The Pupil

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Генри Джеймс. The Pupil

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

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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 déjeuner, 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.

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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.

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