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.
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 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, 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 borné 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.