The Unbearable Bassington | Page 3

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