THERE was no time lost in setting the experiment going, and it was soon
in full swing. Its birth pangs were awful, and embraced in their throes
a great number of persons. The parents’ sufferings were so complex and
so quite peculiar to themselves that it is impossible to expound them to
an unsympathizing public.
The tortures that couple endured during the first few months after the
initial stage of intellectual development had been instituted and was
being dealt with, were severe, but they were in no wise connected with
their children’s anguish at the sudden and unexpected onslaught on their
higher parts.
_Their_ misery arose chiefly from the jarring and inconveniently close
contact with tutors, whom, in their unconscious Christian way, they
found it their duty to admit for some part of every day into the edge of
their lives. This was a terrible discipline, more especially as during
these times the unhappy instructors also thought it their duty to ease
off their slough of learning and to expand their social parts, and thus
the manufacture of small talk became a daily necessity in the lives of
the distracted pair.
They had both taken infinite pains to provide silent entertainment for
their guests—or rather succession of guests—in the tutoring line. The
standard scientists were first tried, and these seeming to have but
little effect, a whole cartload of mixed literature, including all the
rag-tag and bobtail of fiction the bookseller wanted to get off his
hands, was imported and spread about enticingly; theology and ethics
were also given a show, till at last all the tables at one side of the
room were spotted with slate, yellow, and dull blues and browns, and
every form of journal from the _Times_ to the _Police News_ was
scattered broadcast over the place, all with a view to lay hold on the
tutorial mind and keep it independent of its entertainers.
Directly the tutor for the time being, entered at his appointed hour,
they rose simultaneously from their work, as if the same spring moved
them, hurried towards him with outstretched hands, sat down side by side
facing him, and broke into conversation, which if gaspy, and at times
inconsequent, from the sudden upheaval of waves of thought in one or
other of them, was kept up with gallant relentlessness till the period
of detention was at an end.
As soon as the clock announced this event, they broke off suddenly with
a click, and the tutor was, so to speak, shot out, and the rent he had
made in the lives of his entertainers was patched up as well as might be
for that day.
But during the entire first course of those tutors, Mr. and Mrs. Waring
felt always as if they were suffering from ragged edges.
As for Gwen and Dacre, their first taste of reclamation from the savage
state, was bitter, sudden, and condign. Civilization seems the last
thing in the world capable of soothing the savage breast, especially if
the savage who owns it is young and in rude health.
Then Mary suffered. It was a hard blow to find her fledglings torn from
her in one fell stroke, and only allowed to return at odd moments for
repairs to skin and clothes.
Poor Mrs. Fellowes fretted herself into a regular feverish attack.
As for the tutors themselves, the less said of their sufferings the
better. Three succumbed to them in four months.
The one that followed, a most excellent person and cut out for a family
man, broke off his engagement for fear of consequences, his slight
substratum of scientific knowledge having got so much stirred up while
at Waring Park, that he grew bewildered.
If such results as he had to deal with, he reflected, were to be seen in
the green tree what might not come to pass in the dry? And he was well
aware of the cloudy ancestry of his lady-love, and on his own side had
not very much to boast of. It was unfortunate. But it certainly did seem
sacrilegious impertinence in him to attempt what his betters had so
egregiously failed in.