THE UNBEARABLE
BASSINGTON
:: BY H. H. MUNRO (“SAKI”) ::
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[Picture: Decorative graphic]
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LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN. MCMXIII
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_SIXTH EDITION_
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PRINTED BY JAS. TRUSCOTT & SON, LTD. LONDON
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story has no moral.
If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.
CHAPTER I
FRANCESCA BASSINGTON sat in the drawing-room of her house in Blue Street,
W., regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with China tea and
small cress sandwiches. The meal was of that elegant proportion which,
while ministering sympathetically to the desires of the moment, is
happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon and blessedly expectant of
an elaborate dinner to come.
In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful Miss
Greech; at forty, although much of the original beauty remained, she was
just dear Francesca Bassington. No one would have dreamed of calling her
sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew her were punctilious
about putting in the “dear.”
Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that she was
svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed with her friends
in asserting that she had no soul. When one’s friends and enemies agree
on any particular point they are usually wrong. Francesca herself, if
pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have
described her drawing-room. Not that she would have considered that the
one had stamped the impress of its character on the other, so that close
scrutiny might reveal its outstanding features, and even suggest its
hidden places, but because she might have dimly recognised that her
drawing-room was her soul.
Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have the
best intentions and never to carry them into practice. With the
advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to command a
more than average share of feminine happiness. So many of the things
that make for fretfulness, disappointment and discouragement in a woman’s
life were removed from her path that she might well have been considered
the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she
was not of the perverse band of those who make a rock-garden of their
souls by dragging into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles
they can find lying around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways and
pleasant places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright side
of things but to live there and stay there. And the fact that things
had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and cheated her of some
of her early illusions made her cling the closer to such good fortune as
remained to her now that she seemed to have reached a calmer period of
her life. To undiscriminating friends she appeared in the guise of a
rather selfish woman, but it was merely the selfishness of one who had
seen the happy and unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the
utmost what was left to her of the former. The vicissitudes of fortune
had not soured her, but they had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of
making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that immediately
pleased and amused her, or that recalled and perpetuated the pleasing and
successful incidents of other days. And it was her drawing-room in
particular that enshrined the memorials or tokens of past and present
happiness.
Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays and alcoves
had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious personal possessions and
trophies that had survived the buffetings and storms of a not very
tranquil married life. Wherever her eyes might turn she saw the embodied
results of her successes, economies, good luck, good management or good
taste. The battle had more than once gone against her, but she had
somehow always contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent
gaze could roam over object after object that represented the spoils of
victory or the salvage of honourable defeat. The delicious bronze
Fremiet on the mantelpiece had been the outcome of a Grand Prix
sweepstake of many years ago; a group of Dresden figures of some
considerable value had been bequeathed to her by a discreet admirer, who
had added death to his other kindnesses; another group had been a
self-bestowed present, purchased in blessed and unfading memory of a
wonderful nine-days’ bridge winnings at a country-house party. There
were old Persian and Bokharan rugs and Worcester tea-services of glowing
colour, and little treasures of antique silver that each enshrined a
history or a memory in addition to its own intrinsic value. It amused
her at times to think of the bygone craftsmen and artificers who had
hammered and wrought and woven in far distant countries and ages, to
produce the wonderful and beautiful things that had come, one way and
another, into her possession. Workers in the studios of medieval Italian
towns and of later Paris, in the bazaars of Baghdad and of Central Asia,
in old-time English workshops and German factories, in all manner of
queer hidden corners where craft secrets were jealously guarded, nameless
unremembered men and men whose names were world-renowned and deathless.
And above all her other treasures, dominating in her estimation every
other object that the room contained, was the great Van der Meulen that
had come from her father’s home as part of her wedding dowry. It fitted
exactly into the central wall panel above the narrow buhl cabinet, and
filled exactly its right space in the composition and balance of the
room. From wherever you sat it seemed to confront you as the dominating
feature of its surroundings. There was a pleasing serenity about the
great pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly warriors bestriding
their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely in
earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression that their campaigns
were but vast serious picnics arranged in the grand manner. Francesca
could not imagine the drawing-room without the crowning complement of the
stately well-hung picture, just as she could not imagine herself in any
other setting than this house in Blue Street with its crowded Pantheon of
cherished household gods.
And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the rose-leaf
damask of what might otherwise have been Francesca’s peace of mind.
One’s happiness always lies in the future rather than in the past. With
due deference to an esteemed lyrical authority one may safely say that a
sorrow’s crown of sorrow is anticipating unhappier things. The house in
Blue Street had been left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but
only until such time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it
was to pass to her as a wedding present. Emmeline was now seventeen and
passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could be
safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood. Beyond that
period lay chaos, the wrenching asunder of Francesca from the sheltering
habitation that had grown to be her soul. It is true that in imagination
she had built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single
span. The bridge in question was her schoolboy son Comus, now being
educated somewhere in the southern counties, or rather one should say the
bridge consisted of the possibility of his eventual marriage with
Emmeline, in which case Francesca saw herself still reigning, a trifle
squeezed and incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue
Street. The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon
light in its place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old
Worcester would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.
Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca sometimes
drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate drawing-room, where she
could put her own things. The details of the bridge structure had all
been carefully thought out. Only—it was an unfortunate circumstance that
Comus should have been the span on which everything balanced.
Francesca’s husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange Pagan
name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to the appropriateness,
or otherwise, of its significance. In seventeen years and some odd
months Francesca had had ample opportunity for forming an opinion
concerning her son’s characteristics. The spirit of mirthfulness which
one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a
twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself could seldom see
the humorous side. In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress
sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some
immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her.
He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and
lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale,
clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of
illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have
painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas
offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited. Instead
of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent in family
life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a
woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their one child had
the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even its parents
could consider worth repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament,
possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any
rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death
can produce the item “another by-election” on the news posters can be
wholly a nonentity. Henry, in short, who might have been an
embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and
counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on her
part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined woman often
feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel but frequently
followed it. When convenient, moreover, she repaid his loans.
Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with Henry
for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of the destiny
that had given her Comus for a son. The boy was one of those untameable
young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe themselves through nursery
and preparatory and public-school days with the utmost allowance of storm
and dust and dislocation and the least possible amount of collar-work,
and come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that has
reduced everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings.
Sometimes they sober down in after-life and become uninteresting,
forgetting that they were ever lords of anything; sometimes Fate plays
royally into their hands, and they do great things in a spacious manner,
and are thanked by Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day
crowds. But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave school
and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too civilised and too
crowded and too empty to have any place for them. And they are very
many.
Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and settled down
like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the fashionably prevalent
topics of the moment, the prevention of destitution.
“It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one might say,
at the present moment,” he observed, “but it is one that will have to
engage our serious attention and consideration before long. The first
thing that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and
academic way of approaching it. We must collect and assimilate hard
facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal to all thinking minds, and
yet, you know, I find it surprisingly difficult to interest people in
it.”
Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of sympathetic grunt
which was meant to indicate that she was, to a certain extent, listening
and appreciating. In reality she was reflecting that Henry possibly
found it difficult to interest people in any topic that he enlarged on.
His talents lay so thoroughly in the direction of being uninteresting,
that even as an eye-witness of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would
probably have infused a flavour of boredom into his descriptions of the
event.
“I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on this subject,”
continued Henry, “and I pointed out at some length a thing that few
people ever stop to consider—”
Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority that will
not stop to consider.
“Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were down there?” she
interrupted; “Eliza Barnet is rather taken up with all those subjects.”
In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas of life
and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is frequently to be
found between closely allied types and species. Eliza Barnet shared many
of Henry Greech’s political and social views, but she also shared his
fondness for pointing things out at some length; there had been occasions
when she had extensively occupied the strictly limited span allotted to
the platform oratory of a group of speakers of whom Henry Greech had been
an impatient unit. He might see eye to eye with her on the leading
questions of the day, but he persistently wore mental blinkers as far as
her estimable qualities were concerned, and the mention of her name was a
skilful lure drawn across the trail of his discourse; if Francesca had to
listen to his eloquence on any subject she much preferred that it should
be a disparagement of Eliza Barnet rather than the prevention of
destitution.
“I’ve no doubt she means well,” said Henry, “but it would be a good thing
if she could be induced to keep her own personality a little more in the
background, and not to imagine that she is the necessary mouthpiece of
all the progressive thought in the countryside. I fancy Canon Besomley
must have had her in his mind when he said that some people came into the
world to shake empires and others to move amendments.”
Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.
“I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the subjects she
talks about,” was her provocative comment.
Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being drawn out on
the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned on to a more
personal topic.
“From the general air of tranquillity about the house I presume Comus has
gone back to Thaleby,” he observed.
“Yes,” said Francesca, “he went back yesterday. Of course, I’m very fond
of him, but I bear the separation well. When he’s here it’s rather like
having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that in its quietest
moments asks incessant questions and uses strong scent.”
“It is only a temporary respite,” said Henry; “in a year or two he will
be leaving school, and then what?”
Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to shut out a
distressing vision. She was not fond of looking intimately at the future
in the presence of another person, especially when the future was draped
in doubtfully auspicious colours.
“And then what?” persisted Henry.
“Then I suppose he will be upon my hands.”
“Exactly.”
“Don’t sit there looking judicial. I’m quite ready to listen to
suggestions if you’ve any to make.”
“In the case of any ordinary boy,” said Henry, “I might make lots of
suggestions as to the finding of suitable employment. From what we know
of Comus it would be rather a waste of time for either of us to look for
jobs which he wouldn’t look at when we’d got them for him.”
“He must do something,” said Francesca.
“I know he must; but he never will. At least, he’ll never stick to
anything. The most hopeful thing to do with him will be to marry him to
an heiress. That would solve the financial side of his problem. If he
had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere
and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve
it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our
social misfits.”
Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout, was
scornfully superior on the subject of big game shooting.
Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion. “I don’t know about
an heiress,” she said reflectively. “There’s Emmeline Chetrof of course.
One could hardly call her an heiress, but she’s got a comfortable little
income of her own and I suppose something more will come to her from her
grandmother. Then, of course, you know this house goes to her when she
marries.”
“That would be very convenient,” said Henry, probably following a line of
thought that his sister had trodden many hundreds of times before him.
“Do she and Comus hit it off at all well together?”
“Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion,” said Francesca. “I must
arrange for them to see more of each other in future. By the way, that
little brother of hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to Thaleby this
term. I’ll write and tell Comus to be specially kind to him; that will
be a sure way to Emmeline’s heart. Comus has been made a prefect, you
know. Heaven knows why.”
“It can only be for prominence in games,” sniffed Henry; “I think we may
safely leave work and conduct out of the question.”
Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.
Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily scribbling a
letter to her son in which the delicate health, timid disposition and
other inevitable attributes of the new boy were brought to his notice,
and commanded to his care. When she had sealed and stamped the envelope
Henry uttered a belated caution.
“Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the boy to
Comus. He doesn’t always respond to directions you know.”
Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother’s
opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean unspoiled penny stamp is
probably yet unborn.