Chapter VII

In the course of the following year Mrs. Vandeleur acquired two new “attachés,” as Joan not unhumorously dubbed her mother’s satellites. Artistically these latest recruits were on quite a different plane from the very minor young men whom Mrs. Vandeleur had hitherto patronised, for Eustace Chalfont was an accepted English poet, although his slender work lay chiefly in the past, while Davidovitch ranked with the first two or three of the coming pianists. Thus both men had a recognised position, but there the likeness between them ended. For Davidovitch was an un-Jewish-looking young Jew, with a square, plain head, closely cropped in defiance of musical tradition, and usually rather silent, while Chalfont, an un-English-looking Englishman, talkative and emotional, was obviously struggling against the approaches of middle-age and still possessed extreme good looks despite the ravages of dissipation.

It may have been because Joan Vandeleur already knew her mother’s latest friends by reputation, that she showed more interest in them than she usually bestowed on the vague, strange youths who permeated the boudoir. “I saw Mr. Chalfont this afternoon; he had come to tea with Mother,” she informed her grandmother after the first meeting.

“Not Eustace Chalfont the poet?” Mrs. Lennox could hardly believe her ears. Once, long ago, there had been a young actress in the company, who became acquainted with Chalfont when he first came over from Europe, and used afterwards to rave fatuously over him. But even in those days there were unpleasant stories about the new Adonis. How could her daughter have taken him up and exposed Joan to his influence? “Well, what is Mr. Chalfont like?” she asked, trying to gauge the impression he had made on the girl.

“Horrible--like a blackbeetle.”

“A blackbeetle!” The grandmother was surprised, if relieved. “But I thought he was so beautiful, with a Greek profile and ambrosial locks?”

“Mr. Chalfont beautiful!” It was now Joan’s turn to be surprised. “Why, Granny, he’s hideous. He’s getting fat and he’s getting bald, and his face is all covered with pimples.”

“Poor man, he does sound homely.” Mrs. Lennox felt that all anxiety could be put aside. Still it would be better to thresh out the subject. “He has written some beautiful verse,” she suggested. “I once knew a girl who used to recite it. There was one piece about a dead baby; I’ve forgotten the name, but I know it used to make me weep.”

“Wasn’t it ‘A little Lily on the Madonna’s Shrine?’ That’s in our school anthology. It is beautiful.” Joan’s voice was grudging. “I don’t see how that spotty man could have written it, but I suppose he was different when he was young. And now he’s gone and spoilt all his poetry for me, so that’s another reason why I hate him.”

The conversation left Mrs. Lennox thoughtful. It was curious, as Joan had said, how a man like that could write such beautiful things--or rather could have written them. For of late years Eustace Chalfont did seem to have dropped out poetically. Mrs. Lennox was not a great reader, but if he had published anything of importance she would surely have heard of it. In the days when, through her friend, she had come into a second-hand intimacy with him, he preached, and also practised, that freedom from all restraint was necessary to an artist’s full development. It almost seemed as if in his case this freedom, instead of developing the artist, had killed him. Was Imogen ignorant of his reputation, Mrs. Lennox again wondered. She had better speak to her daughter about it.

The interview was not a success. Imogen was coldly furious. “Really, Mother, I am old enough to choose my own friends without your interference,” she observed. When Mrs. Lennox murmured that the poet was hardly a fit person for Joan to meet, Imogen retorted that she would forbid Joan to come into the room when he was there. “You and John are such Pharisees!” The unexpectedness of the thrust, and to be thus coupled with her disapproving son-in-law reduced Mrs. Lennox to sudden laughter, which irritated Imogen still further.

Over Mendel Davidovitch, on the contrary, Joan was unexpectedly enthusiastic. “He’s real, Granny,” she informed Mrs. Lennox. “He isn’t just one of Mother’s geniuses, he really can play.” Imogen had always proclaimed that her daughter had absolutely no soul for music. Now she was astounded by the girl asking if she might come into the boudoir when Davidovitch was playing. Joan’s desire must have been strong indeed, for she evidently disliked making the request as much as her mother disliked granting it. Indeed, had Imogen been able to think of any valid reason for refusing, she would have done so. She had never quite forgiven Joan for existing at all, and now there was, in addition, the chronological inconvenience of possessing a daughter of fourteen who looked seventeen, while she herself might otherwise have passed for twenty-four. Moreover, Imogen never felt quite comfortable in the child’s presence. Joan had an embarrassing habit of fastening her eyes on the person who was speaking, with a gaze of aloof and amused interest. Somehow her mother’s soulful remarks broke down under the strain. “Well, you can come in and listen to Davidovitch playing, if you sit absolutely quiet and don’t stare,” Imogen conceded grudgingly.

The young pianist had made a practice of coming every afternoon for a couple of hours to play to Mrs. Vandeleur. He said it inspired him to play amid such beauty. No doubt he did find satisfaction in his lovely and sympathetic listener, while the exquisite room must have come as a relief after his stereotyped hotel suite. But one day the underlying reason came to light. In an unusual burst of expansiveness, he apostrophised the marvellous quality of the “instrument.” “I have never known a tone so beautiful; I would walk for leagues every day to play on it.” Imogen acquiesced with concealed irritation, murmuring that it was sweet of him to put it like that; otherwise she might have felt she was imposing too much on his kindness. “You do not know what it means to me, a poor helpless mortal--this opening of the gates of heaven,” she told him. Secretly she was extremely annoyed. The Egeria of Fifth Avenue was not accustomed to such a detached attaché. To be put second to a piano! And to one moreover that she had not even the credit of choosing, for it was her husband’s purchase. She resolved that before this young man left America things should be very different. She would awaken in his undeveloped soul an appreciation of true womanhood--that was how she put it--and thus safeguard him against the temptations of the artistic life.

So nearly every afternoon when Joan came back from school, she heard the wonderful music flooding out from her mother’s boudoir. Then she would creep in silently and take up her obscure seat in the alcove. If Davidovitch were not too engrossed, he would nod to her with his sudden illuminating smile as she passed. Her evident absorption appealed to him, although he was too young himself to be much interested in a schoolgirl, or indeed in anyone. “Your daughter, Miss Joan, is very musical, is it not so?” he said one day to Mrs. Vandeleur.

“Joan musical? Oh, no! Why, she hardly knows one note from another. She began to learn, but I could not get her to practise. It was a great grief to me with my adoration of music and being cut off as I am from the outside world----” Mrs. Vandeleur smiled wanly. “But, of course, my real regret was for my little girl’s own sake. It seems so sad to have no feeling for Art. Not that Joan realises her loss, but we--_nous autres_--we cannot help realising it for her. Have you heard how the tickets are going at Carnegie?”

The conversation turned to Davidovitch’s approaching recital at Carnegie Hall. Imogen was taking a considerable amount of trouble over it. On this account alone she felt that her latest protégé ought to show more gratitude, more devotion. She had even announced the possibility of being present herself on the great occasion. A wonderful gown of pale greys and greens, specially created by Vesta, defined her intention. “If a place in the hall is kept clear for my invalid chair, I can be carried straight in from the automobile,” she was now explaining to Davidovitch.

He was listening with apparent interest. If only his hostess would suggest that her piano should “be carried straight in” instead! Dared he mention such a request? He decided to postpone it. Mrs. Vandeleur did not seem as pleasant as usual to-day. “It is curious that Miss Joan should listen to my playing with such interest if she does not care for music,” he substituted.

The remark was almost as unfortunate as a reference to the piano could have been. Imogen flushed with irritation. Instead of eliminating the troublesome child, her disclosure of Joan’s musical obtuseness seemed to have aroused the young man’s curiosity. “Yes, I am surprised at it myself, for I have never been able to persuade the child to listen to music before. You must take it as a personal compliment.” Imogen gave rather a forced laugh. “Is it not getting late?”

Davidovitch was not dense, although he was self-centred. At any rate he noticed the increased coldness. “I hope you do not regret having given me permission to play here, Mrs. Vandeleur--that I do not become tiresome?”

“Oh, no, no.” Imogen’s good humour was restored by this unexpected humility. She put out her white hand covered with its wonderful, antique rings, and patted the young man’s arm. “Why, Mendel, what an idea! As if everybody does not want to hear you play. Now sit down and begin.”

This he did with alacrity--too much alacrity his hostess thought with renewed ill-humour. He had been playing some little time, for the servants had already drawn the curtains and turned on the lights, before Joan crept into the room. “You come late to-day. I can only play one thing more,” he said with his slight foreign accent. “What shall it be?”

“The Ninth Symphony,” Joan demanded brazenly.

“But that is an orchestral piece. How have you even heard of it?” her mother laughed. “Besides, it is far too long. Indeed, I do not think we ought to let you play any more to-day, Mr. Davidovitch. You will be tired.” As a matter of fact, Imogen was expecting Eustace Chalfont at six o’clock, and she preferred her guests in sequence.

“Oh, I can give Miss Joan an idea of it, if she wishes.” Mendel Davidovitch broke into a brilliant rendering of the third movement.

Really this young man was getting insupportable, Imogen felt angrily. How dared he do what Joan wanted in defiance of her wishes! She more than ever determined that he must be brought into complete subjection. In the meantime at the first possible break in the music, he should stop. But the break did not come. Good heavens! Was the thing going on interminably?

It was only just finished when Mr. Chalfont was announced. In the slight confusion of his arrival and Davidovitch’s departure, Imogen did not notice what became of her daughter. Indeed, her thoughts about Joan were usually limited to a sense of relief at her absence. As a matter of fact the girl, instead of slipping out of the room as she usually did, had retreated hastily behind the curtains into the alcove. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, so deeply had the music moved her. It would be horrible, she felt, for either her mother or Mr. Chalfont to see her in this condition; she did not know which she would mind the more. She would remain hidden, she decided, until she had mopped her eyes into respectability. It did not occur to her that in the meantime she was practically spying on her mother. The girl was too un-self-conscious to consider her own presence objectively. Besides she could only hear detached words of the low-toned conversation as she stood behind the thick curtains.

As soon as Davidovitch had closed the door behind him, Eustace Chalfont came nearer to the couch. “How wonderful you are looking to-day, dear lady,” he murmured.

Imogen smiled a little. Certainly this was a great improvement on Mendel’s remarks. “I think you are the only person who ever notices how I look,” she said.

“‘Having eyes they see not.’ For me, your beauty is the only balm in this sordid city of noise; the only solace in my infinite loneliness.” The words were romantic, but there was a hackneyed note in Mr. Chalfont’s voice. “I have even dared to write a sonnet in gratitude for your God-given loveliness.”

“Oh, Mr. Chalfont, do, do read it to me.” Imogen was really pleased, indeed a trifle awed. A poem written in her praise by an accepted poet, and not by a mere literary aspirant, was something of a triumph. Why, this sonnet might figure some day in the popular anthologies; certainly it would appear in any complete collection of Chalfont’s works. Of course, she would not allow it to be headed with her own name, she reflected. It might be addressed to “My Dear Lady,” as he so often called her, and then in the distant future there would be a footnote stating who the lady had been. Or perhaps even now it could be entitled “Imogen” and clouded by Shakespeare. What a comfort that she had a poetical name; it was one of the few sensible things her mother had ever done. “It is too much honour, but read it to me, dear friend,” she repeated.

Chalfont drew a sheet of paper from his pocket. As a matter of fact the sonnet had been roughed out a few months before for another “dear lady.” He had come across it that morning, and with Imogen in his mind, had re-written and vastly improved it. The lines were passionate and graceful, for even in his decadence, Eustace Chalfont was a poet. He took Imogen’s hand at the first tender expression and continued to hold it as he read.

Joan was just going to emerge from her hiding place when Mr. Chalfont’s voice began in this unbroken flow. “Bother!” she thought. The man must be reading aloud, or perhaps reciting something to her mother. Well, she had better wait until he stopped. Besides, it would give her cheeks more time to cool down. Retreating to the back of the alcove, she peered into a mirror to try and discover whether her eyes still betrayed any suspicious redness. It was almost too dark behind the curtain to see anything.

The sonnet was soon over. “How beautiful,” Imogen exclaimed, with real feeling. Art, of which she was the subject, she could always appreciate. “But _I_ am not beautiful enough to deserve it.”

Eustace Chalfont pressed her hand to his lips. He wished, with a sense of staleness bordering on repugnance, that all women’s hands were not so much alike. She even used the same scent as another woman he had known of late. However, as he kissed the jewelled fingers, a faint flicker of desire awoke. He consciously tried to increase it. This excitement was now the only salt of his life. “You do not know how beautiful you are, dear lady,” he said softly. “And there is no one here to tell you. Ah, if I could bear you away to the lands of romance--‘the magic casements opening on the foam,’ in ‘faery lands’ we should not find ‘forlorn.’ There I would teach you the true meaning of beauty and life--and love.”

“Is it a play you are doing?” a fresh young voice broke in.

Eustace Chalfont started violently. He turned and saw the young girl, and then looked interrogatively at his hostess. Imogen exclaimed “Joan!” but otherwise she did not speak. She was both too disconcerted and too furious. Although Chalfont’s face had deepened in colour, he had sufficient presence of mind to deal with the situation; perhaps, too, he was not entirely unacquainted with such unpleasant moments. “Oh, how do you do, Miss Joan?” he said carelessly, and shook hands. “You startled me dreadfully! I did not know you were in the room. Yes, I have been trying my ‘prentice hand’ on a little dramatic fantasy and I was just inflicting it on your mother.”

“May I read the play?” The girl’s tone was keenly interested. Mr. Chalfont wondered uneasily whether anything lay behind the innocent words, but, indeed to Joan the explanation had seemed quite natural. She and her grandmother constantly read or recited bits of plays together with appropriate gesture. “But perhaps you haven’t written the words out yet?”

“No, I’ve only got a few notes here.” Mr. Chalfont folded up the sonnet and put it back in his pocket. “How do you think I should do as an actor, Miss Joan?” he asked boldly. He was beginning to enjoy the piquancy of the situation, although he would have enjoyed it more had the little girl been prettier. On the only other occasion that they had met, he had thought what a heavy, gawky-looking child for the lovely Mrs. Vandeleur to have engendered. However, on the whole he felt grateful for the interruption. Suppose fair Imogen had taken his words seriously. Of course he was willing to have an intrigue with any pretty woman, but when the woman was the wife of the great Vandeleur, perhaps, on consideration, the game was too risky. Adultery verged on high treason--or rather on high finance. Why, everything about Mrs. Vandeleur must run into three figures, even the handkerchief which he considered she had metaphorically thrown. If ever Vandeleur divorced her--and he was probably as sharp as a ferret--no ordinary man could afford such an expensive luxury, let alone a penniless devil like himself. As for eloping to Italy, that was, of course, a mere figure of speech. The memory of his seasick voyage to America was still too poignant--for sixteen years it had kept him from again braving the perils of the deep. All things considered, the little girl’s advent had been fortunate. “Well, Miss Joan, you haven’t given me your opinion as to my dramatic talent?” he repeated banteringly, as he saw she was hesitating over a reply.

“I don’t think you would be much good as an actor.” Joan had got rather red, but her words were decided enough. “You don’t speak it as though you really meant it. You sound tired of it, you know. I expect it is because you have had the trouble of making it all up first--and, of course, that is your real work. The words were lovely, particularly the ‘magic casements opening on the foam,’” she finished, half-apologetically. The criticism was quite unbiassed, for Joan’s personal dislike to Mr. Chalfont had been lost in her dramatic interest.

“Joan, your rudeness is perfectly intolerable!” Prudence had kept Mrs. Vandeleur silent, but now anger with her daughter overcame her, although the anger was more at the nature of Joan’s criticism than at its severity. “Leave the room at once. I will not have you here, first spying on my guests and then insulting them. A little girl like you naturally cannot appreciate Mr. Chalfont’s work, but you might have had the common politeness to hold your tongue about it.”

Joan marched out in speechless indignation. “Talking to me as if I were a baby,” she stormed afterwards to her grandmother. “I won’t go into the boudoir ever again, even if Mother begs me--and that’s not likely!” Indeed a veto upon Joan’s entering the room soon reached her. Henceforward the boudoir, like the library, passed out of her life. For days together she did not see either of her parents.

Imogen always imagined that her husband heard from Joan something of this incident, and it increased her unmaternal coldness. As a matter of fact the girl was not sufficiently intimate with her father to mention such a circumstance, even if it had occurred to her to do so. By a curious coincidence, one of John Vandeleur’s business acquaintances referred to the poet the next afternoon at the small and select club that the millionaire sometimes patronized. “I’ve just run across that skunk Chalfont,” the man said. “He was bragging that he visits at your house almost every day, but I guess it’s a lie.”

“Who is this--er--Chalfont?” Mr. Vandeleur enquired with a deepening of his usual quiet. On hearing that it was Eustace Chalfont, he was genuinely surprised. “Oh, the English poet. He came over some twelve or fifteen years ago, I remember. Is he back?”

“Back? Why, he never left,” the acquaintance explained. “They say he was too seasick or lovesick or something. Anyhow, we’ve got him for good--or for bad! But if you didn’t even know he was this side, he can’t be the tame cat at your place that he makes out. But that’s Chalfont all over--if there ever was a scab! You’ve only to look at the women he goes around with! I saw him supping at Sherry’s with one last week. My, she was the limit!”

Mr. Vandeleur moved away frigidly. It was the type of conversation he particularly disliked. But, although he was outwardly cold, inwardly he was raging. For he had little doubt that his wife had really taken up this most objectionable individual. Perhaps she did not know--but she ought to have known. That a man of this sort should be boasting of an intimacy with the Vandeleurs! It was intolerable. That afternoon Mr. Vandeleur got home quite early, and went straight to the boudoir. Imogen looked up from the couch in astonishment. “How surprising to see you at this hour! Is anything the matter?”

When her husband intimated that he merely wished to speak to her, Imogen looked, or feigned, a still greater surprise. “Could it not wait until this evening?” she suggested gently, glancing at the little jewelled clock. “Mendel Davidovitch is coming in a few minutes to play to me. I find it such a solace,--an opiate for my poor nerves.”

“I have told them downstairs that you would not be at home to anyone. Mr. Davidovitch’s playing must be postponed.”

The delicate eyebrows went up. “And to what do I owe this sudden, if flattering desire for an uninterrupted _tête-à-tête_?” she asked in a sweet, cool voice.

Mr. Vandeleur’s face had already flushed; now the bridge of his nose began to shine. What an unattractive old man he was getting, his wife reflected with detachment. He disregarded her question. “Do you know Mr.--er--Chalfont?”

Imogen was toying with a little tortoiseshell fan which she used to screen her eyes. “If you are referring to Eustace Chalfont, the poet, he is one of my most intimate friends. I suppose even in Wall Street they have heard of his work.”

It was rather a ridiculous gibe, for John Vandeleur certainly knew ten times as much of literature as his wife, despite her professed culture. “I have heard both of Mr. Chalfont’s work and of his character,” he replied with increasing anger. “You will oblige me by not having him here again.”

“I thought I had mentioned that Mr. Chalfont was a friend of mine.” Imogen gave an unpleasant laugh. “May I ask the reason of your extraordinary prejudice against him? Surely it is rather late in the day and rather--well--bourgeois to begin taking up the rôle of the jealous husband?”

Mr. Vandeleur’s face was steadily deepening in colour, but his manner remained unruffled. “Perhaps I have been wrong in tolerating your friendships and flirtations as I have done,” he replied coldly. “I considered them too contemptible for my notice. And even in this case, do not flatter yourself that I fear being put into the position of ‘_le mari trompé_.’ I am certain that you would not imperil your comfort by any decisive action. All the same, I will not have a man of Chalfont’s reputation in my house. Have you forgotten that there is Joan?”

“Joan! Joan!” For the first time Mrs. Vandeleur was thoroughly incensed. “You and Mother seem to have no thought in your heads but for that miserable child. You don’t mind about me at all. I might go to perdition for all either of you care.” She suddenly burst into tears. “I will not give up seeing Mr. Chalfont on account of Joan.”

“Well, you will not see him here. Unless you instruct the servants to refuse him admission in the future, I must do so.” John Vandeleur left the room.

That ended the matter. For, although Imogen loved admiration, her husband had been right in saying that she loved comfort more. Besides she was naturally decorous. She had never before allowed any of her friendships to assume this violent form, and although she had found it deliciously exciting, it had made her uneasy. In a way it was a relief to be obliged to intimate to Mr. Chalfont that she must not see him again, which she did in a letter of seventeen scented mauve pages. As she wrote she was almost overcome by her nobility and sorrow. For she told herself, and soon even believed, that it was her own sainted purity that compelled her to send away this wonderful poet lover. If only things had been different! If only her mother had not married her off as a child to John Vandeleur, who was even then quite elderly. Ah, what was the dross of riches compared with love--this phrase occurred twice in her letter. But now it was too late. The hand of fate had written. “Not all her tears could wash away a line,” she misquoted. Visions might come at times, of life passed with a twin soul in that magical fairyland of romance of which he had spoken, but they must be put away. For her was only a weary round of abnegation and duty, the dull, hard duty of the unloved wife and mother. It was bitter that her little girl should so resemble her husband--not even to have the love of her own child! A tear blotted the page.

Even after the letter was dispatched, the same thoughts recurred to Imogen, although at longer and longer intervals, while the tear that was wiped away grew more and more infinitesimal. At last her longing for Mr. Chalfont’s presence was changed into the vague wonder as to whether they would ever meet again. As for the disconsolate lover, he received the many-sheeted outpouring with a comic groan. Away from the lure of the flesh, the artist’s fastidiousness showed itself. “‘From contempt of thy word, Good Lord deliver us,’” he quoted blasphemously as he struggled through the rambling, hackneyed sentences. Then, carefully putting the well-worn sonnet in his pocket, he went out to call on a third dear lady.