The Unbearable Bassington Part 5

"His selfishness is splendid but absolutely futile," said Youghal; "now my selfishness is commonplace, but always thoroughly practical and calculated. He will have great difficulty in getting the swans to accept his offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing us to a bread-and-b.u.t.terless condition. Incidentally he will get very hot."

Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled. If Youghal had said anything unkind it was about himself.

"If my cousin Suzette had been here," she observed, with the shadow of a malicious smile on her lips, "I believe she would have gone into a flood of tears at the loss of her bread-and-b.u.t.ter, and Comus would have figured ever after in her mind as something black and destroying and hateful. In fact I don't really know why we took our loss so unprotestingly."

"For two reasons," said Youghal; "you are rather fond of Comus. And I-am not very fond of bread-and-b.u.t.ter."

The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to Elaine's heart. She had known full well that she cared for Comus, but now that Courtenay Youghal had openly proclaimed the fact as something unchallenged and understood matters seemed placed at once on a more advanced footing. The warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a Heaven that held the secret of eternal happiness. Youth and comeliness would always walk here, under the low-boughed mulberry trees, as unchanging as the leaden otter that for ever preyed on the leaden salmon on the edge of the old fountain, and somehow the lovers would always wear the aspect of herself and the boy who was talking to the four white swans by the water steps. Youghal was right; this was the real Heaven of one's dreams and longings, immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise about which one professed utterly insincere hankerings in places of public worship.

Elaine drank her tea in a happy silence; besides being a brilliant talker Youghal understood the rarer art of being a non-talker on occasion.

Comus came back across the gra.s.s swinging the empty basket-dish in his hand.

"Swans were very pleased," he cried, gaily, "and said they hoped I would keep the bread-and-b.u.t.ter dish as a souvenir of a happy tea-party. I may really have it, mayn't I?" he continued in an anxious voice; "it will do to keep studs and things in. You don't want it."

"It's got the family crest on it," said Elaine. Some of the happiness had died out of her eyes.

"I'll have that scratched off and my own put on," said Comus.

"It's been in the family for generations," protested Elaine, who did not share Comus's view that because you were rich your lesser possessions could have no value in your eyes.

"I want it dreadfully," said Comus, sulkily, "and you've heaps of other things to put bread-and-b.u.t.ter in."

For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to keep the dish at all costs; a look of greedy determination dominated his face, and he had not for an instant relaxed his grip of the coveted object.

Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily telling herself that it was absurd to be put out over such a trifle; at the same moment a sense of justice was telling her that Comus was displaying a good deal of rather shabby selfishness. And somehow her chief anxiety at the moment was to keep Courtenay Youghal from seeing that she was angry.

"I know you don't really want it, so I'm going to keep it," persisted Comus.

"It's too hot to argue," said Elaine.

"Happy mistress of your destinies," laughed Youghal; "you can suit your disputations to the desired time and temperature. I have to go and argue, or what is worse, listen to other people's arguments, in a hot and doctored atmosphere suitable to an invalid lizard."

"You haven't got to argue about a bread-and-b.u.t.ter dish," said Elaine.

"Chiefly about bread-and-b.u.t.ter," said Youghal; "our great preoccupation is other people's bread-and-b.u.t.ter. They earn or produce the material, but we busy ourselves with making rules how it shall be cut up, and the size of the slices, and how much b.u.t.ter shall go on how much bread. That is what is called legislation. If we could only make rules as to how the bread-and-b.u.t.ter should be digested we should be quite happy."

Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something to be treated with cheerful solemnity, like illness or family re-unions.

Youghal's flippant disparagement of the career in which he was involved did not, however, jar on her susceptibilities. She knew him to be not only a lively and effective debater but an industrious worker on committees. If he made light of his labours, at least he afforded no one else a loophole for doing so. And certainly, the Parliamentary atmosphere was not inviting on this hot afternoon.

"When must you go?" she asked, sympathetically.

Youghal looked ruefully at his watch. Before he could answer, a cheerful hoot came through the air, as of an owl joyously challenging the sunlight with a foreboding of the coming night. He sprang laughing to his feet.

"Listen! My summons back to my galley," he cried. "The G.o.ds have given me an hour in this enchanted garden, so I must not complain."

Then in a lower voice he almost whispered, "It's the Persian debate to-night."

It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking and laughing that he was really keenly enthralled in the work that lay before him. It was the one little intimate touch that gave Elaine the knowledge that he cared for her opinion of his work.

Comus, who had emptied his cigarette-case, became suddenly clamorous at the prospect of being temporarily stranded without a smoke. Youghal took the last remaining cigarette from his own case and gravely bisected it.

"Friendship could go no further," he observed, as he gave one-half to the doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit the other himself.

"There are heaps more in the hall," said Elaine.

"It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours effect," said Youghal; "I hate smoking when I'm rushing through the air. Good-bye."

The departing galley-slave stepped forth into the sunlight, radiant and confident. A few minutes later Elaine could see glimpses of his white car as it rushed past the rhododendron bushes. He woos best who leaves first, particularly if he goes forth to battle or the semblance of battle.

Somehow Elaine's garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded in its imagery. The girl-figure who walked in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and undefined, as a picture that has been superimposed on another.

Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself. To-morrow, he reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her morning paper, and he knew in advance that it was not going to be one of his worst efforts. He knew almost exactly where the punctuations of laughter and applause would burst in, he knew that nimble fingers in the Press Gallery would be taking down each gibe and argument as he flung it at the impa.s.sive Minister confronting him, and that the fair lady of his desire would be able to judge what manner of young man this was who spent his afternoon in her garden, lazily chaffing himself and his world.

And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she would be vividly reminded of Comus for days to come, when she took her afternoon tea, and saw the bread-and-b.u.t.ter reposing in an unaccustomed dish.

CHAPTER VII

TOWARDS four o'clock on a hot afternoon Francesca stepped out from a shop entrance near the Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran almost into the arms of Merla Blathlington. The afternoon seemed to get instantly hotter. Merla was one of those human flies that buzz; in crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she attained to the proportions of a human bluebottle. Lady Caroline Benaresq had openly predicted that a special fly-paper was being reserved for her accommodation in another world; others, however, held the opinion that she would be miraculously multiplied in a future state, and that four or more Merla Blathlingtons, according to deserts, would be in perpetual and unremitting attendance on each lost soul.

"Here we are," she cried, with a glad eager buzz, "popping in and out of shops like rabbits; not that rabbits do pop in and out of shops very extensively."

It was evidently one of her bluebottle days.

"Don't you love Bond Street?" she gabbled on. "There's something so unusual and distinctive about it; no other street anywhere else is quite like it. Don't you know those ikons and images and things scattered up and down Europe, that are supposed to have been painted or carved, as the case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus, or somebody of that sort; I always like to think that some notable person of those times designed Bond Street. St. Paul, perhaps. He travelled about a lot."

"Not in Middles.e.x, though," said Francesca.

"One can't be sure," persisted Merla; "when one wanders about as much as he did one gets mixed up and forgets where one _has_ been. I can never remember whether I've been to the Tyrol twice and St. Moritz once, or the other way about; I always have to ask my maid. And there's something about the name Bond that suggests St. Paul; didn't he write a lot about the bond and the free?"

"I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek," objected Francesca; "the word wouldn't have the least resemblance."

"So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering in those bizarre languages," complained Merla; "that's what makes all those people so elusive. As soon as you try to pin them down to a definite statement about anything you're told that some vitally important word has fifteen other meanings in the original. I wonder our Cabinet Ministers and politicians don't adopt a sort of dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to deliver their speeches in; what a lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved. But to go back to Bond Street-not that we've left it-"

"I'm afraid I must leave it now," said Francesca, preparing to turn up Grafton Street; "Good-bye."

"Must you be going? Come and have tea somewhere. I know of a cosy little place where one can talk undisturbed."

Francesca repressed a shudder and pleaded an urgent engagement.

"I know where you're going," said Merla, with the resentful buzz of a bluebottle that finds itself thwarted by the cold unreasoning resistance of a windowpane. "You're going to play bridge at Serena Golackly's. She never asks me to her bridge parties."

Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having to play bridge anywhere in the near neighbourhood of Merla's voice was not one that could be contemplated with ordinary calmness.

"Good-bye," she said again firmly, and pa.s.sed out of earshot; it was rather like leaving the machinery section of an exhibition. Merla's diagnosis of her destination had been a correct one; Francesca made her way slowly through the hot streets in the direction of Serena Golackly's house on the far side of Berkeley Square. To the blessed certainty of finding a game of bridge, she hopefully added the possibility of hearing some fragments of news which might prove interesting and enlightening.

And of enlightenment on a particular subject, in which she was acutely and personally interested, she stood in some need. Comus of late had been provokingly reticent as to his movements and doings; partly, perhaps, because it was his nature to be provoking, partly because the daily bickerings over money matters were gradually choking other forms of conversation. Francesca had seen him once or twice in the Park in the desirable company of Elaine de Frey, and from time to time she heard of the young people as having danced together at various houses; on the other hand, she had seen and heard quite as much evidence to connect the heiress's name with that of Courtenay Youghal. Beyond this meagre and conflicting and altogether tantalising information, her knowledge of the present position of affairs did not go. If either of the young men was seriously "making the running," it was probable that she would hear some sly hint or open comment about it from one of Serena's gossip-laden friends, without having to go out of her way to introduce the subject and unduly disclose her own state of ignorance. And a game of bridge, played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an embarra.s.singly inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in a defensive spade.