God replied before our eyes. The mocking man, in a misjudged movement, bent over too far with the dog. In a second the boat was overturned, and men and dog were in the water together, struggling and splashing. (Brother Brawn's back was turned; I do not think he knew what was happening.)
Where the boat had overturned it was clearly much deeper, as neither of the men could stand. One managed to swim in safety to the opposite bank. The other, the chief mocker, struggled, rose, disappeared, rose again, and finally disappeared, gurgling and gesticulating horribly.
Those of us on shore were purged with awe and terror. "God is not mocked!" cried Pentecost.
After the service, the dead body was washed ashore; I gazed in dumb horror (thinking too of God's power) at the staring wide-open eyes, the blue face contorted with fear, the soft white foam issuing from the mouth.
The dog was saved. Brother Brawn took it away with him and had it poisoned.
This incident served to tinge with apprehension the hopes with which I looked forward to my own immersion, now very near. Suppose I were drowned: in my own way I was wicked as the labourer, with better chances and less excuse. God could drown me if He wished. The mere physical horror of cold water was another fleck. Nor was Mrs. Cheese behindhand with tales that troubled. She recalled the young woman in a rapid decline who had been baptized one winter morning in the Exe, had been dragged out unconscious, and had died within the hour. She knew of Sisters who had fainted through nervousness or collapsed with the cold. Then there was the Christian wife who was stripped naked and horsewhipped by her infidel husband, a country squire over Chittlehampton way, because she had received public baptism. He flogged her till she was a mass of blood and wounds, till she fell to the ground as one dead; then dragged her up again and dashed her head against a stone wall. She died from ill-usage, a true "gauspel martyr."
My day was fixed: our next baptism, a Sunday in April, a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday.
Clothes were a problem. Female candidates usually donned for the occasion an old cast-off skirt which they could afford to let the water ruin. Pieces of lead were sewn at intervals to the inside of the bottom of the skirt, so that when in the water the air would not get into and blow it upwards.
According to Aunt Jael, the pieces of lead should weigh about four ounces each: just sufficient to keep the skirt pendant and modest. All very well, said my Grandmother, but what good were weights—four ounces or forty ounces—when the skirt, like the child's, reached down to the knees only? There was only one way out of the difficulty: "The child must wear a long skirt for the occasion." A faded black serge of my Grandmother's was unearthed. It fitted me—more or less—though a good couple of inches higher in front than behind; and, helped out by an old black blouse and cape, produced the most grotesque and unlovely Mary the mirror had ever shewn me.
"Changing" was at Brother Brawn's, the White House, near the quay. On the Saturday night preceding the event Grandmother took me down there with my ordinary Lord's Day clothes wrapped up in a paper parcel and laid them out in the back kitchen (the immemorial after-the-event robing room) ready for the morrow. Mistress Brawn, née Clinker, received us with an infantile affectation of patronage: as though we didn't know that Brother Brawn's had been the garmenting-house for forty years and more.