The Pupil

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THE PUPIL


CHAPTER I


The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an
effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who
spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy. Yet he was
unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some
more conventional glance in that direction than he could find an opening
for in the manner of the large affable lady who sat there drawing a pair
of soiled gants de Suede through a fat jewelled hand and, at once
pressing and gliding, repeated over and over everything but the thing he
would have liked to hear. He would have liked to hear the figure of his
salary; but just as he was nervously about to sound that note the little
boy came back--the little boy Mrs. Moreen had sent out of the room to
fetch her fan. He came back without the fan, only with the casual
observation that he couldn't find it. As he dropped this cynical
confession he looked straight and hard at the candidate for the honour of
taking his education in hand. This personage reflected somewhat grimly
that the thing he should have to teach his little charge would be to
appear to address himself to his mother when he spoke to her--especially
not to make her such an improper answer as that.

When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid of
their companion Pemberton supposed it was precisely to approach the
delicate subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to say some
things about her son that it was better a boy of eleven shouldn't catch.
They were extravagantly to his advantage save when she lowered her voice
to sigh, tapping her left side familiarly, "And all overclouded by
_this_, you know; all at the mercy of a weakness--!" Pemberton gathered
that the weakness was in the region of the heart. He had known the poor
child was not robust: this was the basis on which he had been invited to
treat, through an English lady, an Oxford acquaintance, then at Nice, who
happened to know both his needs and those of the amiable American family
looking out for something really superior in the way of a resident tutor.

The young man's impression of his prospective pupil, who had come into
the room as if to see for himself the moment Pemberton was admitted, was
not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken for granted. Morgan
Moreen was somehow sickly without being "delicate," and that he looked
intelligent--it is true Pemberton wouldn't have enjoyed his being
stupid--only added to the suggestion that, as with his big mouth and big
ears he really couldn't be called pretty, he might too utterly fail to
please. Pemberton was modest, was even timid; and the chance that his
small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had quite figured, to his
anxiety, among the dangers of an untried experiment. He reflected,
however, that these were risks one had to run when one accepted a
position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one's
university honours had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren. At any
rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it was understood
he would enter upon his duties within the week she would let him off now,
he succeeded, in spite of the presence of the child, in squeezing out a
phrase about the rate of payment. It was not the fault of the conscious
smile which seemed a reference to the lady's expensive identity, it was
not the fault of this demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness
and point, if the allusion didn't sound rather vulgar. This was exactly
because she became still more gracious to reply: "Oh I can assure you
that all that will be quite regular."

Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what "all that" was to
amount to--people had such different ideas. Mrs. Moreen's words,
however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to
elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the
mocking foreign ejaculation "Oh la-la!"

Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to the
window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the air in his
elderly shoulders of a boy who didn't play. The young man wondered if he
should be able to teach him to play, though his mother had said it would
never do and that this was why school was impossible. Mrs. Moreen
exhibited no discomfiture; she only continued blandly: "Mr. Moreen will
be delighted to meet your wishes. As I told you, he has been called to
London for a week. As soon as he comes back you shall have it out with
him."

This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply,
laughing as his hostess laughed: "Oh I don't imagine we shall have much
of a battle."

"They'll give you anything you like," the boy remarked unexpectedly,
returning from the window. "We don't mind what anything costs--we live
awfully well."

"My darling, you're too quaint!" his mother exclaimed, putting out to
caress him a practised but ineffectual hand. He slipped out of it, but
looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had
time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face
seemed to change its time of life. At this moment it was infantine, yet
it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and
knowledges. Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed to
find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his teens. Nevertheless he
divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn't prove a bore. He would prove on
the contrary a source of agitation. This idea held the young man, in
spite of a certain repulsion.

"You pompous little person! We're not extravagant!" Mrs. Moreen gaily
protested, making another unsuccessful attempt to draw the boy to her
side. "You must know what to expect," she went on to Pemberton.

"The less you expect the better!" her companion interposed. "But we
_are_ people of fashion."

"Only so far as _you_ make us so!" Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked. "Well
then, on Friday--don't tell me you're superstitious--and mind you don't
fail us. Then you'll see us all. I'm so sorry the girls are out. I
guess you'll like the girls. And, you know, I've another son, quite
different from this one."

"He tries to imitate me," Morgan said to their friend.

"He tries? Why he's twenty years old!" cried Mrs. Moreen.

"You're very witty," Pemberton remarked to the child--a proposition his
mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan's sallies to be the
delight of the house.

The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the visitor,
who was surprised afterwards that he hadn't struck him as offensively
forward: "Do you _want_ very much to come?"

"Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?"
Pemberton replied. Yet he didn't want to come at all; he was coming
because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune at
the end of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant
patrimony into a single full wave of experience. He had had his full
wave but couldn't pay the score at his inn. Moreover he had caught in
the boy's eyes the glimpse of a far-off appeal.

"Well, I'll do the best I can for you," said Morgan; with which he turned
away again. He passed out of one of the long windows; Pemberton saw him
go and lean on the parapet of the terrace. He remained there while the
young man took leave of his mother, who, on Pemberton's looking as if he
expected a farewell from him, interposed with: "Leave him, leave him;
he's so strange!" Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might say.
"He's a genius--you'll love him," she added. "He's much the most
interesting person in the family." And before he could invent some
civility to oppose to this she wound up with: "But we're all good, you
know!"

"He's a genius--you'll love him!" were words that recurred to our
aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses
were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the better if there
was an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken
too much for granted it would only disgust him. As he left the villa
after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning
over it. "We shall have great larks!" he called up.

Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: "By the time you come
back I shall have thought of something witty!"

This made Pemberton say to himself "After all he's rather nice."




CHAPTER II


On the Friday he saw them all, as Mrs. Moreen had promised, for her
husband had come back and the girls and the other son were at home. Mr.
Moreen had a white moustache, a confiding manner and, in his buttonhole,
the ribbon of a foreign order--bestowed, as Pemberton eventually learned,
for services. For what services he never clearly ascertained: this was a
point--one of a large number--that Mr. Moreen's manner never confided.
What it emphatically did confide was that he was even more a man of the
world than you might first make out. Ulick, the firstborn, was in
visible training for the same profession--under the disadvantage as yet,
however, of a buttonhole but feebly floral and a moustache with no
pretensions to type. The girls had hair and figures and manners and
small fat feet, but had never been out alone. As for Mrs. Moreen
Pemberton saw on a nearer view that her elegance was intermittent and her
parts didn't always match. Her husband, as she had promised, met with
enthusiasm Pemberton's ideas in regard to a salary. The young man had
endeavoured to keep these stammerings modest, and Mr. Moreen made it no
secret that _he_ found them wanting in "style." He further mentioned
that he aspired to be intimate with his children, to be their best
friend, and that he was always looking out for them. That was what he
went off for, to London and other places--to look out; and this vigilance
was the theory of life, as well as the real occupation, of the whole
family. They all looked out, for they were very frank on the subject of
its being necessary. They desired it to be understood that they were
earnest people, and also that their fortune, though quite adequate for
earnest people, required the most careful administration. Mr. Moreen, as
the parent bird, sought sustenance for the nest. Ulick invoked support
mainly at the club, where Pemberton guessed that it was usually served on
green cloth. The girls used to do up their hair and their frocks
themselves, and our young man felt appealed to to be glad, in regard to
Morgan's education, that, though it must naturally be of the best, it
didn't cost too much. After a little he _was_ glad, forgetting at times
his own needs in the interest inspired by the child's character and
culture and the pleasure of making easy terms for him.

During the first weeks of their acquaintance Morgan had been as puzzling
as a page in an unknown language--altogether different from the obvious
little Anglo-Saxons who had misrepresented childhood to Pemberton. Indeed
the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound
demanded some practice in translation. To-day, after a considerable
interval, there is something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic reflexion
or a serial novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens.
If it were not for a few tangible tokens--a lock of Morgan's hair cut by
his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were
disjoined--the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too
inconsequent for anything but dreamland. Their supreme quaintness was
their success--as it appeared to him for a while at the time; since he
had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure. Wasn't it
success to have kept him so hatefully long? Wasn't it success to have
drawn him in that first morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came--it was
enough to _make_ one superstitious--so that he utterly committed himself,
and this not by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct
which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together? They
amused him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was
still young and had not seen much of the world--his English years had
been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the Moreens--for
they had _their_ desperate proprieties--struck him as topsy-turvy. He
had encountered nothing like them at Oxford; still less had any such note
been struck to his younger American ear during the four years at Yale in
which he had richly supposed himself to be reacting against a Puritan
strain. The reaction of the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much
further. He had thought himself very sharp that first day in hitting
them all off in his mind with the "cosmopolite" label. Later it seemed
feeble and colourless--confessedly helplessly provisional.

He yet when he first applied it felt a glow of joy--for an instructor he
was still empirical--rise from the apprehension that living with them
would really he to see life. Their sociable strangeness was an
intimation of that--their chatter of tongues, their gaiety and good
humour, their infinite dawdling (they were always getting themselves up,
but it took forever, and Pemberton had once found Mr. Moreen shaving in
the drawing-room), their French, their Italian and, cropping up in the
foreign fluencies, their cold tough slices of American. They lived on
macaroni and coffee--they had these articles prepared in perfection--but
they knew recipes for a hundred other dishes. They overflowed with music
and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and had a sort
of professional acquaintance with Continental cities. They talked of
"good places" as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players. They
had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to
official parties. They were a perfect calendar of the "days" of their
friends, which Pemberton knew them, when they were indisposed, to get out
of bed to go to, and which made the week larger than life when Mrs.
Moreen talked of them with Paula and Amy. Their initiations gave their
new inmate at first an almost dazzling sense of culture. Mrs. Moreen had
translated something at some former period--an author whom it made
Pemberton feel borne never to have heard of. They could imitate Venetian
and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very
particular communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their
own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some
patois of one of their countries, but which he "caught on to" as he would
not have grasped provincial development of Spanish or German.

"It's the family language--Ultramoreen," Morgan explained to him drolly
enough; but the boy rarely condescended to use it himself, though he
dealt in colloquial Latin as if he had been a little prelate.

Among all the "days" with which Mrs. Moreen's memory was taxed she
managed to squeeze in one of her own, which her friends sometimes forgot.
But the house drew a frequented air from the number of fine people who
were freely named there and from several mysterious men with foreign
titles and English clothes whom Morgan called the princes and who, on
sofas with the girls, talked French very loud--though sometimes with some
oddity of accent--as if to show they were saying nothing improper.
Pemberton wondered how the princes could ever propose in that tone and so
publicly: he took for granted cynically that this was what was desired of
them. Then he recognised that even for the chance of such an advantage
Mrs. Moreen would never allow Paula and Amy to receive alone. These
young ladies were not at all timid, but it was just the safeguards that
made them so candidly free. It was a houseful of Bohemians who wanted
tremendously to be Philistines.

In one respect, however, certainly they achieved no rigour--they were
wonderfully amiable and ecstatic about Morgan. It was a genuine
tenderness, an artless admiration, equally strong in each. They even
praised his beauty, which was small, and were as afraid of him as if they
felt him of finer clay. They spoke of him as a little angel and a
prodigy--they touched on his want of health with long vague faces.
Pemberton feared at first an extravagance that might make him hate the
boy, but before this happened he had become extravagant himself. Later,
when he had grown rather to hate the others, it was a bribe to patience
for him that they were at any rate nice about Morgan, going on tiptoe if
they fancied he was showing symptoms, and even giving up somebody's "day"
to procure him a pleasure. Mixed with this too was the oddest wish to
make him independent, as if they had felt themselves not good enough for
him. They passed him over to the new members of their circle very much
as if wishing to force some charity of adoption on so free an agent and
get rid of their own charge. They were delighted when they saw Morgan
take so to his kind playfellow, and could think of no higher praise for
the young man. It was strange how they contrived to reconcile the
appearance, and indeed the essential fact, of adoring the child with
their eagerness to wash their hands of him. Did they want to get rid of
him before he should find them out? Pemberton was finding them out month
by month. The boy's fond family, however this might be, turned their
backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the reproach of
interfering. Seeing in time how little he had in common with them--it
was by _them_ he first observed it; they proclaimed it with complete
humility--his companion was moved to speculate on the mysteries of
transmission, the far jumps of heredity. Where his detachment from most
of the things they represented had come from was more than an observer
could say--it certainly had burrowed under two or three generations.

As for Pemberton's own estimate of his pupil, it was a good while before
he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for it by the
smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto
revealed to him, had been adjusted. Morgan was scrappy and surprising,
deficient in many properties supposed common to the genus and abounding
in others that were the portion only of the supernaturally clever. One
day his friend made a great stride: it cleared up the question to
perceive that Morgan _was_ supernaturally clever and that, though the
formula was temporarily meagre, this would be the only assumption on
which one could successfully deal with him. He had the general quality
of a child for whom life had not been simplified by school, a kind of
homebred sensibility which might have been as bad for himself but was
charming for others, and a whole range of refinement and
perception--little musical vibrations as taking as picked-up
airs--begotten by wandering about Europe at the tail of his migratory
tribe. This might not have been an education to recommend in advance,
but its results with so special a subject were as appreciable as the
marks on a piece of fine porcelain. There was at the same time in him a
small strain of stoicism, doubtless the fruit of having had to begin
early to bear pain, which counted for pluck and made it of less
consequence that he might have been thought at school rather a polyglot
little beast. Pemberton indeed quickly found himself rejoicing that
school was out of the question: in any million of boys it was probably
good for all but one, and Morgan was that millionth. It would have made
him comparative and superior--it might have made him really require
kicking. Pemberton would try to be school himself--a bigger seminary
than five hundred grazing donkeys, so that, winning no prizes, the boy
would remain unconscious and irresponsible and amusing--amusing, because,
though life was already intense in his childish nature, freshness still
made there a strong draught for jokes. It turned out that even in the
still air of Morgan's various disabilities jokes flourished greatly. He
was a pale lean acute undeveloped little cosmopolite, who liked
intellectual gymnastics and who also, as regards the behaviour of
mankind, had noticed more things than you might suppose, but who
nevertheless had his proper playroom of superstitions, where he smashed a
dozen toys a day.




CHAPTER III


At Nice once, toward evening, as the pair rested in the open air after a
walk, and looked over the sea at the pink western lights, he said
suddenly to his comrade: "Do you like it, you know--being with us all in
this intimate way?"

"My dear fellow, why should I stay if I didn't?"

"How do I know you'll stay? I'm almost sure you won't, very long."

"I hope you don't mean to dismiss me," said Pemberton.

Morgan debated, looking at the sunset. "I think if I did right I ought
to."

"Well, I know I'm supposed to instruct you in virtue; but in that case
don't do right."

"'You're very young--fortunately," Morgan went on, turning to him again.

"Oh yes, compared with you!"

"Therefore it won't matter so much if you do lose a lot of time."

"That's the way to look at it," said Pemberton accommodatingly.

They were silent a minute; after which the boy asked: "Do you like my
father and my mother very much?"

"Dear me, yes. They're charming people."

Morgan received this with another silence; then unexpectedly, familiarly,
but at the same time affectionately, he remarked: "You're a jolly old
humbug!"

For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour. The
boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red
himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance in which there
was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon,
even tacitly, in such a relation. It produced for Pemberton an
embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy form a question--this was the first
glimpse of it--destined to play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to
the altogether peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his
intercourse with his little companion. Later, when he found himself
talking with the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever
have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at
Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added
to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to
Morgan that he might abuse him, Pemberton, as much as he liked, but must
never abuse his parents. To this Morgan had the easy retort that he
hadn't dreamed of abusing them; which appeared to be true: it put
Pemberton in the wrong.

"Then why am I a humbug for saying _I_ think them charming?" the young
man asked, conscious of a certain rashness.

"Well--they're not your parents."

"They love you better than anything in the world--never forget that,"
said Pemberton.

"Is that why you like them so much?"

"They're very kind to me," Pemberton replied evasively.

"You _are_ a humbug!" laughed Morgan, passing an arm into his tutor's. He
leaned against him looking oft at the sea again and swinging his long
thin legs.

"Don't kick my shins," said Pemberton while he reflected "Hang it, I
can't complain of them to the child!"

"There's another reason, too," Morgan went on, keeping his legs still.

"Another reason for what?"

"Besides their not being your parents."

"I don't understand you," said Pemberton.

"Well, you will before long. All right!"

He did understand fully before long, but he made a fight even with
himself before he confessed it. He thought it the oddest thing to have a
struggle with the child about. He wondered he didn't hate the hope of
the Moreens for bringing the struggle on. But by the time it began any
such sentiment for that scion was closed to him. Morgan was a special
case, and to know him was to accept him on his own odd terms. Pemberton
had spent his aversion to special cases before arriving at knowledge.
When at last he did arrive his quandary was great. Against every
interest he had attached himself. They would have to meet things
together. Before they went home that evening at Nice the boy had said,
clinging to his arm:

"Well, at any rate you'll hang on to the last."

"To the last?"

"Till you're fairly beaten."

"_You_ ought to be fairly beaten!" cried the young man, drawing him
closer.




CHAPTER IV


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 manoeuvre 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.