第4章

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.