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 manœuvre 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 calorifère. 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 five-franc 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 pocket-handkerchief 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.