The Unbearable Bassington by H. H. Munro (Saki)
Scanned and proofed by David Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

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 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