by Henry James
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 wen
t 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.