ON the evening of a certain November day, two years after the events
heretofore chronicled, Francesca Bassington steered her way through the
crowd that filled the rooms of her friend Serena Golackly, bestowing nods
of vague recognition as she went, but with eyes that were obviously
intent on focussing one particular figure. Parliament had pulled its
energies together for an Autumn Session, and both political Parties were
fairly well represented in the throng. Serena had a harmless way of
inviting a number of more or less public men and women to her house, and
hoping that if you left them together long enough they would constitute a
_salon_. In pursuance of the same instinct she planted the flower
borders at her week-end cottage retreat in Surrey with a large mixture of
bulbs, and called the result a Dutch garden. Unfortunately, though you
may bring brilliant talkers into your home, you cannot always make them
talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you cannot restrict
the output of those starling-voiced dullards who seem to have, on all
subjects, so much to say that was well worth leaving unsaid. One group
that Francesca passed was discussing a Spanish painter, who was
forty-three, and had painted thousands of square yards of canvas in his
time, but of whom no one in London had heard till a few months ago; now
the starling-voices seemed determined that one should hear of very little
else. Three women knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt
that she must go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures,
another had noticed that there were always pomegranates in his later
compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar knew what the
pomegranates “meant.” “What I think so splendid about him,” said a stout
lady in a loud challenging voice, “is the way he defies all the
conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions stand for.”
“Ah, but have you noticed—” put in the man with the atrocious collar, and
Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering dimly as she went, what people
found so unsupportable in the affliction of deafness. Her progress was
impeded for a moment by a couple engaged in earnest and voluble
discussion of some smouldering question of the day; a thin spectacled
young man with the receding forehead that so often denotes advanced
opinions, was talking to a spectacled young woman with a similar type of
forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair. It was her ambition in life to be
taken for a Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of patient
research in trying to find out exactly where you put the tea-leaves in a
samovar. She had once been introduced to a young Jewess from Odessa, who
had died of pneumonia the following week; the experience, slight as it
was, constituted the spectacled young lady an authority on all things
Russian in the eyes of her immediate set.
“Talk is helpful, talk is needful,” the young man was saying, “but what
we have got to do is to lift the subject out of the furrow of
indisciplined talk and place it on the threshing-floor of practical
discussion.”
The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to dash in
with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip of her tongue.
“In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid the
mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into when liberating the
serfs of the soil.”
She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but recovered
her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level terms with the young
man, who had jumped into the stride of his next sentence.
“They got off to a good start that time,” said Francesca to herself; “I
suppose it’s the Prevention of Destitution they’re hammering at. What on
earth would become of these dear good people if anyone started a crusade
for the prevention of mediocrity?”
Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an elusive
presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and the shadow of a
frown passed across her face. The object of her faintly signalled
displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spur-winner who seemed
absurdly youthful to a generation that had never heard of Pitt. It was
Youghal’s ambition—or perhaps his hobby—to infuse into the greyness of
modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered
with the correctness of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the
flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him. His
success was only a half-measure. The public missed in him that touch of
blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men; the decorative
smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the lively sparkle of his
epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained sumptuousness
of his waistcoats and cravats were as wasted efforts. If he had
habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece, or worn spats of
Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting-man, and the gush of the
paragraph-makers might have been unreservedly his. The art of public
life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and
going a bit further.
It was not Youghal’s lack of political sagacity that had brought the
momentary look of disapproval into Francesca’s face. The fact was that
Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was now a social problem,
had lately enrolled himself among the young politician’s associates and
admirers, and as the boy knew and cared nothing about politics, and
merely copied Youghal’s waistcoats, and, less successfully, his
conversation, Francesca felt herself justified in deploring the intimacy.
To a woman who dressed well on comparatively nothing a year it was an
anxious experience to have a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely
nothing.
The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of the
offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of gratified
achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a
portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her
in the rather meagre group that he had gathered about him.
“We were just talking about my new charge,” he observed genially,
including in the “we” his somewhat depressed-looking listeners, who in
all human probability had done none of the talking. “I was just telling
them, and you may be interested to hear this—”
Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an ingratiating
smile, though the character of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear and
will not hearken, seemed to her at that moment a beautiful one.
Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons distinguished for
its high standard of well-informed mediocrity, and had harmonised so
thoroughly with his surroundings that the most attentive observer of
Parliamentary proceedings could scarcely have told even on which side of
the House he sat. A baronetcy bestowed on him by the Party in power had
at least removed that doubt; some weeks later he had been made Governor
of some West Indian dependency, whether as a reward for having accepted
the baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that West Indian islands
get the Governors they deserve, it would have been hard to say. To Sir
Julian the appointment was, doubtless, one of some importance; during the
span of his Governorship the island might possibly be visited by a member
of the Royal Family, or at the least by an earthquake, and in either case
his name would get into the papers. To the public the matter was one of
absolute indifference; “who is he and where is it?” would have correctly
epitomised the sum total of general information on the personal and
geographical aspects of the case.
Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the likelihood of
the appointment, had taken a deep and lively interest in Sir Julian. As
a Member of Parliament he had not filled any very pressing social want in
her life, and on the rare occasions when she took tea on the Terrace of
the House she was wont to lapse into rapt contemplation of St. Thomas’s
Hospital whenever she saw him within bowing distance. But as Governor of
an island he would, of course, want a private secretary, and as a friend
and colleague of Henry Greech, to whom he was indebted for many little
acts of political support (they had once jointly drafted an amendment
which had been ruled out of order), what was more natural and proper than
that he should let his choice fall on Henry’s nephew Comus? While
privately doubting whether the boy would make the sort of secretary that
any public man would esteem as a treasure, Henry was thoroughly in
agreement with Francesca as to the excellence and desirability of an
arrangement which would transplant that troublesome’ young animal from
the too restricted and conspicuous area that centres in the parish of St.
James’s to some misty corner of the British dominion overseas. Brother
and sister had conspired to give an elaborate and at the same time cosy
little luncheon to Sir Julian on the very day that his appointment was
officially announced, and the question of the secretaryship had been
mooted and sedulously fostered as occasion permitted, until all that was
now needed to clinch the matter was a formal interview between His
Excellency and Comus. The boy had from the first shewn very little
gratification at the prospect of his deportation. To live on a remote
shark-girt island, as he expressed it, with the Jull family as his chief
social mainstay, and Sir Julian’s conversation as a daily item of his
existence, did not inspire him with the same degree of enthusiasm as was
displayed by his mother and uncle, who, after all, were not making the
experiment. Even the necessity for an entirely new outfit did not appeal
to his imagination with the force that might have been expected. But,
however lukewarm his adhesion to the project might be, Francesca and her
brother were clearly determined that no lack of deft persistence on their
part should endanger its success. It was for the purpose of reminding
Sir Julian of his promise to meet Comus at lunch on the following day,
and definitely settle the matter of the secretaryship that Francesca was
now enduring the ordeal of a long harangue on the value of the West
Indian group as an Imperial asset. Other listeners dexterously detached
themselves one by one, but Francesca’s patience outlasted even Sir
Julian’s flow of commonplaces, and her devotion was duly rewarded by a
renewed acknowledgment of the lunch engagement and its purpose. She
pushed her way back through the throng of starling-voiced chatterers
fortified by a sense of well-earned victory. Dear Serena’s absurd
_salons_ served some good purpose after all.
Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only just
beginning to mobilise on the breakfast-table next morning when a copy of
_The Times_, sent by special messenger from her brother’s house, was
brought up to her room. A heavy margin of blue pencilling drew her
attention to a prominently-printed letter which bore the ironical
heading: “Julian Jull, Proconsul.” The matter of the letter was a cruel
dis-interment of some fatuous and forgotten speeches made by Sir Julian
to his constituents not many years ago, in which the value of some of our
Colonial possessions, particularly certain West Indian islands, was
decried in a medley of pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour.
The extracts given sounded weak and foolish enough, taken by themselves,
but the writer of the letter had interlarded them with comments of his
own, which sparkled with an ironical brilliance that was Cervantes-like
in its polished cruelty. Remembering her ordeal of the previous evening
Francesca permitted herself a certain feeling of amusement as she read
the merciless stabs inflicted on the newly-appointed Governor; then she
came to the signature at the foot of the letter, and the laughter died
out of her eyes. “Comus Bassington” stared at her from above a thick
layer of blue pencil lines marked by Henry Greech’s shaking hand.
Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could have written
an Episcopal charge to the clergy of any given diocese. It was obviously
the work of Courtenay Youghal, and Comus, for a palpable purpose of his
own, had wheedled him into foregoing for once the pride of authorship in
a clever piece of political raillery, and letting his young friend stand
sponsor instead. It was a daring stroke, and there could be no question
as to its success; the secretaryship and the distant shark-girt island
faded away into the horizon of impossible things. Francesca, forgetting
the golden rule of strategy which enjoins a careful choosing of ground
and opportunity before entering on hostilities, made straight for the
bathroom door, behind which a lively din of splashing betokened that
Comus had at least begun his toilet.
“You wicked boy, what have you done?” she cried, reproachfully.
“Me washee,” came a cheerful shout; “me washee from the neck all the way
down to the merrythought, and now washee down from the merrythought to—”
“You have ruined your future. _The Times_ has printed that miserable
letter with your signature.”
A loud squeal of joy came from the bath. “Oh, Mummy! Let me see!”
There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering hastily out
of the bath. Francesca fled. One cannot effectively scold a moist
nineteen-year old boy clad only in a bath-towel and a cloud of steam.
Another messenger arrived before Francesca’s breakfast was over. This
one brought a letter from Sir Julian Jull, excusing himself from
fulfilment of the luncheon engagement.