The Unbearable Bassington

The Unbearable Bassington

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Title: The Unbearable Bassington
Author: Saki
Release Date: Jun, 1996 [EBook #555] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 7, 1996]
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UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON ***

Transcribed from the 1913 John Lane edition by David Price, email
[email protected]

THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON

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