The Unbearable Bassington | Page 7

the victim, "and much tighter.
Don't trouble to look pleasant, because I can't see your face anyway. It
may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going to hurt you much
more than it will hurt me."

There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was made
vividly aware of what a good cane can be made to do in really efficient
hands. At the second cut he projected himself hurriedly off the chair.
"Now I've lost count," said Comus; "we shall have to begin all over
again. Kindly get back into the same position. If you get down again
before I've finished Rutley will hold you over and you'll get a dozen."
Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the taste of
his executioner. He stayed there somehow or other while Comus made
eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots at the chalk line.
"By the way," he said to his gasping and gulping victim when the
infliction was over, "you said Chetrof, didn't you? I believe I've been
asked to be kind to you. As a beginning you can clean out my study this
afternoon. Be awfully careful how you dust the old china. If you break
any don't come and tell me but just go and drown yourself somewhere;
it will save you from a worse fate."
"I don't know where your study is," said Lancelot between his chokes.
"You'd better find it or I shall have to beat you, really hard this time.
Here, you'd better keep this chalk in your pocket, it's sure to come in
handy later on. Don't stop to thank me for all I've done, it only
embarrasses me."
As Comus hadn't got a study Lancelot spent a feverish half-hour in
looking for it, incidentally missing another footer practice.
"Everything is very jolly here," wrote Lancelot to his sister Emmeline.
"The prefects can give you an awful hot time if they like, but most of
them are rather decent. Some are Beasts. Bassington is a prefect though
only a junior one. He is the Limit as Beasts go. At least I think so."
Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in the gaps
for herself with the lavish splendour of feminine imagination.
Francesca's bridge went crashing into the abyss.

CHAPTER III

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