The Pupil | Page 3

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