The Unbearable Bassington

by "Saki" [H. H. Munro]
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

bridgestructure 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