‘Dear lady, c’est trop fort!’ Pemberton laughed. ‘Where in the world do you suppose I should get sixty francs, 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 an instant, 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 have been very nice about that; but why go back to it 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 that there was no danger of Morgan’s taking 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 ‘gone back’ to anything; and she also repeated her prayer that, somewhere and somehow, he would find her sixty francs. He took the liberty of declaring 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 place them in her hand. He accused himself, at bottom and with some truth, of a fantastic, demoralised sympathy with her. If misery made strange bed-fellows it also made strange sentiments. It was moreover a part of the demoralisation and of the general bad effect of living with such people that one had to make rough retorts, quite out of the tradition of good manners. ‘Morgan, Morgan, to what pass have I come for you?’ he privately exclaimed, while Mrs Moreen floated voluminously down the sala again, to liberate the boy; groaning, as she went, that everything was too odious.
Before the boy 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 friend in London), he was reading the words: ‘Found jolly job for you – engagement to coach opulent youth on own terms. Come immediately.’ 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), 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 Pemberton said to Morgan:
‘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 stupid – he probably will –’ Morgan parenthesised, ‘and keep you a long time.’
‘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 –!’ Pemberton paused, he was on the point of using an invidious term. Instead of this he said ‘two such chances’.
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 stupid!’
‘Oh, they’re happier then. But you can’t have everything, can you?’ the boy smiled.
Pemberton held him, his hands on his shoulders. ‘What will become of you, what will you do?’ He thought of Mrs Moreen, desperate for sixty francs.
‘I shall turn into a man.’ 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 stay and keep the money!
Pemberton entered into the joke enough to reply that, for Morgan, he was really capable of that; but the boy, growing more serious, and to prove that 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 insisted on 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 St 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 to 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.
VIII
WHEN Pemberton got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in hand for Balliol, he found himself unable to say whether he was really an idiot or it was only, on his own part, the long association with an intensely living little mind that made him seem so. 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 disciple, as a kind of wasted incentive, and the sense of something in them that was profanable by publicity. 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 keep his pupil in hand another year.
The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs Moreen sixty francs, and he sent her a post-office order for the amount. In return for this favour he received a frantic, scribbled line from her: ‘Implore you to come back instantly – Morgan dreadfully ill.’ They were on the 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 he received no answer to his letter. Accordingly he took an abrupt leave of the opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysées, 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 l
ive at hotels, in velvety entresols, amid a smell of burnt pastilles, in 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 had happened was that they succeeded in getting away. ‘How is he? where is he?’ he asked of Mrs Moreen; but before she could speak, these questions were answered by the pressure round his neck of a pair of arms, in shrunken sleeves, which 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 demonstration that Pemberton’s note had been intercepted. Mrs Moreen was prepared to see the fact exposed, as Pemberton perceived, 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 that 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 he had no right to abandon him. He had created for himself the gravest responsibilities; he 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 treacherous!’ These words broke from Morgan, who had intermitted his embrace, in a key which made Pemberton turn quickly to him, to see that he had suddenly seated himself, was breathing with evident difficulty and was very pale.
‘Now do you say he’s not ill – 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 treacherous – 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 Pemberton, who had sat down beside him, taking his hand, 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 from 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, and without a pledge of instantaneous return, he had thrown them over; of the just resentment with which they would already have called in a successor, and of the little help as regarded finding fresh employment that resided for him in the flatness 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 precarious,’ Pemberton’s hostess explained to him. Then to Morgan she explained: ‘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, chéri? We’ll all forget how foolish we’ve been, and we’ll 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, dropping 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 iniquity 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 producing 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 the sick boy 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 from sinking a little, any more than it prevented him from accepting the prospect on the spot, with some confidence moreover that he would 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 whether she were in high feather or only in hysterics. If the family were 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 had really done it, which was indeed an unprecedented blow to the general cohesion. And if the cohesion was to terminate what was to become of poor Pemberton? He felt quite enough bound up with them to figure, to his alarm, as a floating spar in case of a wreck.
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 a languor 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 this 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 had not 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 got them fast, we’re chucked!’
Morgan’s comments, in these days, were more and more free; they even included a large recognitio
n 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 him so glad, after all, of 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: ‘You know what I mean.’ Pemberton knew perfectly what he meant; but there were a good many things 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 a great deal 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 intensified 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 such a renunciation 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.