The silence in which Morgan received this graceful sophistry struck Pemberton somehow as expressive. After a moment Morgan 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 imputation of lucidity, but wondering greatly at the child’s own, and especially at this fresh reminder of something he had been conscious of from the first – the strangest thing in the boy’s large little composition, a temper, a sensibility, even a sort of ideal, which made him privately resent the general quality of his kinsfolk. Morgan had in secret a small loftiness which begot an element of reflection, a domestic scorn not imperceptible to his companion (though they never had any talk about it), and absolutely anomalous 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 the family. This comparison didn’t make him vain; but it could make him melancholy and a trifle austere. When Pemberton guessed at these young dimnesses he saw him serious and gallant, and was partly drawn on and partly checked, as if with a scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows which were quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he perceived that it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant one touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing that at a given moment you could say a clever child didn’t know. It seemed to him that he both 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 should have spoken to them about their idea, as I call it, long ago, if I hadn’t been sure what they would say.’
‘And what would they say?’
‘Just what they said about what poor Zénobie 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 insisted perversely. ‘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 his eyes, which had filled, away), saw that he couldn’t have trusted himself to utter.
‘You’re right. Don’t squeeze 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,’ he added.
‘I daresay your father has his reasons,’ Pemberton observed, 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 rejoined, in a manner which made his preceptor burst out laughing.
‘He’s saving for you,’ said Pemberton. ‘They think of you in everything they do.’
‘He might save a little—’ The boy paused. Pemberton 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 exclaimed.
‘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 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 do they want to pass for? What do they, Mr Pemberton?’
‘You pause for a reply,’ said Pemberton, treating the inquiry as a joke, yet wondering too, and greatly struck with the boy’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 extraordinarily competent attitude.
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 part next week. The sooner it’s over the sooner to sleep.’
‘If I hear of anything – any other chance, I promise to go,’ said Pemberton.
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 moment he began again: ‘Well, now that you know that 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 surely will be quite impossible for me to forgo such hours as these.’
This made Morgan stop once more. ‘You do keep something back. Oh, you’re not straight – I am!’
‘Why am I not straight?’
‘Oh, you’ve got your idea!’
‘My idea?’
‘Why, that I probably sha’n’t live, 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 on again.
Morgan proceeded, and after a few steps he gave a sigh of mingled weariness and relief. ‘Ah, now that we look at the facts, it’s all right!’
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, as it were, 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 they had such a number of perceptions in common it was useless for the pair to pretend that 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 soreness of his characteristic pride. He had plenty of that, Pemberton felt – so much that it was perhaps well it should have had to take some early bruises. He would have liked his people to be gallant, and he had waked up too soon to the sense that they were perpetually swallowing 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, fed 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 sensitiveness manly), to have a proper spirit. But their one idea was to get in with people who didn’t want them and to take snubs as if they were honourable scars. Why people didn’t want them more he didn’t know – that was people’s own affair; after all they were not 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!’ Morgan used to say, with the wisdom of the ages. To which Pemberton always replied: ‘Amusing – the great Moreen troupe? Why, they’re altogether delightful; and if it were not for the hitch that you and I (feeble performers!) make in the ensemble, they would carry everything before them.’
What the boy couldn’t get over was 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 movement of 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 how they appeared. 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 to see, at the age of five: a gentleman with a high neckcloth 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 and of keeping something 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 better 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 demi-tasse, 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 were splendid – the Dorringtons had arrived. The Dorringtons were the only reason they had not talked of at breakfast; but the reasons that 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; for 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 prophecy of disaster and disgrace, 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, unmistakable 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 portents. 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 – it was 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 questioning his circumstances, there were happy hours when he was as superficial as a child; 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 vexed Pemberton to see how little, in such a project, he took account of ways and means: on other matters he was so sceptical about them. Pemberton tried to imagine the Moreens at Oxford, and fortunately failed; yet unless they were to remove there as a family 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 frail the consideration that 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 strong enough to thrive. He himself, at any rate, was in a period of natural, boyish rosiness about all this, so that the beating of the tempest seemed to him only the voice of life and the challenge of fate. He had on his shabby little overcoat, with the collar up, but he was enjoying his walk.
It was interrupted at last by the appearance of his mother at the end of the sala. She beckoned to Morgan to come to her, and while Pemberton saw him, complacent, pass down the long vista, 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 inquired – without hesitation – if the young man could lend her sixty francs. 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.