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.
