village that would do for Florence. Ah, how beautiful the Weald looked!

But now Cecil claimed her. He chanced to be in a lucid critical mood, and would not sympathize with exaltation. He had been rather a nuisance all through the tennis, for the novel that he was reading was so bad that he was obliged to read it aloud to others. He would stroll round the precincts of the court and call out: “I say, listen to this, Lucy. Three split infinitives.”

“Dreadful!” said Lucy, and missed her stroke. When they had finished their set, he still went on reading; there was some murder scene, and really everyone must listen to it. Freddy and Mr. Floyd were obliged to hunt for a lost ball in the laurels, but the other two acquiesced.

“The scene is laid in Florence.”

“What fun, Cecil! Read away. Come, Mr. Emerson, sit down after all your energy.” She had “forgiven” George, as she put it, and she made a point of being pleasant to him.

He jumped over the net and sat down at her feet asking: “You—and are you tired?”

“Of course I’m not!”

“Do you mind being beaten?”

She was going to answer, “No,” when it struck her that she did mind, so she answered, “Yes.” She added merrily, “I don’t see you’re such a splendid player, though. The light was behind you, and it was in my eyes.”

“I never said I was.”

“Why, you did!”

“You didn’t attend.”

“You said—oh, don’t go in for accuracy at this house. We all exaggerate, and we get very angry with people who don’t.”

“‘The scene is laid in Florence,’” repeated Cecil, with an upward note.

Lucy recollected herself.

“‘Sunset. Leonora was speeding—‘”

Lucy interrupted. “Leonora? Is Leonora the heroine? Who’s the book by?”

“Joseph Emery Prank. ‘Sunset. Leonora speeding across the square. Pray the saints she might not arrive too late. Sunset—the sunset of Italy. Under Orcagna’s Loggia—the Loggia de’ Lanzi, as we sometimes call it now—‘”

Lucy burst into laughter. “‘Joseph Emery Prank’ indeed! Why it’s Miss Lavish! It’s Miss Lavish’s novel, and she’s publishing it under somebody else’s name.”

“Who may Miss Lavish be?”

“Oh, a dreadful person—Mr. Emerson, you remember Miss Lavish?”

Excited by her pleasant afternoon, she clapped her hands.

George looked up. “Of course I do. I saw her the day I arrived at Summer Street. It was she who told me that you lived here.”

“Weren’t you pleased?” She meant “to see Miss Lavish,” but when he bent down to the grass without replying, it struck her that she could mean something else. She watched his head, which was almost resting against her knee, and she thought that the ears were reddening. “No wonder the novel’s bad,” she added. “I never liked Miss Lavish. But I suppose one ought to read it as one’s met her.”

“All modern books are bad,” said Cecil, who was annoyed at her inattention, and vented his annoyance on literature. “Every one writes for money in these days.”

“Oh, Cecil—!”

“It is so. I will inflict Joseph Emery Prank on you no longer.”

Cecil, this afternoon seemed such a twittering sparrow. The ups and downs in his voice were noticeable, but they did not affect her. She had dwelt amongst melody and movement, and her nerves refused to answer to the clang of his. Leaving him to be annoyed, she gazed at the black head again. She did not want to stroke it, but she saw herself wanting to stroke it; the sensation was curious.