Pemberton’s mind was fully made up to quit the house the following week. This would give him time to get an answer to a letter he had despatched to England. If he did 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 presented him – again with all the precautions of a man of the world – three hundred francs. He was exasperated to find that Mrs Moreen was right, that he couldn’t 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 upon Pemberton with a luridness which perhaps would have struck a spectator as comically excessive, 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 reflection of lighted back-windows. He had simply given himself away to a band of adventurers. The idea, the word itself, had a sort of 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 of them put it at last very simply – they were adventurers because they were abject 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 to the extraordinary little boy.
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 a while after Pemberton had received his three hundred francs. They produced a sort of lull, a relief from the sharpest pressure. Pemberton 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 said something to him about his neckties. 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 they were gone – the boy knew when they were gone – Morgan did say something. 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 they went to another hotel, explaining that they had left the first because they had waited and waited and 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 still less for educational expenses. 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 go away. ‘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, continuing his search.
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 transparent fiction,’ Morgan dropped.
‘Find that rather for gross impertinence, and disabuse your mind. What do I want of money?’
‘Oh, that’s another question!’
Pemberton hesitated – 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 Morgan’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 his companion 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 he saw something strange in them. Then Morgan said: ‘I’m not afraid of the reality.’
‘I haven’t yet seen the thing that 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 child 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 tunnels, where there were waysides and views. Yet the morning was brought to a violent end by Morgan’s suddenly leaning his arms on the table, burying his head in them and bursting into tears. Pemberton would have been startled at any rate; but he was doubly startled because, as it then occurred to him, it was the first time he had ever seen the boy cry. It was rather awful.
The next day, after much thought, he took a decision and, believing it to be just, immediately acted upon it. He cornered Mr and Mrs Moreen again and informed them that if, on the spot, they didn’t pay him all they owed him, he would not 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?’
Mr and Mrs Moreen looked at each other, and Pemberton could see both that they were relieved and 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?’ – an inquiry to which Pemberton made no answer, occupied as he was in perceiving 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 idea that rather stirred up Mr and Mrs Moreen, as Pemberton had desired that it should. At the same time, if he ha
d thought that his threat would do something towards bringing them round, he was disappointed to find they had taken for granted (how little they appreciated his delicacy!) that he had already given them away to his pupil. There was a mystic uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that was the way they had accounted for it. None the less his threat did touch them; for if they had escaped it was only to meet a new danger. Mr Moreen appealed to Pemberton, as usual, as a man of the world; but his wife had recourse, for the first time since the arrival of their inmate, 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!’ the young man 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 Mrs Moreen 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 he had no hope that 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 zealous, and when she was zealous 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 nasty room. What Mrs Moreen was zealous about on this occasion was to persuade him that in the first place she was very good-natured to bring him fifty francs, and, 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 that 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 was not easy to discover? Wasn’t he paid, above all, by the delightful 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 – 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 sir, look here now’; and urged him to be reasonable, putting it before him that it was really 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, however, continued to be convincing; sitting there with her fifty francs she talked and repeated, as women repeat, 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 blackmail.’
Mrs Moreen bounded up, which was what the young man 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?’ demanded Mrs Moreen, 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 that 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 Pemberton’s hand. ‘Will you make it – the sacrifice?’
Pemberton burst out laughing. ‘I’ll see – I’ll do what I can – I’ll stay a little longer. Your calculation is just – I do hate intensely to give him up; I’m fond of him and he interests me deeply, in spite of the inconvenience I suffer. You know my situation perfectly; I haven’t a penny in the world, and, occupied as I am with Morgan, I’m 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 am glad to earn what I can,’ said Mrs Moreen virtuously, with her head high.
‘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 – to have such pretensions,’ smiled his interlocutress.
‘I haven’t time to do things properly,’ Pemberton 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 hesitated. ‘Surely you don’t want to show off to a child?’
‘To show you off, do you mean?’
Again Mrs Moreen hesitated, 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,’ Mrs Moreen continued.
‘Yes, there’s no doubt I’m a great scoundrel.’
His visitor looked at him a moment – it was evident that she was sorely bothered. 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!’ laughed the young man.
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!’
VI
A COUPLE of days after this, during which Pemberton had delayed to profit by Mrs Moreen’s permission to tell her son any horror, the two had been for a quarter of an hour walking together in silence when the boy became sociable again with the remark: ‘I’ll tell you how I know it; I know it through Zénobie.’
‘Zénobie? 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 pay her. 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, out of devotion. And she did stay ever so long – as long as 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 she wen
t 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,’ Morgan repeated. ‘She told me it was their idea. So I guessed, ever so long ago, that they have had the same idea with you.’
‘Zénobie was very shrewd,’ said Pemberton. ‘And she made you so.’
‘Oh, that wasn’t Zénobie; that was nature. And experience!’ Morgan laughed.
‘Well, Zénobie was a part of your experience.’
‘Certainly I was a part of hers, poor dear!’ the boy exclaimed. ‘And I’m a part of yours.’
‘A very important part. But I don’t see how you know that I’ve been treated like Zénobie.’
‘Do you take me for an idiot?’ 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 fellow, you’re a hero!’
‘Well, you’re another!’ Pemberton retorted.
‘No, I’m not; but I’m not 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 in a little passionate voice that was very touching to Pemberton.
‘We ought to go off and live somewhere together,’ said the young man.
‘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 crétin!’
‘The difficulty is that your parents wouldn’t hear of it,’ said Pemberton. ‘They would never part with you; they worship the ground you tread on. Don’t you see the proof of it? They don’t dislike me; they wish me no harm; they’ve very amiable people; but they’re perfectly ready to treat me badly for your sake.’