The Pupil by Henry James

The Pupil
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such
an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a
person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the
aristocracy. Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his
engagement as settled, without some more conventional glance in
that direction than he could find an opening for in the manner of
the large affable lady who sat there drawing a pair of soiled gants
de Suede through a fat jewelled hand and, at once pressing and
gliding, repeated over and over everything but the thing he would
have liked to hear. He would have liked to hear the figure of his
salary; but just as he was nervously about to sound that note the
little boy came back - the little boy Mrs. Moreen had sent out of
the room to fetch her fan. He came back without the fan, only with
the casual observation that he couldn't find it. As he dropped
this cynical confession he looked straight and hard at the
candidate for the honour of taking his education in hand. This
personage reflected somewhat grimly that the thing he should have
to teach his little charge would be to appear to address himself to
his mother when he spoke to her - especially not to make her such
an improper answer as that.
When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid
of their companion Pemberton supposed it was precisely to approach
the delicate subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to
say some things about her son that it was better a boy of eleven
shouldn't catch. They were extravagantly to his advantage save
when she lowered her voice to sigh, tapping her left side
familiarly, "And all overclouded by THIS, you know; all at the
mercy of a weakness - !" Pemberton gathered that the weakness was
in the region of the heart. He had known the poor child was not
robust: this was the basis on which he had been invited to treat,
through an English lady, an Oxford acquaintance, then at Nice, who
happened to know both his needs and those of the amiable American
family looking out for something really superior in the way of a
resident tutor.
The young man's impression of his prospective pupil, who had come
into the room as if to see for himself the moment Pemberton was
admitted, was not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken
for granted. Morgan Moreen was somehow sickly without being
"delicate," and that he looked intelligent - it is true Pemberton
wouldn't have enjoyed his being stupid - only added to the
suggestion that, as with his big mouth and big ears he really
couldn't be called pretty, he might too utterly fail to please.
Pemberton was modest, was even timid; and the chance that his small
scholar might prove cleverer than himself had quite figured, to his
anxiety, among the dangers of an untried experiment. He reflected,
however, that these were risks one had to run when one accepted a
position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one's
university honours had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren. At
any rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it was
understood he would enter upon his duties within the week she would
let him off now, he succeeded, in spite of the presence of the
child, in squeezing out a phrase about the rate of payment. It was
not the fault of the conscious smile which seemed a reference to
the lady's expensive identity, it was not the fault of this
demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if
the allusion didn't sound rather vulgar. This was exactly because
she became still more gracious to reply: "Oh I can assure you that
all that will be quite regular."
Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what "all that"
was to amount to - people had such different ideas. Mrs. Moreen's
words, however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite
enough to elicit from the child a strange little comment in the
shape of the mocking foreign ejaculation "Oh la-la!"
Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to
the window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the
air in his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn't play. The young
man wondered if he should be able to teach him to play, though his
mother had said it would never do and that this was why school was
impossible. Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only
continued blandly: "Mr. Moreen will be delighted to meet your
wishes. As I told you, he has been called to London for a week.
As soon as he comes back you shall have it out with him."
This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply,
laughing as his hostess laughed: "Oh I don't imagine we shall have
much of a battle."
"They'll give you anything you like," the boy remarked
unexpectedly, returning from the window. "We don't mind what
anything costs - we live awfully well."
"My darling, you're too quaint!" his mother exclaimed, putting out
to caress him a practised but ineffectual hand. He slipped out of
it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had
already had time to notice that from one moment to the other his
small satiric face seemed to change its time of life. At this
moment it was infantine, yet it appeared also to be under the
influence of curious intuitions and knowledges. Pemberton rather
disliked precocity and was disappointed to find gleams of it in a
disciple not yet in his teens. Nevertheless he divined on the spot
that Morgan wouldn't prove a bore. He would prove on the contrary
a source of agitation. This idea held the young man, in spite of a
certain repulsion.
"You pompous little person! We're not extravagant!" Mrs. Moreen
gaily protested, making another unsuccessful attempt to draw the
boy to her side. "You must know what to expect," she went on to
Pemberton.
"The less you expect the better!" her companion interposed. "But
we ARE people of fashion."
"Only so far as YOU make us so!" Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked.
"Well then, on Friday - don't tell me you're superstitious - and
mind you don't fail us. Then you'll see us all. I'm so sorry the
girls are out. I guess you'll like the girls. And, you know, I've
another son, quite different from this one."
"He tries to imitate me," Morgan said to their friend.
"He tries? Why he's twenty years old!" cried Mrs. Moreen.
"You're very witty," Pemberton remarked to the child - a
proposition his mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan's
sallies to be the delight of the house.
The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the
visitor, who was surprised afterwards that he hadn't struck him as
offensively forward: "Do you WANT very much to come?"
"Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?"
Pemberton replied. Yet he didn't want to come at all; he was
coming because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of
his fortune at the end of a year abroad spent on the system of
putting his scant patrimony into a single full wave of experience.
He had had his full wave but couldn't pay the score at his inn.
Moreover he had caught in the boy's eyes the glimpse of a far-off
appeal.
"Well, I'll do the best I can for you," said Morgan; with which he
turned away again. He passed out of one of the long windows;
Pemberton saw him go and lean on the parapet of the terrace. He
remained there while the young man took leave of his mother, who,
on Pemberton's looking as if he expected a farewell from him,
interposed with: "Leave him, leave him; he's so strange!"
Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might say. "He's a
genius - you'll love him," she added. "He's much the most
interesting person in the family." And before he could invent some
civility to oppose to this she wound up with: "But we're all good,
you know!"
"He's a genius - you'll love him!" were words that recurred to our
aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that
geniuses were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the
better if there was an element that would make tutorship absorbing:
he had perhaps taken too much for granted it would only disgust
him. As he left the villa after his interview he looked up at the
balcony and saw the child leaning over it. "We shall have great
larks!" he called up.
Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: "By the time
you come back I shall have thought of something witty!"
This made Pemberton say to himself "After all he's rather nice."
CHAPTER II
On the Friday he saw them all, as Mrs. Moreen had promised, for her
husband had come back and the girls and the other son were at home.
Mr. Moreen had a white moustache, a confiding manner and, in his
buttonhole, the ribbon of a foreign order - bestowed, as Pemberton
eventually learned, for services. For what services he never
clearly ascertained: this was a point - one of a large number -
that Mr. Moreen's manner never confided. What it emphatically did
confide was that he was even more a man of the world than you might
first make out. Ulick, the firstborn, was in visible training for
the same profession - under the disadvantage as yet, however, of a
buttonhole but feebly floral and a moustache with no pretensions to
type. The girls had hair and figures and manners and small fat
feet, but had never been out alone. As for Mrs. Moreen Pemberton
saw on a nearer view that her elegance was intermittent and her
parts didn't always match. Her husband, as she had promised, met
with enthusiasm Pemberton's ideas in regard to a salary. The young
man had endeavoured to keep these stammerings modest, and Mr.
Moreen made it no secret that HE found them wanting in "style." He
further mentioned that he aspired to be intimate with his children,
to be their best friend, and that he was always looking out for
them. That was what he went off for, to London and other places -
to look out; and this vigilance was the theory of life, as well as
the real occupation, of the whole family. They all looked out, for
they were very frank on the subject of its being necessary. They
desired it to be understood that they were earnest people, and also
that their fortune, though quite adequate for earnest people,
required the most careful administration. Mr. Moreen, as the
parent bird, sought sustenance for the nest. Ulick invoked support
mainly at the club, where Pemberton guessed that it was usually
served on green cloth. The girls used to do up their hair and
their frocks themselves, and our young man felt appealed to to be
glad, in regard to Morgan's education, that, though it must
naturally be of the best, it didn't cost too much. After a little
he WAS glad, forgetting at times his own needs in the interest
inspired by the child's character and culture and the pleasure of
making easy terms for him.
During the first weeks of their acquaintance Morgan had been as
puzzling as a page in an unknown language - altogether different
from the obvious little Anglo-Saxons who had misrepresented
childhood to Pemberton. Indeed the whole mystic volume in which
the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in
translation. To-day, after a considerable interval, there is
something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial
novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens. If
it were not for a few tangible tokens - a lock of Morgan's hair cut
by his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when
they were disjoined - the whole episode and the figures peopling it
would seem too inconsequent for anything but dreamland. Their
supreme quaintness was their success - as it appeared to him for a
while at the time; since he had never seen a family so brilliantly
equipped for failure. Wasn't it success to have kept him so
hatefully long? Wasn't it success to have drawn him in that first
morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came - it was enough to MAKE one
superstitious - so that he utterly committed himself, and this not
by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct which made
them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together? They amused
him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was
still young and had not seen much of the world - his English years
had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the
Moreens - for they had THEIR desperate proprieties - struck him as
topsy-turvy. He had encountered nothing like them at Oxford; still
less had any such note been struck to his younger American ear
during the four years at Yale in which he had richly supposed
himself to be reacting against a Puritan strain. The reaction of
the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much further. He had
thought himself very sharp that first day in hitting them all off
in his mind with the "cosmopolite" label. Later it seemed feeble
and colourless - confessedly helplessly provisional.
He yet when he first applied it felt a glow of joy - for an
instructor he was still empirical - rise from the apprehension that
living with them would really he to see life. Their sociable
strangeness was an intimation of that - their chatter of tongues,
their gaiety and good humour, their infinite dawdling (they were
always getting themselves up, but it took forever, and Pemberton
had once found Mr. Moreen shaving in the drawing-room), their
French, their Italian and, cropping up in the foreign fluencies,
their cold tough slices of American. They lived on macaroni and
coffee - they had these articles prepared in perfection - but they
knew recipes for a hundred other dishes. They overflowed with
music and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and
had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities.
They talked of "good places" as if they had been pickpockets or
strolling players. They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano
and a banjo, and they went to official parties. They were a
perfect calendar of the "days" of their friends, which Pemberton
knew them, when they were indisposed, to get out of bed to go to,
and which made the week larger than life when Mrs. Moreen talked of
them with Paula and Amy. Their initiations gave their new inmate
at first an almost dazzling sense of culture. Mrs. Moreen had
translated something at some former period - an author whom it made
Pemberton feel borne never to have heard of. They could imitate
Venetian and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something
very particular communicated with each other in an ingenious
dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at
first took for some patois of one of their countries, but which he
"caught on to" as he would not have grasped provincial development
of Spanish or German.
"It's the family language - Ultramoreen," Morgan explained to him
drolly enough; but the boy rarely condescended to use it himself,
though he dealt in colloquial Latin as if he had been a little
prelate.
Among all the "days" with which Mrs. Moreen's memory was taxed she
managed to squeeze in one of her own, which her friends sometimes
forgot. But the house drew a frequented air from the number of
fine people who were freely named there and from several mysterious
men with foreign titles and English clothes whom Morgan called the
princes and who, on sofas with the girls, talked French very loud -
though sometimes with some oddity of accent - as if to show they
were saying nothing improper. Pemberton wondered how the princes
could ever propose in that tone and so publicly: he took for
granted cynically that this was what was desired of them. Then he
recognised that even for the chance of such an advantage Mrs.
Moreen would never allow Paula and Amy to receive alone. These
young ladies were not at all timid, but it was just the safeguards
that made them so candidly free. It was a houseful of Bohemians
who wanted tremendously to be Philistines.
In one respect, however, certainly they achieved no rigour - they
were wonderfully amiable and ecstatic about Morgan. It was a
genuine tenderness, an artless admiration, equally strong in each.
They even praised his beauty, which was small, and were as afraid
of him as if they felt him of finer clay. They spoke of him as a
little angel and a prodigy - they touched on his want of health
with long vague faces. Pemberton feared at first an extravagance
that might make him hate the boy, but before this happened he had
become extravagant himself. Later, when he had grown rather to
hate the others, it was a bribe to patience for him that they were
at any rate nice about Morgan, going on tiptoe if they fancied he
was showing symptoms, and even giving up somebody's "day" to
procure him a pleasure. Mixed with this too was the oddest wish to
make him independent, as if they had felt themselves not good
enough for him. They passed him over to the new members of their
circle very much as if wishing to force some charity of adoption on
so free an agent and get rid of their own charge. They were
delighted when they saw Morgan take so to his kind playfellow, and
could think of no higher praise for the young man. It was strange
how they contrived to reconcile the appearance, and indeed the
essential fact, of adoring the child with their eagerness to wash
their hands of him. Did they want to get rid of him before he
should find them out? Pemberton was finding them out month by
month. The boy's fond family, however this might be, turned their
backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the reproach of
interfering. Seeing in time how little he had in common with them
- it was by THEM he first observed it; they proclaimed it with
complete humility - his companion was moved to speculate on the
mysteries of transmission, the far jumps of heredity. Where his
detachment from most of the things they represented had come from
was more than an observer could say - it certainly had burrowed
under two or three generations.
As for Pemberton's own estimate of his pupil, it was a good while
before he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for
it by the smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship,
as hitherto revealed to him, had been adjusted. Morgan was scrappy
and surprising, deficient in many properties supposed common to the
genus and abounding in others that were the portion only of the
supernaturally clever. One day his friend made a great stride: it
cleared up the question to perceive that Morgan WAS supernaturally
clever and that, though the formula was temporarily meagre, this
would be the only assumption on which one could successfully deal
with him. He had the general quality of a child for whom life had
not been simplified by school, a kind of homebred sensibility which
might have been as bad for himself but was charming for others, and
a whole range of refinement and perception - little musical
vibrations as taking as picked-up airs - begotten by wandering
about Europe at the tail of his migratory tribe. This might not
have been an education to recommend in advance, but its results
with so special a subject were as appreciable as the marks on a
piece of fine porcelain. There was at the same time in him a small
strain of stoicism, doubtless the fruit of having had to begin
early to bear pain, which counted for pluck and made it of less
consequence that he might have been thought at school rather a
polyglot little beast. Pemberton indeed quickly found himself
rejoicing that school was out of the question: in any million of
boys it was probably good for all but one, and Morgan was that
millionth. It would have made him comparative and superior - it
might have made him really require kicking. Pemberton would try to
be school himself - a bigger seminary than five hundred grazing
donkeys, so that, winning no prizes, the boy would remain
unconscious and irresponsible and amusing - amusing, because,
though life was already intense in his childish nature, freshness
still made there a strong draught for jokes. It turned out that
even in the still air of Morgan's various disabilities jokes
flourished greatly. He was a pale lean acute undeveloped little
cosmopolite, who liked intellectual gymnastics and who also, as
regards the behaviour of mankind, had noticed more things than you
might suppose, but who nevertheless had his proper playroom of
superstitions, where he smashed a dozen toys a day.
CHAPTER III
At Nice once, toward evening, as the pair rested in the open air
after a walk, and looked over the sea at the pink western lights,
he said suddenly to his comrade: "Do you like it, you know - being
with us all in this intimate way?"
"My dear fellow, why should I stay if I didn't?"
"How do I know you'll stay? I'm almost sure you won't, very long."
"I hope you don't mean to dismiss me," said Pemberton.
Morgan debated, looking at the sunset. "I think if I did right I
ought to."
"Well, I know I'm supposed to instruct you in virtue; but in that
case don't do right."
"'You're very young - fortunately," Morgan went on, turning to him
again.
"Oh yes, compared with you!"
"Therefore it won't matter so much if you do lose a lot of time."
"That's the way to look at it," said Pemberton accommodatingly.
They were silent a minute; after which the boy asked: "Do you like
my father and my mother very much?"
"Dear me, yes. They're charming people."
Morgan received this with another silence; then unexpectedly,
familiarly, but at the same time affectionately, he remarked:
"You're a jolly old humbug!"
For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour.
The boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he
turned red himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance
in which there was a consciousness of many more things than are
usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation. It
produced for Pemberton an embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy
form a question - this was the first glimpse of it - destined to
play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to the altogether
peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his intercourse with
his little companion. Later, when he found himself talking with
the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever have been
talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at Nice
as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added
to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare
to Morgan that he might abuse him, Pemberton, as much as he liked,
but must never abuse his parents. To this Morgan had the easy
retort that he hadn't dreamed of abusing them; which appeared to be
true: it put Pemberton in the wrong.
"Then why am I a humbug for saying I think them charming?" the
young man asked, conscious of a certain rashness.
"Well - they're not your parents."
"They love you better than anything in the world - never forget
that," said Pemberton.
"Is that why you like them so much?"
"They're very kind to me," Pemberton replied evasively.
"You ARE a humbug!" laughed Morgan, passing an arm into his
tutor's. He leaned against him looking oft at the sea again and
swinging his long thin legs.
"Don't kick my shins," said Pemberton while he reflected "Hang it,
I can't complain of them to the child!"
"There's another reason, too," Morgan went on, keeping his legs
still.
"Another reason for what?"
"Besides their not being your parents."
"I don't understand you," said Pemberton.
"Well, you will before long. All right!"
He did understand fully before long, but he made a fight even with
himself before he confessed it. He thought it the oddest thing to
have a struggle with the child about. He wondered he didn't hate
the hope of the Moreens for bringing the struggle on. But by the
time it began any such sentiment for that scion was closed to him.
Morgan was a special case, and to know him was to accept him on his
own odd terms. Pemberton had spent his aversion to special cases
before arriving at knowledge. When at last he did arrive his
quandary was great. Against every interest he had attached
himself. They would have to meet things together. Before they
went home that evening at Nice the boy had said, clinging to his
arm:
"Well, at any rate you'll hang on to the last."
"To the last?"
"Till you're fairly beaten."
"YOU ought to be fairly beaten!" cried the young man, drawing him
closer.
CHAPTER IV
A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen
suddenly gave up the villa at Nice. Pemberton had got used to
suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during
two jerky little tours - one in Switzerland the first summer, and
the other late in the winter, when they all ran down to Florence
and then, at the end of ten days, liking it much less than they had
intended, straggled back in mysterious depression. They had
returned to Nice "for ever," as they said; but this didn't prevent
their squeezing, one rainy muggy May night, into a second-class
railway-carriage - you could never tell by which class they would
travel - where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful
collection of bundles and bags. The explanation of this manoeuvre
was that they had determined to spend the summer "in some bracing
place"; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment
- a fourth floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on
the staircase and the portier was hateful - and passed the next
four months in blank indigence.
The better part of this baffled sojourn was for the preceptor and
his pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and Notre Dame, the
Conciergerie and all the museums, took a hundred remunerative
rambles. They learned to know their Paris, which was useful, for
they came back another year for a longer stay, the general
character of which in Pemberton's memory to-day mixes pitiably and
confusedly with that of the first. He sees Morgan's shabby
knickerbockers - the everlasting pair that didn't match his blouse
and that as he grew longer could only grow faded. He remembers the
particular holes in his three or four pair of coloured stockings.
Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than
was absolutely necessary - partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for
he was as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher.
"My dear fellow, you ARE coming to pieces," Pemberton would say to
him in sceptical remonstrance; to which the child would reply,
looking at him serenely up and down: "My dear fellow, so are you!
I don't want to cast you in the shade." Pemberton could have no
rejoinder for this - the assertion so closely represented the fact.
If however the deficiencies of his own wardrobe were a chapter by
themselves he didn't like his little charge to look too poor.
Later he used to say "Well, if we're poor, why, after all,
shouldn't we look it?" and he consoled himself with thinking there
was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan's disrepair
- it differed from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and
spoils his things. He could trace perfectly the degrees by which,
in proportion as her little son confined himself to his tutor for
society, Mrs. Moreen shrewdly forbore to renew his garments. She
did nothing that didn't show, neglected him because he escaped
notice, and then, as he illustrated this clever policy, discouraged
at home his public appearances. Her position was logical enough -
those members of her family who did show had to be showy.
During this period and several others Pemberton was quite aware of
how he and his comrade might strike people; wandering languidly
through the Jardin des Plantes as if they had nowhere to go,
sitting on the winter days in the galleries of the Louvre, so
splendidly ironical to the homeless, as if for the advantage of the
calorifere. They joked about it sometimes: it was the sort of
joke that was perfectly within the boy's compass. They figured
themselves as part of the vast vague hand-to-mouth multitude of the
enormous city and pretended they were proud of their position in it
- it showed them "such a lot of life" and made them conscious of a
democratic brotherhood. If Pemberton couldn't feel a sympathy in
destitution with his small companion - for after all Morgan's fond
parents would never have let him really suffer - the boy would at
least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing. He used
sometimes to wonder what people would think they were - to fancy
they were looked askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of
kidnapping. Morgan wouldn't be taken for a young patrician with a
preceptor - he wasn't smart enough; though he might pass for his
companion's sickly little brother. Now and then he had a fivefranc
piece, and except once, when they bought a couple of lovely
neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they laid it out
scientifically in old books. This was sure to be a great day,
always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that
garnish the parapets. Such occasions helped them to live, for
their books ran low very soon after the beginning of their
acquaintance. Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was
obliged to write to a friend and ask him kindly to get some fellow
to give him something for them.
If they had to relinquish that summer the advantage of the bracing
climate the young man couldn't but suspect this failure of the cup
when at their very lips to have been the effect of a rude jostle of
his own. This had represented his first blow-out, as he called it,
with his patrons; his first successful attempt - though there was
little other success about it - to bring them to a consideration of
his impossible position. As the ostensible eve of a costly journey
the moment had struck him as favourable to an earnest protest, the
presentation of an ultimatum. Ridiculous as it sounded, he had
never yet been able to compass an uninterrupted private interview
with the elder pair or with either of them singly. They were
always flanked by their elder children, and poor Pemberton usually
had his own little charge at his side. He was conscious of its
being a house in which the surface of one's delicacy got rather
smudged; nevertheless he had preserved the bloom of his scruple
against announcing to Mr. and Mrs. Moreen with publicity that he
shouldn't be able to go on longer without a little money. He was
still simple enough to suppose Ulick and Paula and Amy might not
know that since his arrival he had only had a hundred and forty
francs; and he was magnanimous enough to wish not to compromise
their parents in their eyes. Mr. Moreen now listened to him, as he
listened to every one and to every thing, like a man of the world,
and seemed to appeal to him - though not of course too grossly - to
try and be a little more of one himself. Pemberton recognised in
fact the importance of the character - from the advantage it gave
Mr. Moreen. He was not even confused or embarrassed, whereas the
young man in his service was more so than there was any reason for.
Neither was he surprised - at least any more than a gentleman had
to be who freely confessed himself a little shocked - though not
perhaps strictly at Pemberton.
"We must go into this, mustn't we, dear?" he said to his wife. He
assured his young friend that the matter should have his very best
attention; and he melted into space as elusively as if, at the
door, he were taking an inevitable but deprecatory precedence.
When, the next moment, Pemberton found himself alone with Mrs.
Moreen it was to hear her say "I see, I see" - stroking the
roundness of her chin and looking as if she were only hesitating
between a dozen easy remedies. If they didn't make their push Mr.
Moreen could at least disappear for several days. During his
absence his wife took up the subject again spontaneously, but her
contribution to it was merely that she had thought all the while
they were getting on so beautifully. Pemberton's reply to this
revelation was that unless they immediately put down something on
account he would leave them on the spot and for ever. He knew she
would wonder how he would get away, and for a moment expected her
to enquire. She didn't, for which he was almost grateful to her,
so little was he in a position to tell.
"You won't, you KNOW you won't - you're too interested," she said.
"You are interested, you know you are, you dear kind man!" She
laughed with almost condemnatory archness, as if it were a reproach
- though she wouldn't insist; and flirted a soiled pockethandkerchief
at him.
Pemberton's mind was fully made up to take his step the following
week. This would give him time to get an answer to a letter he had
despatched to England. If he did in the event nothing of the sort
- that is if he stayed another year and then went away only for
three months - it was not merely because before the answer to his
letter came (most unsatisfactory when it did arrive) Mr. Moreen
generously counted out to him, and again with the sacrifice to
"form" of a marked man of the world, three hundred francs in
elegant ringing gold. He was irritated to find that Mrs. Moreen
was right, that he couldn't at the pinch bear to leave the child.
This stood out clearer for the very reason that, the night of his
desperate appeal to his patrons, he had seen fully for the first
time where he was. Wasn't it another proof of the success with
which those patrons practised their arts that they had managed to
avert for so long the illuminating flash? It descended on our
friend with a breadth of effect which perhaps would have struck a
spectator as comical, after he had returned to his little servile
room, which looked into a close court where a bare dirty opposite
wall took, with the sound of shrill clatter, the reflexion of
lighted back windows. He had simply given himself away to a band
of adventurers. The idea, the word itself, wore a romantic horror
for him - he had always lived on such safe lines. Later it assumed
a more interesting, almost a soothing, sense: it pointed a moral,
and Pemberton could enjoy a moral. The Moreens were adventurers
not merely because they didn't pay their debts, because they lived
on society, but because their whole view of life, dim and confused
and instinctive, like that of clever colour-blind animals, was
speculative and rapacious and mean. Oh they were "respectable,"
and that only made them more immondes. The young man's analysis,
while he brooded, put it at last very simply - they were
adventurers because they were toadies and snobs. That was the
completest account of them - it was the law of their being. Even
when this truth became vivid to their ingenious inmate he remained
unconscious of how much his mind had been prepared for it by the
extraordinary little boy who had now become such a complication in
his life. Much less could he then calculate on the information he
was still to owe the extraordinary little boy.
CHAPTER V
But it was during the ensuing time that the real problem came up -
the problem of how far it was excusable to discuss the turpitude of
parents with a child of twelve, of thirteen, of fourteen.
Absolutely inexcusable and quite impossible it of course at first
appeared; and indeed the question didn't press for some time after
Pemberton had received his three hundred francs. They produced a
temporary lull, a relief from the sharpest pressure. The young man
frugally amended his wardrobe and even had a few francs in his
pocket. He thought the Moreens looked at him as if he were almost
too smart, as if they ought to take care not to spoil him. If Mr.
Moreen hadn't been such a man of the world he would perhaps have
spoken of the freedom of such neckties on the part of a
subordinate. But Mr. Moreen was always enough a man of the world
to let things pass - he had certainly shown that. It was singular
how Pemberton guessed that Morgan, though saying nothing about it,
knew something had happened. But three hundred francs, especially
when one owed money, couldn't last for ever; and when the treasure
was gone - the boy knew when it had failed - Morgan did break
ground. The party had returned to Nice at the beginning of the
winter, but not to the charming villa. They went to an hotel,
where they stayed three months, and then moved to another
establishment, explaining that they had left the first because,
after waiting and waiting, they couldn't get the rooms they wanted.
These apartments, the rooms they wanted, were generally very
splendid; but fortunately they never COULD get them - fortunately,
I mean, for Pemberton, who reflected always that if they had got
them there would have been a still scantier educational fund. What
Morgan said at last was said suddenly, irrelevantly, when the
moment came, in the middle of a lesson, and consisted of the
apparently unfeeling words: "You ought to filer, you know - you
really ought."
Pemberton stared. He had learnt enough French slang from Morgan to
know that to filer meant to cut sticks. "Ah my dear fellow, don't
turn me off!"
Morgan pulled a Greek lexicon toward him - he used a Greek-German -
to look out a word, instead of asking it of Pemberton. "You can't
go on like this, you know."
"Like what, my boy?"
"You know they don't pay you up," said Morgan, blushing and turning
his leaves.
"Don't pay me?" Pemberton stared again and feigned amazement.
"What on earth put that into your head?"
"It has been there a long time," the boy replied rummaging his
book.
Pemberton was silent, then he went on: "I say, what are you
hunting for? They pay me beautifully."
"I'm hunting for the Greek for awful whopper," Morgan dropped.
"Find that rather for gross impertinence and disabuse your mind.
What do I want of money?"
"Oh that's another question!"
Pemberton wavered - he was drawn in different ways. The severely
correct thing would have been to tell the boy that such a matter
was none of his business and bid him go on with his lines. But
they were really too intimate for that; it was not the way he was
in the habit of treating him; there had been no reason it should
be. On the other hand Morgan had quite lighted on the truth - he
really shouldn't be able to keep it up much longer; therefore why
not let him know one's real motive for forsaking him? At the same
time it wasn't decent to abuse to one's pupil the family of one's
pupil; it was better to misrepresent than to do that. So in reply
to his comrade's last exclamation he just declared, to dismiss the
subject, that he had received several payments.
"I say - I say!" the boy ejaculated, laughing.
"That's all right," Pemberton insisted. "Give me your written
rendering."
Morgan pushed a copybook across the table, and he began to read the
page, but with something running in his head that made it no sense.
Looking up after a minute or two he found the child's eyes fixed on
him and felt in them something strange. Then Morgan said: "I'm
not afraid of the stern reality."
"I haven't yet seen the thing you ARE afraid of - I'll do you that
justice!"
This came out with a jump - it was perfectly true - and evidently
gave Morgan pleasure. "I've thought of it a long time," he
presently resumed.
"Well, don't think of it any more."
The boy appeared to comply, and they had a comfortable and even an
amusing hour. They had a theory that they were very thorough, and
yet they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, the
intervals between the dull dark tunnels, where there were waysides
and jolly views. Yet the morning was brought to a violent as end
by Morgan's suddenly leaning his arms on the table, burying his
head in them and bursting into tears: at which Pemberton was the
more startled that, as it then came over him, it was the first time
he had ever seen the boy cry and that the impression was
consequently quite awful.
The next day, after much thought, he took a decision and, believing
it to be just, immediately acted on it. He cornered Mr. and Mrs.
Moreen again and let them know that if on the spot they didn't pay
him all they owed him he wouldn't only leave their house but would
tell Morgan exactly what had brought him to it.
"Oh you HAVEN'T told him?" cried Mrs. Moreen with a pacifying hand
on her well-dressed bosom.
"Without warning you? For what do you take me?" the young man
returned.
Mr. and Mrs. Moreen looked at each other; he could see that they
appreciated, as tending to their security, his superstition of
delicacy, and yet that there was a certain alarm in their relief.
"My dear fellow," Mr. Moreen demanded, "what use can you have,
leading the quiet life we all do, for such a lot of money?" - a
question to which Pemberton made no answer, occupied as he was in
noting that what passed in the mind of his patrons was something
like: "Oh then, if we've felt that the child, dear little angel,
has judged us and how he regards us, and we haven't been betrayed,
he must have guessed - and in short it's GENERAL!" an inference
that rather stirred up Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, as Pemberton had
desired it should. At the same time, if he had supposed his threat
would do something towards bringing them round, he was disappointed
to find them taking for granted - how vulgar their perception HAD
been! - that he had already given them away. There was a mystic
uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that had been the
inferior sense of it. None the less however, his threat did touch
them; for if they had escaped it was only to meet a new danger.
Mr. Moreen appealed to him, on every precedent, as a man of the
world; but his wife had recourse, for the first time since his
domestication with them, to a fine hauteur, reminding him that a
devoted mother, with her child, had arts that protected her against
gross misrepresentation.
"I should misrepresent you grossly if I accused you of common
honesty!" our friend replied; but as he closed the door behind him
sharply, thinking he had not done himself much good, while Mr.
Moreen lighted another cigarette, he heard his hostess shout after
him more touchingly
"Oh you do, you DO, put the knife to one's throat!"
The next morning, very early, she came to his room. He recognised
her knock, but had no hope she brought him money; as to which he
was wrong, for she had fifty francs in her hand. She squeezed
forward in her dressing-gown, and he received her in his own,
between his bath-tub and his bed. He had been tolerably schooled
by this time to the "foreign ways" of his hosts. Mrs. Moreen was
ardent, and when she was ardent she didn't care what she did; so
she now sat down on his bed, his clothes being on the chairs, and,
in her preoccupation, forgot, as she glanced round, to be ashamed
of giving him such a horrid room. What Mrs. Moreen's ardour now
bore upon was the design of persuading him that in the first place
she was very good-natured to bring him fifty francs, and that in
the second, if he would only see it, he was really too absurd to
expect to be paid. Wasn't he paid enough without perpetual money -
wasn't he paid by the comfortable luxurious home he enjoyed with
them all, without a care, an anxiety, a solitary want? Wasn't he
sure of his position, and wasn't that everything to a young man
like him, quite unknown, with singularly little to show, the ground
of whose exorbitant pretensions it had never been easy to discover?
Wasn't he paid above all by the sweet relation he had established
with Morgan - quite ideal as from master to pupil - and by the
simple privilege of knowing and living with so amazingly gifted a
child; than whom really (and she meant literally what she said)
there was no better company in Europe? Mrs. Moreen herself took to
appealing to him as a man of the world; she said "Voyons, mon
cher," and "My dear man, look here now"; and urged him to be
reasonable, putting it before him that it was truly a chance for
him. She spoke as if, according as he SHOULD be reasonable, he
would prove himself worthy to be her son's tutor and of the
extraordinary confidence they had placed in him.
After all, Pemberton reflected, it was only a difference of theory
and the theory didn't matter much. They had hitherto gone on that
of remunerated, as now they would go on that of gratuitous,
service; but why should they have so many words about it? Mrs.
Moreen at all events continued to be convincing; sitting there with
her fifty francs she talked and reiterated, as women reiterate, and
bored and irritated him, while he leaned against the wall with his
hands in the pockets of his wrapper, drawing it together round his
legs and looking over the head of his visitor at the grey negations
of his window. She wound up with saying: "You see I bring you a
definite proposal."
"A definite proposal?"
"To make our relations regular, as it were - to put them on a
comfortable footing."
"I see - it's a system," said Pemberton. "A kind of organised
blackmail."
Mrs. Moreen bounded up, which was exactly what he wanted. "What do
you mean by that?"
"You practise on one's fears - one's fears about the child if one
should go away."
"And pray what would happen to him in that event?" she demanded,
with majesty.
"Why he'd be alone with YOU."
"And pray with whom SHOULD a child be but with those whom he loves
most?"
"If you think that, why don't you dismiss me?"
"Do you pretend he loves you more than he loves US?" cried Mrs.
Moreen.
"I think he ought to. I make sacrifices for him. Though I've
heard of those YOU make I don't see them."
Mrs. Moreen stared a moment; then with emotion she grasped her
inmate's hand. "WILL you make it - the sacrifice?"
He burst out laughing. "I'll see. I'll do what I can. I'll stay
a little longer. Your calculation's just - I DO hate intensely to
give him up; I'm fond of him and he thoroughly interests me, in
spite of the inconvenience I suffer. You know my situation
perfectly. I haven't a penny in the world and, occupied as you see
me with Morgan, am unable to earn money."
Mrs. Moreen tapped her undressed arm with her folded bank-note.
"Can't you write articles? Can't you translate as I do?"
"I don't know about translating; it's wretchedly paid."
"I'm glad to earn what I can," said Mrs. Moreen with prodigious
virtue.
"You ought to tell me who you do it for." Pemberton paused a
moment, and she said nothing; so he added: "I've tried to turn off
some little sketches, but the magazines won't have them - they're
declined with thanks."
"You see then you're not such a phoenix," his visitor pointedly
smiled - "to pretend to abilities you're sacrificing for our sake."
"I haven't time to do things properly," he ruefully went on. Then
as it came over him that he was almost abjectly good-natured to
give these explanations he added: "If I stay on longer it must be
on one condition - that Morgan shall know distinctly on what
footing I am."
Mrs. Moreen demurred. "Surely you don't want to show off to a
child?"
"To show YOU off, do you mean?"
Again she cast about, but this time it was to produce a still finer
flower. "And YOU talk of blackmail!"
"You can easily prevent it," said Pemberton.
"And YOU talk of practising on fears," she bravely pushed on.
"Yes, there's no doubt I'm a great scoundrel."
His patroness met his eyes - it was clear she was in straits. Then
she thrust out her money at him. "Mr. Moreen desired me to give
you this on account."
"I'm much obliged to Mr. Moreen, but we HAVE no account."
"You won't take it?"
"That leaves me more free," said Pemberton.
"To poison my darling's mind?" groaned Mrs. Moreen.
"Oh your darling's mind -!" the young man laughed.
She fixed him a moment, and he thought she was going to break out
tormentedly, pleadingly: "For God's sake, tell me what IS in it!"
But she checked this impulse - another was stronger. She pocketed
the money - the crudity of the alternative was comical - and swept
out of the room with the desperate concession: "You may tell him
any horror you like!"
CHAPTER VI
A couple of days after this, during which he had failed to profit
by so free a permission, he had been for a quarter of an hour
walking with his charge in silence when the boy became sociable
again with the remark: "I'll tell you how I know it; I know it
through Zenobie."
"Zenobie? Who in the world is SHE?"
"A nurse I used to have - ever so many years ago. A charming
woman. I liked her awfully, and she liked me."
"There's no accounting for tastes. What is it you know through
her?"
"Why what their idea is. She went away because they didn't fork
out. She did like me awfully, and she stayed two years. She told
me all about it - that at last she could never get her wages. As
soon as they saw how much she liked me they stopped giving her
anything. They thought she'd stay for nothing - just BECAUSE,
don't you know?" And Morgan had a queer little conscious lucid
look. "She did stay ever so long - as long an she could. She was
only a poor girl. She used to send money to her mother. At last
she couldn't afford it any longer, and went away in a fearful rage
one night - I mean of course in a rage against THEM. She cried
over me tremendously, she hugged me nearly to death. She told me
all about it," the boy repeated. "She told me it was their idea.
So I guessed, ever so long ago, that they have had the same idea
with you."
"Zenobie was very sharp," said Pemberton. "And she made you so."
"Oh that wasn't Zenobie; that was nature. And experience!" Morgan
laughed.
"Well, Zenobie was a part of your experience."
"Certainly I was a part of hers, poor dear!" the boy wisely sighed.
"And I'm part of yours."
"A very important part. But I don't see how you know that I've
been treated like Zenobie."
"Do you take me for the biggest dunce you've known?" Morgan asked.
"Haven't I been conscious of what we've been through together?"
"What we've been through?"
"Our privations - our dark days."
"Oh our days have been bright enough."
Morgan went on in silence for a moment. Then he said: "My dear
chap, you're a hero!"
"Well, you're another!" Pemberton retorted.
"No I'm not, but I ain't a baby. I won't stand it any longer. You
must get some occupation that pays. I'm ashamed, I'm ashamed!"
quavered the boy with a ring of passion, like some high silver note
from a small cathedral cloister, that deeply touched his friend.
"We ought to go off and live somewhere together," the young man
said.
"I'll go like a shot if you'll take me."
"I'd get some work that would keep us both afloat," Pemberton
continued.
"So would I. Why shouldn't I work? I ain't such a beastly little
muff as that comes to."
"The difficulty is that your parents wouldn't hear of it. They'd
never part with you; they worship the ground you tread on. Don't
you see the proof of it?" Pemberton developed. "They don't dislike
me; they wish me no harm; they're very amiable people; but they're
perfectly ready to expose me to any awkwardness in life for your
sake."
The silence in which Morgan received his fond sophistry struck
Pemberton somehow as expressive. After a moment the child
repeated: "You are a hero!" Then he added: "They leave me with
you altogether. You've all the responsibility. They put me off on
you from morning till night. Why then should they object to my
taking up with you completely? I'd help you."
"They're not particularly keen about my being helped, and they
delight in thinking of you as THEIRS. They're tremendously proud
of you."
"I'm not proud of THEM. But you know that," Morgan returned.
"Except for the little matter we speak of they're charming people,"
said Pemberton, not taking up the point made for his intelligence,
but wondering greatly at the boy's own, and especially at this
fresh reminder of something he had been conscious of from the first
- the strangest thing in his friend's large little composition, a
temper, a sensibility, even a private ideal, which made him as
privately disown the stuff his people were made of. Morgan had in
secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed
meanness; as well as a critical sense for the manners immediately
surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile
nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this nature
"old-fashioned," as the word is of children - quaint or wizened or
offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had
paid the penalty by discovering that he was the only such person in
his family. This comparison didn't make him vain, but it could
make him melancholy and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed
at these dim young things, shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn
on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting
to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing
deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of
childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed,
never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was
already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing
that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn't
know. It seemed to him that he himself knew too much to imagine
Morgan's simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.
The boy paid no heed to his last remark; he only went on: "I'd
have spoken to them about their idea, as I call it, long ago, if I
hadn't been sure what they'd say."
"And what would they say?"
"Just what they said about what poor Zenobie told me - that it was
a horrid dreadful story, that they had paid her every penny they
owed her."
"Well, perhaps they had," said Pemberton.
"Perhaps they've paid you!"
"Let us pretend they have, and n'en parlons plus."
"They accused her of lying and cheating" - Morgan stuck to historic
truth. "That's why I don't want to speak to them."
"Lest they should accuse me, too?" To this Morgan made no answer,
and his companion, looking down at him - the boy turned away his
eyes, which had filled - saw what he couldn't have trusted himself
to utter. "You're right. Don't worry them," Pemberton pursued.
"Except for that, they ARE charming people."
"Except for THEIR lying and THEIR cheating?"
"I say - I say!" cried Pemberton, imitating a little tone of the
lad's which was itself an imitation.
"We must be frank, at the last; we MUST come to an understanding,"
said Morgan with the importance of the small boy who lets himself
think he is arranging great affairs - almost playing at shipwreck
or at Indians. "I know all about everything."
"I dare say your father has his reasons,'' Pemberton replied, but
too vaguely, as he was aware.
"For lying and cheating?"
"For saving and managing and turning his means to the best account.
He has plenty to do with his money. You're an expensive family."
"Yes, I'm very expensive," Morgan concurred in a manner that made
his preceptor burst out laughing.
"He's saving for YOU," said Pemberton. "They think of you in
everything they do."
"He might, while he's about it, save a little - " The boy paused,
and his friend waited to hear what. Then Morgan brought out oddly:
"A little reputation."
"Oh there's plenty of that. That's all right!"
"Enough of it for the people they know, no doubt. The people they
know are awful."
"Do you mean the princes? We mustn't abuse the princes."
"Why not? They haven't married Paula - they haven't married Amy.
They only clean out Ulick."
"You DO know everything!" Pemberton declared.
"No, I don't, after all. I don't know what they live on, or how
they live, or WHY they live! What have they got and how did they
get it? Are they rich, are they poor, or have they a modeste
aisance? Why are they always chiveying me about - living one year
like ambassadors and the next like paupers? Who are they, any way,
and what are they? I've thought of all that - I've thought of a
lot of things. They're so beastly worldly. That's what I hate
most - oh, I've SEEN it! All they care about is to make an
appearance and to pass for something or other. What the dickens do
they want to pass for? What DO they, Mr. Pemberton?"
"You pause for a reply," said Pemberton, treating the question as a
joke, yet wondering too and greatly struck with his mate's intense
if imperfect vision. "I haven't the least idea."
"And what good does it do? Haven't I seen the way people treat
them - the 'nice' people, the ones they want to know? They'll take
anything from them - they'll lie down and be trampled on. The nice
ones hate that - they just sicken them. You're the only really
nice person we know."
"Are you sure? They don't lie down for me!"
"Well, you shan't lie down for them. You've got to go - that's
what you've got to do," said Morgan.
"And what will become of you?"
"Oh I'm growing up. I shall get off before long. I'll see you
later."
"You had better let me finish you," Pemberton urged, lending
himself to the child's strange superiority.
Morgan stopped in their walk, looking up at him. He had to look up
much less than a couple of years before - he had grown, in his
loose leanness, so long and high. "Finish me?" he echoed.
"There are such a lot of jolly things we can do together yet. I
want to turn you out - I want you to do me credit."
Morgan continued to look at him. "To give you credit - do you
mean?"
"My dear fellow, you're too clever to live."
"That's just what I'm afraid you think. No, no; it isn't fair - I
can't endure it. We'll separate next week. The sooner it's over
the sooner to sleep."
"If I hear of anything - any other chance - I promise to go,"
Pemberton said.
Morgan consented to consider this. "But you'll be honest," he
demanded; "you won't pretend you haven't heard?"
"I'm much more likely to pretend I have."
"But what can you hear of, this way, stuck in a hole with us? You
ought to be on the spot, to go to England - you ought to go to
America."
"One would think you were MY tutor!" said Pemberton.
Morgan walked on and after a little had begun again: "Well, now
that you know I know and that we look at the facts and keep nothing
back - it's much more comfortable, isn't it?"
"My dear boy, it's so amusing, so interesting, that it will surely
be quite impossible for me to forego such hours as these."
This made Morgan stop once more. "You DO keep something back. Oh
you're not straight - I am!"
"How am I not straight?"
"Oh you've got your idea!"
"My idea?"
"Why that I probably shan't make old - make older - bones, and that
you can stick it out till I'm removed."
"You ARE too clever to live!" Pemberton repeated.
"I call it a mean idea," Morgan pursued. "But I shall punish you
by the way I hang on."
"Look out or I'll poison you!" Pemberton laughed.
"I'm stronger and better every year. Haven't you noticed that
there hasn't been a doctor near me since you came?"
"I'M your doctor," said the young man, taking his arm and drawing
him tenderly on again.
Morgan proceeded and after a few steps gave a sigh of mingled
weariness and relief. "Ah now that we look at the facts it's all
right!"
CHAPTER VII
They looked at the facts a good deal after this and one of the
first consequences of their doing so was that Pemberton stuck it
out, in his friend's parlance, for the purpose. Morgan made the
facts so vivid and so droll, and at the same time so bald and so
ugly, that there was fascination in talking them over with him,
just as there would have been heartlessness in leaving him alone
with them. Now that the pair had such perceptions in common it was
useless for them to pretend they didn't judge such people; but the
very judgement and the exchange of perceptions created another tie.
Morgan had never been so interesting as now that he himself was
made plainer by the sidelight of these confidences. What came out
in it most was the small fine passion of his pride. He had plenty
of that, Pemberton felt - so much that one might perhaps wisely
wish for it some early bruises. He would have liked his people to
have a spirit and had waked up to the sense of their perpetually
eating humble-pie. His mother would consume any amount, and his
father would consume even more than his mother. He had a theory
that Ulick had wriggled out of an "affair" at Nice: there had once
been a flurry at home, a regular panic, after which they all went
to bed and took medicine, not to be accounted for on any other
supposition. Morgan had a romantic imagination, led by poetry and
history, and he would have liked those who "bore his name" - as he
used to say to Pemberton with the humour that made his queer
delicacies manly - to carry themselves with an air. But their one
idea was to get in with people who didn't want them and to take
snubs as it they were honourable scars. Why people didn't want
them more he didn't know - that was people's own affair; after all
they weren't superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times
cleverer than most of the dreary grandees, the "poor swells" they
rushed about Europe to catch up with. "After all they ARE amusing
- they are!" he used to pronounce with the wisdom of the ages. To
which Pemberton always replied: "Amusing - the great Moreen
troupe? Why they're altogether delightful; and if it weren't for
the hitch that you and I (feeble performers!) make in the ensemble
they'd carry everything before them."
What the boy couldn't get over was the fact that this particular
blight seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so
arbitrary. No doubt people had a right to take the line they
liked; but why should his people have liked the line of pushing and
toadying and lying and cheating? What had their forefathers - all
decent folk, so far as he knew - done to them, or what had he done
to them? Who had poisoned their blood with the fifth-rate social
ideal, the fixed idea of making smart acquaintances and getting
into the monde chic, especially when it was foredoomed to failure
and exposure? They showed so what they were after; that was what
made the people they wanted not want THEM. And never a wince for
dignity, never a throb of shame at looking each other in the face,
never any independence or resentment or disgust. If his father or
his brother would only knock some one down once or twice a year!
Clever as they were they never guessed the impression they made.
They were good-natured, yes - as good-natured as Jews at the doors
of clothing-shops! But was that the model one wanted one's family
to follow? Morgan had dim memories of an old grandfather, the
maternal, in New York, whom he had been taken across the ocean at
the age of five to see: a gentleman with a high neck-cloth and a
good deal of pronunciation, who wore a dress-coat in the morning,
which made one wonder what he wore in the evening, and had, or was
supposed to have "property" and something to do with the Bible
Society. It couldn't have been but that he was a good type.
Pemberton himself remembered Mrs. Clancy, a widowed sister of Mr.
Moreen's, who was as irritating as a moral tale and had paid a
fortnight's visit to the family at Nice shortly after he came to
live with them. She was "pure and refined," as Amy said over the
banjo, and had the air of not knowing what they meant when they
talked, and of keeping something rather important back. Pemberton
judged that what she kept back was an approval of many of their
ways; therefore it was to be supposed that she too was of a good
type, and that Mr. and Mrs. Moreen and Ulick and Paula and Amy
might easily have been of a better one if they would.
But that they wouldn't was more and more perceptible from day to
day. They continued to "chivey," as Morgan called it, and in due
time became aware of a variety of reasons for proceeding to Venice.
They mentioned a great many of them - they were always strikingly
frank and had the brightest friendly chatter, at the late foreign
breakfast in especial, before the ladies had made up their faces,
when they leaned their arms on the table, had something to follow
the demitasse, and, in the heat of familiar discussion as to what
they "really ought" to do, fell inevitably into the languages in
which they could tutoyer. Even Pemberton liked them then; he could
endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for
the "sweet sea-city." That was what made him have a sneaking
kindness for them - that they were so out of the workaday world and
kept him so out of it. The summer had waned when, with cries of
ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand
Canal. The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had
arrived. The Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn't talked
of at breakfast; but the reasons they didn't talk of at breakfast
always came out in the end. The Dorringtons on the other hand came
out very little; or else when they did they stayed - as was natural
- for hours, during which periods Mrs. Moreen and the girls
sometimes called at their hotel (to see if they had returned) as
many as three times running. The gondola was for the ladies, as in
Venice too there were "days," which Mrs. Moreen knew in their order
an hour after she arrived. She immediately took one herself, to
which the Dorringtons never came, though on a certain occasion when
Pemberton and his pupil were together at St. Mark's - where, taking
the best walks they had ever had and haunting a hundred churches,
they spent a great deal of time - they saw the old lord turn up
with Mr. Moreen and Ulick, who showed him the dim basilica as if it
belonged to them. Pemberton noted how much less, among its
curiosities, Lord Dorrington carried himself as a man of the world;
wondering too whether, for such services, his companions took a fee
from him. The autumn at any rate waned, the Dorringtons departed,
and Lord Verschoyle, the eldest son, had proposed neither for Amy
nor for Paula.
One sad November day, while the wind roared round the old palace
and the rain lashed the lagoon, Pemberton, for exercise and even
somewhat for warmth - the Moreens were horribly frugal about fires;
it was a cause of suffering to their inmate - walked up and down
the big bare sala with his pupil. The scagliola floor was cold,
the high battered casements shook in the storm, and the stately
decay of the place was unrelieved by a particle of furniture.
Pemberton's spirits were low, and it came over him that the fortune
of the Moreens was now even lower. A blast of desolation, a
portent of disgrace and disaster, seemed to draw through the
comfortless hall. Mr. Moreen and Ulick were in the Piazza, looking
out for something, strolling drearily, in mackintoshes, under the
arcades; but still, in spite of mackintoshes, unmistakeable men of
the world. Paula and Amy were in bed - it might have been thought
they were staying there to keep warm. Pemberton looked askance at
the boy at his side, to see to what extent he was conscious of
these dark omens. But Morgan, luckily for him, was now mainly
conscious of growing taller and stronger and indeed of being in his
fifteenth year. This fact was intensely interesting to him and the
basis of a private theory - which, however, he had imparted to his
tutor - that in a little while he should stand on his own feet. He
considered that the situation would change - that in short he
should be "finished," grown up, producible in the world of affairs
and ready to prove himself of sterling ability. Sharply as he was
capable at times of analysing, as he called it, his life, there
were happy hours when he remained, as he also called it - and as
the name, really, of their right ideal - "jolly" superficial; the
proof of which was his fundamental assumption that he should
presently go to Oxford, to Pemberton's college, and, aided and
abetted by Pemberton, do the most wonderful things. It depressed
the young man to see how little in such a project he took account
of ways and means: in other connexions he mostly kept to the
measure. Pemberton tried to imagine the Moreens at Oxford and
fortunately failed; yet unless they were to adopt it as a residence
there would be no modus vivendi for Morgan. How could he live
without an allowance, and where was the allowance to come from?
He, Pemberton, might live on Morgan; but how could Morgan live on
HIM? What was to become of him anyhow? Somehow the fact that he
was a big boy now, with better prospects of health, made the
question of his future more difficult. So long as he was markedly
frail the great consideration he inspired seemed enough of an
answer to it. But at the bottom of Pemberton's heart was the
recognition of his probably being strong enough to live and not yet
strong enough to struggle or to thrive. Morgan himself at any rate
was in the first flush of the rosiest consciousness of adolescence,
so that the beating of the tempest seemed to him after all but the
voice of life and the challenge of fate. He had on his shabby
little overcoat, with the collar up, but was enjoying his walk.
It was interrupted at last by the appearance of his mother at the
end of the sala. She beckoned him to come to her, and while
Pemberton saw him, complaisant, pass down the long vista and over
the damp false marble, he wondered what was in the air. Mrs.
Moreen said a word to the boy and made him go into the room she had
quitted. Then, having closed the door after him, she directed her
steps swiftly to Pemberton. There was something in the air, but
his wildest flight of fancy wouldn't have suggested what it proved
to be. She signified that she had made a pretext to get Morgan out
of the way, and then she enquired - without hesitation - if the
young man could favour her with the loan of three louis. While,
before bursting into a laugh, he stared at her with surprise, she
declared that she was awfully pressed for the money; she was
desperate for it - it would save her life.
"Dear lady, c'est trop fort!" Pemberton laughed in the manner and
with the borrowed grace of idiom that marked the best colloquial,
the best anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves. "Where in
the world do you suppose I should get three louis, du train dont
vous allez?"
"I thought you worked - wrote things. Don't they pay you?"
"Not a penny."
"Are you such a fool as to work for nothing?"
"You ought surely to know that."
Mrs. Moreen stared, then she coloured a little. Pemberton saw she
had quite forgotten the terms - if "terms" they could be called -
that he had ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her
memory as little as her conscience. "Oh yes, I see what you mean -
you've been very nice about that; but why drag it in so often?"
She had been perfectly urbane with him ever since the rough scene
of explanation in his room the morning he made her accept HIS
"terms" - the necessity of his making his case known to Morgan.
She had felt no resentment after seeing there was no danger Morgan
would take the matter up with her. Indeed, attributing this
immunity to the good taste of his influence with the boy, she had
once said to Pemberton "My dear fellow, it's an immense comfort
you're a gentleman." She repeated this in substance now. "Of
course you're a gentleman - that's a bother the less!" Pemberton
reminded her that he had not "dragged in" anything that wasn't
already in as much as his foot was in his shoe; and she also
repeated her prayer that, somewhere and somehow, he would find her
sixty francs. He took the liberty of hinting that if he could find
them it wouldn't be to lend them to HER - as to which he
consciously did himself injustice, knowing that if he had them he
would certainly put them at her disposal. He accused himself, at
bottom and not unveraciously, of a fantastic, a demoralised
sympathy with her. If misery made strange bedfellows it also made
strange sympathies. It was moreover a part of the abasement of
living with such people that one had to make vulgar retorts, quite
out of one's own tradition of good manners. "Morgan, Morgan, to
what pass have I come for you?" he groaned while Mrs. Moreen
floated voluminously down the sala again to liberate the boy,
wailing as she went that everything was too odious.
Before their young friend was liberated there came a thump at the
door communicating with the staircase, followed by the apparition
of a dripping youth who poked in his head. Pemberton recognised
him as the bearer of a telegram and recognised the telegram as
addressed to himself. Morgan came back as, after glancing at the
signature - that of a relative in London - he was reading the
words: "Found a jolly job for you, engagement to coach opulent
youth on own terms. Come at once." The answer happily was paid
and the messenger waited. Morgan, who had drawn near, waited too
and looked hard at Pemberton; and Pemberton, after a moment, having
met his look, handed him the telegram. It was really by wise looks
- they knew each other so well now - that, while the telegraph-boy,
in his waterproof cape, made a great puddle on the floor, the thing
was settled between them. Pemberton wrote the answer with a pencil
against the frescoed wall, and the messenger departed. When he had
gone the young man explained himself.
"I'll make a tremendous charge; I'll earn a lot of money in a short
time, and we'll live on it."
"Well, I hope the opulent youth will be a dismal dunce - he
probably will - " Morgan parenthesised - "and keep you a long time
a-hammering of it in."
"Of course the longer he keeps me the more we shall have for our
old age."
"But suppose THEY don't pay you!" Morgan awfully suggested.
"Oh there are not two such - !" But Pemberton pulled up; he had
been on the point of using too invidious a term. Instead of this
he said "Two such fatalities."
Morgan flushed - the tears came to his eyes. "Dites toujours two
such rascally crews!" Then in a different tone he added: "Happy
opulent youth!"
"Not if he's a dismal dunce."
"Oh they're happier then. But you can't have everything, can you?"
the boy smiled.
Pemberton held him fast, hands on his shoulders - he had never
loved him so. "What will become of you, what will you do?" He
thought of Mrs. Moreen, desperate for sixty francs.
"I shall become an homme fait." And then as if he recognised all
the bearings of Pemberton's allusion: "I shall get on with them
better when you're not here."
"Ah don't say that - it sounds as if I set you against them!"
"You do - the sight of you. It's all right; you know what I mean.
I shall be beautiful. I'll take their affairs in hand; I'll marry
my sisters."
"You'll marry yourself!" joked Pemberton; as high, rather tense
pleasantry would evidently be the right, or the safest, tone for
their separation.
It was, however, not purely in this strain that Morgan suddenly
asked: "But I say - how will you get to your jolly job? You'll
have to telegraph to the opulent youth for money to come on."
Pemberton bethought himself. "They won't like that, will they?"
"Oh look out for them!"
Then Pemberton brought out his remedy. "I'll go to the American
Consul; I'll borrow some money of him - just for the few days, on
the strength of the telegram."
Morgan was hilarious. "Show him the telegram - then collar the
money and stay!"
Pemberton entered into the joke sufficiently to reply that for
Morgan he was really capable of that; but the boy, growing more
serious, and to prove he hadn't meant what he said, not only
hurried him off to the Consulate - since he was to start that
evening, as he had wired to his friend - but made sure of their
affair by going with him. They splashed through the tortuous
perforations and over the humpbacked bridges, and they passed
through the Piazza, where they saw Mr. Moreen and Ulick go into a
jeweller's shop. The Consul proved accommodating - Pemberton said
it wasn't the letter, but Morgan's grand air - and on their way
back they went into Saint Mark's for a hushed ten minutes. Later
they took up and kept up the fun of it to the very end; and it
seemed to Pemberton a part of that fun that Mrs. Moreen, who was
very angry when he had announced her his intention, should charge
him, grotesquely and vulgarly and in reference to the loan she had
vainly endeavoured to effect, with bolting lest they should "get
something out" of him. On the other hand he had to do Mr. Moreen
and Ulick the justice to recognise that when on coming in they
heard the cruel news they took it like perfect men of the world.
CHAPTER VIII
When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in
hand for Balliol, he found himself unable to say if this aspirant
had really such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten
of his own long association with an intensely living little mind.
From Morgan he heard half a dozen times: the boy wrote charming
young letters, a patchwork of tongues, with indulgent postscripts
in the family Volapuk and, in little squares and rounds and
crannies of the text, the drollest illustrations - letters that he
was divided between the impulse to show his present charge as a
vain, a wasted incentive, and the sense of something in them that
publicity would profane. The opulent youth went up in due course
and failed to pass; but it seemed to add to the presumption that
brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his parents,
condoning the lapse, which they good-naturedly treated as little as
possible as if it were Pemberton's, should have sounded the rally
again, begged the young coach to renew the siege.
The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three
louis, and he sent her a post-office order even for a larger
amount. In return for this favour he received a frantic scribbled
line from her: "Implore you to come back instantly - Morgan dread
fully ill." They were on there rebound, once more in Paris - often
as Pemberton had seen them depressed he had never seen them crushed
- and communication was therefore rapid. He wrote to the boy to
ascertain the state of his health, but awaited the answer in vain.
He accordingly, after three days, took an abrupt leave of the
opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small
hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysees, of which Mrs. Moreen
had given him the address. A deep if dumb dissatisfaction with
this lady and her companions bore him company: they couldn't be
vulgarly honest, but they could live at hotels, in velvety
entresols, amid a smell of burnt pastilles, surrounded by the most
expensive city in Europe. When he had left them in Venice it was
with an irrepressible suspicion that something was going to happen;
but the only thing that could have taken place was again their
masterly retreat. "How is he? where is he?" he asked of Mrs.
Moreen; but before she could speak these questions were answered by
the pressure round hid neck of a pair of arms, in shrunken sleeves,
which still were perfectly capable of an effusive young foreign
squeeze.
"Dreadfully ill - I don't see it!" the young man cried. And then
to Morgan: "Why on earth didn't you relieve me? Why didn't you
answer my letter?"
Mrs. Moreen declared that when she wrote he was very bad, and
Pemberton learned at the same time from the boy that he had
answered every letter he had received. This led to the clear
inference that Pemberton's note had been kept from him so that the
game practised should not be interfered with. Mrs. Moreen was
prepared to see the fact exposed, as Pemberton saw the moment he
faced her that she was prepared for a good many other things. She
was prepared above all to maintain that she had acted from a sense
of duty, that she was enchanted she had got him over, whatever they
might say, and that it was useless of him to pretend he didn't know
in all his bones that his place at such a time was with Morgan. He
had taken the boy away from them and now had no right to abandon
him. He had created for himself the gravest responsibilities and
must at least abide by what he had done.
"Taken him away from you?" Pemberton exclaimed indignantly.
"Do it - do it for pity's sake; that's just what I want. I can't
stand THIS - and such scenes. They're awful frauds - poor dears!"
These words broke from Morgan, who had intermitted his embrace, in
a key which made Pemberton turn quickly to him and see that he had
suddenly seated himself, was breathing in great pain, and was very
pale.
"NOW do you say he's not in a state, my precious pet?" shouted his
mother, dropping on her knees before him with clasped hands, but
touching him no more than if he had been a gilded idol. "It will
pass - it's only for an instant; but don't say such dreadful
things!"
"I'm all right - all right," Morgan panted to Pemberton, whom he
sat looking up at with a strange smile, his hands resting on either
side of the sofa.
"Now do you pretend I've been dishonest, that I've deceived?" Mrs.
Moreen flashed at Pemberton as she got up.
"It isn't HE says it, it's I!" the boy returned, apparently easier,
but sinking back against the wall; while his restored friend, who
had sat down beside him, took his hand and bent over him.
"Darling child, one does what one can; there are so many things to
consider," urged Mrs. Moreen. "It's his PLACE - his only place.
You see YOU think it is now."
"Take me away - take me away," Morgan went on, smiling to Pemberton
with his white face.
"Where shall I take you, and how - oh HOW, my boy?" the young man
stammered, thinking of the rude way in which his friends in London
held that, for his convenience, with no assurance of prompt return,
he had thrown them over; of the just resentment with which they
would already have called in a successor, and of the scant help to
finding fresh employment that resided for him in the grossness of
his having failed to pass his pupil.
"Oh we'll settle that. You used to talk about it," said Morgan.
"If we can only go all the rest's a detail."
"Talk about it as much as you like, but don't think you can attempt
it. Mr. Moreen would never consent - it would be so VERY hand-tomouth,"
Pemberton's hostess beautifully explained to him. Then to
Morgan she made it clearer: "It would destroy our peace, it would
break our hearts. Now that he's back it will be all the same
again. You'll have your life, your work and your freedom, and
we'll all be happy as we used to be. You'll bloom and grow
perfectly well, and we won't have any more silly experiments, will
we? They're too absurd. It's Mr. Pemberton's place - every one in
his place. You in yours, your papa in his, me in mine - n'est-ce
pas, cheri? We'll all forget how foolish we've been and have
lovely times."
She continued to talk and to surge vaguely about the little draped
stuffy salon while Pemberton sat with the boy, whose colour
gradually came back; and she mixed up her reasons, hinting that
there were going to be changes, that the other children might
scatter (who knew? - Paula had her ideas) and that then it might be
fancied how much the poor old parent-birds would want the little
nestling. Morgan looked at Pemberton, who wouldn't let him move;
and Pemberton knew exactly how he felt at hearing himself called a
little nestling. He admitted that he had had one or two bad days,
but he protested afresh against the wrong of his mother's having
made them the ground of an appeal to poor Pemberton. Poor
Pemberton could laugh now, apart from the comicality of Mrs.
Moreen's mustering so much philosophy for her defence - she seemed
to shake it out of her agitated petticoats, which knocked over the
light gilt chairs - so little did their young companion, MARKED,
unmistakeably marked at the best, strike him as qualified to
repudiate any advantage.
He himself was in for it at any rate. He should have Morgan on his
hands again indefinitely; though indeed he saw the lad had a
private theory to produce which would be intended to smooth this
down. He was obliged to him for it in advance; but the suggested
amendment didn't keep his heart rather from sinking, any more than
it prevented him from accepting the prospect on the spot, with some
confidence moreover that he should do so even better if he could
have a little supper. Mrs. Moreen threw out more hints about the
changes that were to be looked for, but she was such a mixture of
smiles and shudders - she confessed she was very nervous - that he
couldn't tell if she were in high feather or only in hysterics. If
the family was really at last going to pieces why shouldn't she
recognise the necessity of pitching Morgan into some sort of
lifeboat? This presumption was fostered by the fact that they were
established in luxurious quarters in the capital of pleasure; that
was exactly where they naturally WOULD be established in view of
going to pieces. Moreover didn't she mention that Mr. Moreen and
the others were enjoying themselves at the opera with Mr. Granger,
and wasn't THAT also precisely where one would look for them on the
eve of a smash? Pemberton gathered that Mr. Granger was a rich
vacant American - a big bill with a flourishy heading and no items;
so that one of Paula's "ideas" was probably that this time she
hadn't missed fire - by which straight shot indeed she would have
shattered the general cohesion. And if the cohesion was to crumble
what would become of poor Pemberton? He felt quite enough bound up
with them to figure to his alarm as a dislodged block in the
edifice.
It was Morgan who eventually asked if no supper had been ordered
for him; sitting with him below, later, at the dim delayed meal, in
the presence of a great deal of corded green plush, a plate of
ornamental biscuit and an aloofness marked on the part of the
waiter. Mrs. Moreen had explained that they had been obliged to
secure a room for the visitor out of the house; and Morgan's
consolation - he offered it while Pemberton reflected on the
nastiness of lukewarm sauces - proved to be, largely, that his
circumstance would facilitate their escape. He talked of their
escape - recurring to it often afterwards - as if they were making
up a "boy's book" together. But he likewise expressed his sense
that there was something in the air, that the Moreens couldn't keep
it up much longer. In point of fact, as Pemberton was to see, they
kept it up for five or six months. All the while, however,
Morgan's contention was designed to cheer him. Mr. Moreen and
Ulick, whom he had met the day after his return, accepted that
return like perfect men of the world. If Paula and Amy treated it
even with less formality an allowance was to be made for them,
inasmuch as Mr. Granger hadn't come to the opera after all. He had
only placed his box at their service, with a bouquet for each of
the party; there was even one apiece, embittering the thought of
his profusion, for Mr. Moreen and Ulick. "They're all like that,"
was Morgan's comment; "at the very last, just when we think we've
landed them they're back in the deep sea!"
Morgan's comments in these days were more and more free; they even
included a large recognition of the extraordinary tenderness with
which he had been treated while Pemberton was away. Oh yes, they
couldn't do enough to be nice to him, to show him they had him on
their mind and make up for his loss. That was just what made the
whole thing so sad and caused him to rejoice after all in
Pemberton's return - he had to keep thinking of their affection
less, had less sense of obligation. Pemberton laughed out at this
last reason, and Morgan blushed and said: "Well, dash it, you know
what I mean." Pemberton knew perfectly what he meant; but there
were a good many things that - dash it too! - it didn't make any
clearer. This episode of his second sojourn in Paris stretched
itself out wearily, with their resumed readings and wanderings and
maunderings, their potterings on the quays, their hauntings of the
museums, their occasional lingerings in the Palais Royal when the
first sharp weather came on and there was a comfort in warm
emanations, before Chevet's wonderful succulent window. Morgan
wanted to hear all about the opulent youth - he took an immense
interest in him. Some of the details of his opulence - Pemberton
could spare him none of them - evidently fed the boy's appreciation
of all his friend had given up to come back to him; but in addition
to the greater reciprocity established by that heroism he had
always his little brooding theory, in which there was a frivolous
gaiety too, that their long probation was drawing to a close.
Morgan's conviction that the Moreens couldn't go on much longer
kept pace with the unexpended impetus with which, from month to
month, they did go on. Three weeks after Pemberton had rejoined
them they went on to another hotel, a dingier one than the first;
but Morgan rejoiced that his tutor had at least still not
sacrificed the advantage of a room outside. He clung to the
romantic utility of this when the day, or rather the night, should
arrive for their escape.
For the first time, in this complicated connexion, our friend felt
his collar gall him. It was, as he had said to Mrs. Moreen in
Venice, trop fort - everything was trop fort. He could neither
really throw off his blighting burden nor find in it the benefit of
a pacified conscience or of a rewarded affection. He had spent all
the money accruing to him in England, and he saw his youth going
and that he was getting nothing back for it. It was all very well
of Morgan to count it for reparation that he should now settle on
him permanently - there was an irritating flaw in such a view. He
saw what the boy had in his mind; the conception that as his friend
had had the generosity to come back he must show his gratitude by
giving him his life. But the poor friend didn't desire the gift -
what could he do with Morgan's dreadful little life? Of course at
the same time that Pemberton was irritated he remembered the
reason, which was very honourable to Morgan and which dwelt simply
in his making one so forget that he was no more than a patched
urchin. If one dealt with him on a different basis one's
misadventures were one's own fault. So Pemberton waited in a queer
confusion of yearning and alarm for the catastrophe which was held
to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he certainly at moments
felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much
in what form it would find its liveliest effect.
Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal - a frightened
sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they
were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for
something they didn't find. The Dorringtons hadn't re-appeared,
the princes had scattered; wasn't that the beginning of the end?
Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous "days"; her social
calendar was blurred - it had turned its face to the wall.
Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been
the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know
what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they wanted. He kept
sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his retreat, which
was never the path of a return. Flowers were all very well, but -
Pemberton could complete the proposition. It was now positively
conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a social failure;
so that the young man was almost grateful the run had not been
short. Mr. Moreen indeed was still occasionally able to get away
on business and, what was more surprising, was likewise able to get
back. Ulick had no club but you couldn't have discovered it from
his appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking
at life from the window of such an institution; therefore Pemberton
was doubly surprised at an answer he once heard him make his mother
in the desperate tone of a man familiar with the worst privations.
Her question Pemberton had not quite caught; it appeared to be an
appeal for a suggestion as to whom they might get to take Amy.
"Let the Devil take her!" Ulick snapped; so that Pemberton could
see that they had not only lost their amiability but had ceased to
believe in themselves. He could also see that if Mrs. Moreen was
trying to get people to take her children she might be regarded as
closing the hatches for the storm. But Morgan would be the last
she would part with.
One winter afternoon - it was a Sunday - he and the boy walked far
together in the Bois de Boulogne. The evening was so splendid, the
cold lemon-coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and
pedestrians so amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that
they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they should
have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner. They hurried
accordingly, arm-in-arm, good-humoured and hungry, agreeing that
there was nothing like Paris after all and that after everything
too that had come and gone they were not yet sated with innocent
pleasures. When they reached the hotel they found that, though
scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were
likely to sit down to. Confusion reigned in the apartments of the
Moreens - very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house -
and before the interrupted service of the table, with objects
displaced almost as if there had been a scuffle and a great winestain
from an overturned bottle, Pemberton couldn't blink the fact
that there had been a scene of the last proprietary firmness. The
storm had come - they were all seeking refuge. The hatches were
down, Paula and Amy were invisible - they had never tried the most
casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt they had enough of an eye to
him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose frocks had been
confiscated - and Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard. The
host and his staff, in a word, had ceased to "go on" at the pace of
their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a
pile of gaping trunks in the passage, was strangely commingled with
the air of indignant withdrawal. When Morgan took all this in -
and he took it in very quickly - he coloured to the roots of his
hair. He had walked from his infancy among difficulties and
dangers, but he had never seen a public exposure. Pemberton
noticed in a second glance at him that the tears had rushed into
his eyes and that they were tears of a new and untasted bitterness.
He wondered an instant, for the boy's sake, whether he might
successfully pretend not to understand. Not successfully, he felt,
as Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth,
rose before him in their little dishonoured salon, casting about
with glassy eyes for the nearest port in such a storm. They were
not prostrate but were horribly white, and Mrs. Moreen had
evidently been crying. Pemberton quickly learned however that her
grief was not for the loss of her dinner, much as she usually
enjoyed it, but the fruit of a blow that struck even deeper, as she
made all haste to explain. He would see for himself, so far as
that went, how the great change had come, the dreadful bolt had
fallen, and how they would now all have to turn themselves about.
Therefore cruel as it was to them to part with their darling she
must look to him to carry a little further the influence he had so
fortunately acquired with the boy - to induce his young charge to
follow him into some modest retreat. They depended on him - that
was the fact - to take their delightful child temporarily under his
protection; it would leave Mr. Moreen and herself so much more free
to give the proper attention (too little, alas! had been given) to
the readjustment of their affairs.
"We trust you - we feel we CAN," said Mrs. Moreen, slowly rubbing
her plump white hands and looking with compunction hard at Morgan,
whose chin, not to take liberties, her husband stroked with a
paternal forefinger.
"Oh yes - we feel that we CAN. We trust Mr. Pemberton fully,
Morgan," Mr. Moreen pursued.
Pemberton wondered again if he might pretend not to understand; but
everything good gave way to the intensity of Morgan's
understanding. "Do you mean he may take me to live with him for
ever and ever?" cried the boy. "May take me away, away, anywhere
he likes?"
"For ever and ever? Comme vous-y-allez!" Mr. Moreen laughed
indulgently. "For as long as Mr. Pemberton may be so good."
"We've struggled, we've suffered," his wife went on; "but you've
made him so your own that we've already been through the worst of
the sacrifice."
Morgan had turned away from his father - he stood looking at
Pemberton with a light in his face. His sense of shame for their
common humiliated state had dropped; the case had another side -
the thing was to clutch at THAT. He had a moment of boyish joy,
scarcely mitigated by the reflexion that with this unexpected
consecration of his hope - too sudden and too violent; the turn
taken was away from a GOOD boy's book - the "escape" was left on
their hands. The boyish joy was there an instant, and Pemberton
was almost scared at the rush of gratitude and affection that broke
through his first abasement. When he stammered "My dear fellow,
what do you say to THAT?" how could one not say something
enthusiastic? But there was more need for courage at something
else that immediately followed and that made the lad sit down
quietly on the nearest chair. He had turned quite livid and had
raised his hand to his left side. They were all three looking at
him, but Mrs. Moreen suddenly bounded forward. "Ah his darling
little heart!" she broke out; and this time, on her knees before
him and without respect for the idol, she caught him ardently in
her arms. "You walked him too far, you hurried him too fast!" she
hurled over her shoulder at Pemberton. Her son made no protest,
and the next instant, still holding him, she sprang up with her
face convulsed and with the terrified cry "Help, help! he's going,
he's gone!" Pemberton saw with equal horror, by Morgan's own
stricken face, that he was beyond their wildest recall. He pulled
him half out of his mother's hands, and for a moment, while they
held him together, they looked all their dismay into each other's
eyes, "He couldn't stand it with his weak organ," said Pemberton -
"the shock, the whole scene, the violent emotion."
"But I thought he WANTED to go to you!", wailed Mrs. Moreen.
"I TOLD you he didn't, my dear," her husband made answer. Mr.
Moreen was trembling all over and was in his way as deeply affected
as his wife. But after the very first he took his bereavement as a
man of the world.