The Unbearable Bassington | Page 8

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