The Pupil | Page 4

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