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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.