Collected Stories

  I had dropped upon my sofa – I felt faint. The man went on, liking to talk, as persons of his class do when they have something horrible to tell. She usually rang for the stewardess early, but this morning of course there had been no ring. The stewardess had gone in all the same about eight o’clock and found the cabin empty. That was about an hour ago. Her things were there in confusion – the things she usually wore when she went above. The stewardess thought she had been rather strange last night, but she waited a little and then went back. Miss Mavis hadn’t turned up – and she didn’t turn up. The stewardess began to look for her – she hadn’t been seen on deck or in the saloon. Besides, she wasn’t dressed – not to show herself; all her clothes were in her room. There was another lady, an old lady, Mrs Nettlepoint – I would know her – that she was sometimes with, but the stewardess had been with her and she knew Miss Mavis had not come near her that morning. She had spoken to him and they had taken a quiet look – they had hunted everywhere. A ship’s a big place, but you do come to the end of it, and if a person ain’t there why they ain’t. In short an hour had passed and the young lady was not accounted for: from which I might judge if she ever would be. The watch couldn’t account for her, but no doubt the fishes in the sea could – poor miserable lady! The stewardess and he, they had of course thought it their duty very soon to speak to the doctor, and the doctor had spoken immediately to the captain. The captain didn’t like it – they never did. But he would try to keep it quiet – they always did. By the time I succeeded in pulling myself together and getting on, after a fashion, the rest of my clothes I had learned that Mrs Nettlepoint had not yet been informed, unless the stewardess had broken it to her within the previous few minutes. Her son knew, the young gentleman on the other side of the ship (he had the other steward); my man had seen him come out of his cabin and rush above, just before he came in to me. He had gone above, my man was sure; he had not gone to the old lady’s cabin. I remember a queer vision when the steward told me this – the wild flash of a picture of Jasper Nettlepoint leaping with a mad compunction in his young agility over the side of the ship. I hasten to add that no such incident was destined to contribute its horror to poor Grace Mavis’s mysterious tragic act. What followed was miserable enough, but I can only glance at it. When I got to Mrs Nettlepoint’s door she was there in her dressing-gown; the stewardess had just told her and she was rushing out to come to me. I made her go back – I said I would go for Jasper. I went for him but I missed him, partly no doubt because it was really, at first, the captain I was after. I found this personage and found him highly scandalised, but he gave me no hope that we were in error, and his displeasure, expressed with seamanlike plainness, was a definite settlement of the question. From the deck, where I merely turned round and looked, I saw the light of another summer day, the coast of Ireland green and near and the sea a more charming colour than it had been at all. When I came below again Jasper had passed back; he had gone to his cabin and his mother had joined him there. He remained there till we reached Liverpool – I never saw him. His mother, after a little, at his request, left him alone. All the world went above to look at the land and chatter about our tragedy, but the poor lady spent the day, dismally enough, in her room. It seemed to me intolerably long; I was thinking so of vague Porterfield and of my prospect of having to face him on the morrow. Now of course I knew why she had asked me if I should recognise him; she had delegated to me mentally a certain pleasant office. I gave Mrs Peck and Mrs Gotch a wide berth – I couldn’t talk to them. I could, or at least I did a little, to Mrs Nettlepoint, but with too many reserves for comfort on either side, for I foresaw that it would not in the least do now to mention Jasper to her. I was obliged to assume by my silence that he had had nothing to do with what had happened; and of course I never really ascertained what he had had to do. The secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who would have sacrificed her marriage to him on so short an acquaintance remains shut up in his breast. His mother, I know, went to his door from time to time, but he refused her admission. That evening, to be human at a venture, I requested the steward to go in and ask him if he should care to see me, and the attendant returned with an answer which he candidly transmitted. ‘Not in the least!’ Jasper apparently was almost as scandalised as the captain.

  At Liverpool, at the dock, when we had touched, twenty people came on board, and I had already made out Mr Porterfield at a distance. He was looking up at the side of the great vessel with disappointment written (to my eyes) in his face – disappointment at not seeing the woman he loved lean over it and wave her handkerchief to him. Every one was looking at him, every one but she (his identity flew about in a moment) and I wondered if he did not observe it. He used to be lean, he had grown almost fat. The interval between us diminished – he was on the plank and then on the deck with the jostling officers of the customs – all too soon for my equanimity. I met him instantly however, laid my hand on him and drew him away, though I perceived that he had no impression of having seen me before. It was not till afterwards that I thought this a little stupid of him. I drew him far away (I was conscious of Mrs Peck and Mrs Gotch looking at us as we passed) into the empty, stale smoking-room; he remained speechless, and that struck me as like him. I had to speak first, he could not even relieve me by saying ‘Is anything the matter?’ I told him first that she was ill. It was an odious moment.

  THE PUPIL

  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 Suède 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 first 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 which it was better that 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 first come into the room, as if to see for himself, as soon as 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 be unpleasant. Pemberton was modest – he was even timid; and the chance that his small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had quite figured, to his nervousness, among the d
angers 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 if 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, if the allusion did not 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, là-là!’

  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 could 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 he 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 kind of excitement. 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 mocked, tenderly. ‘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,’ said Morgan to Pemberton.

  ‘He tries? Why, he’s twenty years old!’ cried Mrs Moreen.

  ‘You’re very witty,’ Pemberton remarked to the child – a proposition that his mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring that Morgan’s sallies were the delight of the house. The boy paid no heed to this; he only inquired 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 tiny patrimony into a single full wave of experience. He had had his full wave, but he couldn’t pay his hotel bill. 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 suspected she was afraid of 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 Pemberton before the Friday, suggesting, among other things that geniuses were not invariably lovable. However, it was all the better if there was an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken too much for granted that it would be dreary. 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 hesitated a moment: then he answered, laughing: ‘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.’

  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 a man of the world. Ulick, the firstborn, was in visible training for the same profession – under the disadvantage as yet, however, of a buttonhole only 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 make them modest, and Mr Moreen confided to him that he found them positively meagre. He further assured him 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 found sustenance 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 nature and education 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 bound demanded some practice in translation. To-day, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoric, like a prismatic reflection 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 lette
rs he got from him when they were separated – the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too inconsequent for anything but dreamland. The queerest thing about them was their success (as it appeared to him for a while at the time), for 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 a mot d’ordre, but by 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 intensely usual; therefore the reversed conventions of the Moreens (for they had their standards), struck him as topsyturvy. 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 Puritanism. The reaction of the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much further. He had thought himself very clever that first day in hitting them all off in his mind with the term ‘cosmopolite’. Later, it seemed feeble and colourless enough – confessedly, helplessly provisional.

  However, when he first applied it to them he had a degree of joy – for an instructor he was still empirical – as if from the apprehension that to live with them would really be 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, in the spiced fluency, 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 kind of professional acquaintance with continental cities. They talked of ‘good places’ as if they had been 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 romantic 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 borné never to have heard of. They could imitate Venetian and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very particular they communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their own – a sort of spoken cipher, which Pemberton at first took for Volapuk, but which he learned to understand as he would not have understood Volapuk.