“NOW, Ruth,” said Mr. Fellowes when he had finished and despatched his
note, and, lighting a cigarette, settled himself in his armchair
opposite to her, “I’ll yield you up all I know. It was the queerest
interview I ever had with that queer pair.—You needn’t wriggle with
anticipation, my dear, no human creature could reproduce the scene with
any justice to himself or to his subject.—Waring had most palpably put
on for the occasion a brisk man-of-the-world air that was superb, but
his wife seemed dreamier than ever, and limper, and her hat looked
rather askew.”
“It always does, but do go on.”
“Directly you give me a chance, dear. Waring opened the campaign with a
little small talk as he always does, but it was quite off-hand and
reckless to-day. He had hardly set his gentle tap fairly flowing
however, when his wife suddenly woke up and chipped in with quite
phenomenal clearness and precision,
“‘Dear Henry, suppose we state the object of our call, we can converse
afterwards.’
“Then it all came out. First one stated a fact or a theory then the
other had his innings. It was hard enough to follow the two and to watch
them at the same time; one never likes to miss the moment when they
clasp hands again and the little looks they cast on each other in the
process. It appears the pair meditate a definite experiment on those
wretched children, and want my help in securing a bear-leader for the
task.”
“Good gracious!” gasped Mrs. Fellowes. “Go on,” she commanded grimly,
“what is it?”
“On no account whatever is either to be sent to school or allowed to
hold intercourse with other children; no woman is to have any hand in
their tuition; naturally, cricket, football, and every other boyish
sport is to be carefully excluded from the curriculum, and all Christian
teaching is to be utterly tabooed.”
“Mercy on us!”
“The facts of the Old Testament are to be imparted to them with other
ancient history, and they are to be well instructed in the natural
sciences. By these means they will learn to know God in His Works—with a
capital ‘W’—Mrs. Waring observed this solemnly to her husband for my
benefit. ‘Exactly, my darling,’ he replied, with a most surprising
alacrity—they had rehearsed this point, those two babies.—When the
children are launched into their teens and have presumably arrived at an
age of more or less discretion, the Bible and any other existing
evidences of Christianity obtainable, are to be formally presented to
them. The imps may then receive these or reject them according to their
particular turn of mind, but in no case are they to be biased.
“The parents have seemingly occupied themselves a good deal with this
part of the experiment and regard this presentation of a choice of
beliefs as a sort of function on which they mean to take exhaustive
observation.”
The rector paused to roll another cigarette; when he had finished and
lighted it, he went on.
“Ruth, you are an intelligent woman and won’t misjudge me when I say,
that this experiment in itself seems to be a reasonable one.
“This Bible-reading question is an awful one,” he went on, musing aloud,
“we all have had, every decent English man, woman, and child of us has
had the Bible religiously drilled into him from the time of
consciousness till whatever time he can manage to read it for himself,
then he is exhorted to carry on the exercise independently, and a good
percentage of people do; you’d be astonished at the number of people who
never miss reading their Bible every day of their lives, and perhaps
more astonished still if you were to know the amazingly small effect it
has on the lives of these people. Even from an intellectual point of
view, it is incredible to me how little the average human being has
grasped the heritage he possesses in this book.
“I was speaking to a girl the other day—by far the most intelligent one
I know in these regions—she was talking to me with perfect unrestraint
and frankness about all sorts of things. She told me she could see no
beauty whatsoever in the Bible, and that she had never been able to
derive an atom of encouragement or assurance from anything in it. If it
did not bore, it upset her, and made belief harder. It had become a mere
patter to her by vile reading and intonation, and the remarkable turns
of thought given to it by many minds insulted her reason. Even the
poetry of the diction had been spoilt for her and seemed, she said, to
reek of half-fledged curates.—Under some conditions this experiment of
the Warings might prove a success.”
“Oh, but with that mother!”
“Ah, yes, that alters the whole aspect of affairs! If you could only
have heard the passionless, analytical style in which Waring and his
wife discussed the matter and speculated on the issue, which they think
will be more typical in Gwen than in Dacre, his brute strength being, in
their opinion, his strong point, and his theological side hardly worth
considering. They throw it in, however, ‘careless like’ as, if the
experiment is to be tried, it is just as easy to try it on two as on
one.”
“Mercy on us,” again said Mrs. Fellowes, clattering the fire-irons
viciously.
“By the way, Waring amused me intensely by one revelation he made, he
could hardly get it out, and I saw him fling a pathetically-deprecating
glance at his wife and give her hand a squeeze before he began. He felt
he had to account for the luckless Dacre’s strength of legs, of which he
seems to have as poor an opinion as the Psalmist, he feared I might fall
into the error of casting the blame on him or his wife, so he determined
I should know the real cause. ‘You will hardly believe me,’ he observed,
‘when I tell you that my wife with her refined intellectuality is the
outcome of long generations of soldiers and of—ahem,—famous duellists,
and I fear our son, Dacre, is a very clearly-defined specimen of
throwing-back.’ Poor Mrs. Waring! she felt her ancestry keenly and got
as red as a rose during the confession.”
“Goodness gracious me! What a woman! what a pair! What in the name of
goodness brought the two together and made them marry each other and
produce children. If I were Providence and had that on my mind, I’d
never look up again.”
“My dear child!”
“John, in the present state of my feelings, brought on by you yourself
recollect, you must forget your sacerdotal character and only remember
my state of original sin. Why should two beautiful children’s lives be
spoilt for the vagaries of a pair who never had any right to bear
children? Think of Gwen’s sad old face full of the trouble of all ages,
think of her naughtiness with that horrible unique sort of infernal
touch about it; that painting herself blue is the most childish escapade
I remember.
“I was at Mrs. Doyle’s yesterday and she was telling me a lot about Mrs.
Waring before we came. After Dacre’s birth, she said it was absolutely
ghastly to see her with the child, she was terrified to hold it, and
trembled like a leaf whenever she absolutely had to. Poor Mrs. Doyle,
she got quite irritated and excited about one thing; it seems she could
not nurse her own children at all, and that Mrs. Waring was a capital
mother from that point of view, and Mrs. Doyle seemingly could not see
at all why an unnatural little bundle of scientific data should score
off her, a good wholesome creature made for a mother, in this manner.”
“It was certainly too bad, and one would never have expected it of Mrs.
Waring,” said the rector laughing.
“Oh, and whenever Mary brought either of the babies to her or she met
them in the corridors or about the grounds, Mrs. Doyle says her one
request was that Mary should take the creature away and give it food, it
looked faint! They were both huge, flourishing, healthy babies, I hear.”
“Ruth,” said Mr. Fellowes suddenly, “I wish those people would keep away
from church.”
“You are shedding your sacerdotal character with a vengeance! What do
you mean?”
“You have no idea how they distract me, sitting there together with
their eyes far away and their ears sealed, except at the odd times they
give those spasmodic simultaneous starts, and twist their thoughts back
for the minute to what’s going on.”
“But, John, for the sake of the parish—”
“If the parish can’t keep up to its ordinary pretty low water-mark
without this prick to its piety it must be in a poor state, and even
more of a discredit to me than I imagine. They are far too good to be
asked to play this weekly farce for the parish’s sake. It was Hopkins,
not I, who insisted upon this church-going and of course they gave in in
their gracious simple way; and now, not even a water spout would stop
them from coming, they are so concerned for my feelings. What a pair of
unconscious Christians they are to be sure! One sees it cropping up in
all directions.”
“I wish it would appear anyway in the management of their children, I
don’t see many traces of it there. When is this wretched experiment to
be set going?” asked Mrs. Fellowes.
“As soon as I can procure a suitable person to conduct it. I think I
know a fellow who might do.”
“What business have they with children, those two?” cried Mrs. Fellowes
with a little spasm of pain twisting about her mouth. “I don’t believe
those children ever got properly hugged in all their lives by that
inhuman little mother of theirs. And oh, Gwen’s dress! That is awful!”
“Ah, yes, that makes the whole affair very much sadder! Don’t you think
dinner is ready? Yes, those children have a great deal to fight against,
it isn’t their ancestors alone that will handicap them, poor little
beggars.”
“Cartloads of saints for ancestors wouldn’t be worth a rap to them with
an eerie little creature like that for a mother,” said Mrs. Fellowes
hotly, in the pretty lazy drawl into which her touch of twang had
developed itself. “I pity that wretched coming tutor.”
She let her skirts drop and gave them a dexterous kick as she went out,
to give them the correct “hang”.