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.
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,
