MADAME and Mademoiselle Vicaud were at home on Tuesdays,
and Damier felt that he would always receive a courteously cordial
welcome on these formal occasions; but he felt, too, for some weeks,
that the courtesy, the pleasant graciousness of his reception, did not
grow in warmth. He was accepted, but no more. Madame Vicaud treated him
as she might have treated him had he been but one habitué of a crowded
salon. Her salon was anything but crowded; he soon had numbered its
habitués. There was a monotony about these Tuesday reunions; they were
rather thin and colorless; thin only in quantity, not in quality, for
that was excellent--reminded him of Madame Vicaud's black silk dresses
with their white lawn cuffs and collars, a quality worn but
irreproachable. Damier came to find a flavor, an unusualness, in the
cool cheerfulness of the Tuesday teas.
The salon in the Rue B---- on these occasions had some vases of flowers,
and the tea, brought in by the monastic Angélique, boasted bread and
butter and _madeleines_ as well as the daily _petits beurres_ that
Damier had been offered on a more informal visit.
To the teas came old Madame Dépressier, who was of an impoverished
Huguenot family, and who spent her time in works of charity, a serene
woman with a large white face--a woman, Damier found on talking to her,
of character and learning. She and Madame Vicaud talked of books,
lectures, and poor people, and smiled much together. Madame Crécy came
also, dignified, middle-aged, interested in _le mouvement féministe_, a
writer of essays, dark, decisive, a charm in her bright ugliness. There
was a dim, devout, and gentle old Comtesse de Comprailles. She had
known Madame Vicaud for years, from before her marriage, and her piety
had lifted her above the realization of the secular troubles of her
friend, and had, indeed, kept their relation a softly superficial one.
With the comtesse came sometimes a tall, thin priest, her cousin, also
dim, devout, and gentle in these social relations with heretics.
There was a young Polish art-student, a girl with a thin, ardent face,
and an attire manlike from its deficiency of adornment rather than from
any pose. She wore very short cloth skirts,--shortened by several years
of wear and mending, our acutely sympathetic young man guessed,--a
knotted handkerchief around her throat, and a soft felt hat. To this
young woman, who, Damier heard, had great talent and was miserably poor,
Madame Vicaud showed a peculiar tenderness. Sophie Labrinska had a look
at once weary and keen. She seldom spoke, but her face lighted up with a
smile for her hostess, and on Tuesdays she always played to them--and
played with an ungirl-like mastery and beauty of interpretation--a
ballade, nocturne, or mazurka of Chopin.
Lady Vibert and her daughter came too. They lived in a tiny flat near
the Bois, finding poverty in Paris more genial and resourceful than in
England. Miss Vibert, a fresh-colored young woman with prominent teeth,
studied art also, and for years had gone daily to a studio from which,
each week, she brought back to the tiny flat a life-size torso, very
neatly painted. She and her mother were cheerful, eager people, taking
their Paris, their _abonnement_ at the Théâtre Français,--a rite they
religiously fulfilled,--their bi-weekly lecture at the Ecole de France,
with a pleasant seriousness. Madame Vicaud lifted her eyebrows and
smiled a little, though very kindly, over Miss Vibert's artistic
progress; but she was fond of her.
As for Claire, she showed little fondness, with one exception, for any
of her mother's guests. Miss Vibert talked to her in clear, high tones,
but Claire spoke little to her, and only answered with her most
slumberous smiles. For Sophie she had neither smiles nor words. She
ignored her--but not with an effect of intentional ignoring; it was
merely that the little Polish girl made no advances, and unless she were
advanced to, Claire, in her mother's salon, maintained an air of
indolent detachment--except for one member of it, the only one who could
be said to recall, definitely, what there was of bohemia in Madame
Vicaud's past. Monsieur Claude Daunay did no more than recall it, for
his bohemianism was of a most tempered quality, consisting in a kindly
indifference to smallnesses, a half-humorous choice of the
unconventional rather than an ignorant imprisonment in it. He was a man
of about fifty, and his massive gray head, Jovian hair and beard, his
kindly, wearied eyes and stooping yet stalwart figure, made him a
distinguished apparition at Madame Vicaud's teas. She placed him,
sketched him for Damier in a few words, the most open that her reserve
had yet allowed her, and it was then only after a good many Tuesdays:
"He knew my husband, and was very kind to him, and to me, when we were
in need of kindness. He has no genius,--he, too, is a painter, you
know,--but a vast appreciation, and a vast generosity in the expression
of it, and much distinction of mind and talent."
Monsieur Daunay was married, but his marriage was an unfortunate one.
Madame Daunay had been the reverse of a model wife; she lived, an
invalid, a life of retirement in the country, and was supposed to make
much bitterness in the existence of her husband, who had his home with a
_vieille fille_ cousin in Paris. Damier liked the scholarly artist, his
mild smile and air of weary unexpectancy.
It was with Monsieur Daunay that Claire was her most vivid self, with
him and with their new "young" friend--though, when Monsieur Daunay was
present, Damier's relegation to the background bespoke an excellent
loyalty to older ties. There was something very nearly filial in her
graceful and affectionate solicitude for Monsieur Daunay. She would
sweep, in trailing gowns, always a little over-perfumed,--it was the
point where her taste seemed to fail her,--and always late, into the
salon, and, if Monsieur Daunay were there, go at once to him after a
formal acknowledgment of the other presences in the room. She did not
talk much with him,--she talked more to Damier,--but while he talked to
her she smiled at him, an encouraging, responsive smile.
Monsieur Daunay spoke to Damier of Madame Vicaud as _une âme exquise_,
and of Claire as _une charmante enfant_, a term emphasizing his almost
paternal attitude, an emphasis made more noticeable by his more formal
relations with the mother. Damier saw that he was very fond of Claire,
but that between him and Madame Vicaud there were no bonds closer than
a courteous understanding and regard. On Tuesday, after tea and talk,
music would be brought out, candles lighted at the piano, Claire would
sing while Monsieur Daunay accompanied her on the piano or her mother on
the harp, Sophie would play her Polish music, and Monsieur Daunay and
Madame Vicaud give a solo each or a duet. There was not a trace of the
amateur in these performances; the pleasure was great, and, for Damier,
the charm too deep for analysis, in this listening with her, or to her,
in the quiet room, among these quiet, subdued, rather sad people.
He was still, in a sense, outside the barrier, but they all were, he
fancied, in the sense he meant. These Tuesdays were the nearest, really,
that any of them ever came to her. Yet they were more definitely
accepted as friends: he was still the onlooker.
It was only humorously that he resented his slow advance to a more
individual standing. He could hardly himself measure it; and yet he
felt that he was being observed, weighed, thought over, and, almost
imperceptibly, that her smile for him gained in meaning.