It was another instance of his dominating character, but also of his innate sense of justice.
“I am not insensible,” he said to the senior curate, “of the services that you have already rendered. But in the interests of my son, as you must surely agree, I cannot again trust him to your care.”
The senior curate bowed, but did not articulate a reply, and my father then handed me once more to the junior. For a moment the latter hesitated, but at the vicar’s request accepted the privilege of concluding my baptism. Later, I have been told, there was a certain amount of argument, in which my father more than held his own, finally absolving the vicar from further sponsorial duties and notifying his decision to transfer his worship elsewhere.
For a man of my father’s position this was a serious step. But it was one that he did not hesitate to take. And within a year, as I have always been proud to remember, he had made himself a sidesman at St. James-the-Lesser-Still, Peckham Rye.
CHAPTER III
My parents’ studies in the upbringing of children. A successful instance of non-vaccination. Further example of my father’s consideration for others. My mother’s ill-health. My parents engage a charwoman. Her appearance and character. Physical characteristics of her son. Deplorable social result of the war. Continued presumption of charwoman’s son. I rebuff him. Affection for grey rabbit. Charwoman’s son’s cannon and the use made of it by him. Scenes of violence, and intervention of my father. Intervention of charwoman. A lethargic vicar. Was he also immoral? My father transfers his worship to St. James-the-Least-of-All.
Apart from the ill-health to which I have previously made reference, but which was punctuated with intervals of comparative well-being, I have always regarded my first five or six years as a particularly fruitful period. At my father’s desire, almost in this case a command, my mother began to study various books on childhood, such as Dr. Brewinson’s Childish Complaints, Mrs. Edward Podmere’s Diet in Infancy, the Reverend Ambrose Walker’s First Steps in Religion, Wilbur P. Nathan’s The Babe and the Infinite, Mrs. Wood-Mortimer’s Clothes and the Young, and Jonathan and Cornwall’s Dictionary of Home Medicine. Each of these, with the exception of the Dictionary, was borrowed in turn from the nearest public library, and it became my mother’s custom to consecrate her afternoon rest hour to the perusal of these volumes.
According to an arrangement suggested by my father, she would study one chapter each afternoon, or alternatively three and a half pages of the Dictionary of Home Medicine. On his return from work, and after she had washed up the supper dishes—for my father at this time did not employ a domestic—he would put her through a searching examination upon what she had read earlier in the day. If, as was frequently the case, since my mother was not naturally scholastic, she failed to satisfy her examiner, he would playfully impose upon her the little penalty of again going through her task before she went to bed. And on such occasions, if he had not fallen asleep, he would re-examine her when she came to bid him good-night. If, on the other hand, her replies had been judged adequate, it was an understood thing that she might claim an extra kiss. So seriously, indeed, did my mother apply herself that she began to grow unattractively thin; and once, when she had failed in her examination on three successive nights, she actually burst into tears. For this feminine weakness, when she had asked his pardon, my father of course readily forgave her, merely pointing out that, with my future at stake, he was obviously unable to relax his standards.
Regarding me thus, from the very first, as a sacred trust committed to their charge, this is but a small example of the immense and unremitting care with which my parents undertook me. But it will at least suffice to show that they had not underrated the high task to which they had been called. To my father especially, as the months slipped all too quickly by, I became inexpressibly dear; and it was for that reason among others that I escaped the torments of vaccination. Though Jonathan and Cornwall’s Dictionary of Home Medicine advocated this operation on historical grounds, my father had an instinctive, but none the less well-reasoned, horror of the knife. Himself the subject of frequent boils, he would never permit these to be lanced, invariably giving orders that they should be poulticed until Nature herself brought about their evacuation. Nor can I say that, in my own case, he has been other than completely justified. It is true that I have suffered, and still do suffer, apart from the indigestion previously referred to, from several forms of neurasthenia, a marked tendency to eczema, occipital headaches, sour eructations, and flatulent distension of the abdomen. But from smallpox, although entirely unvaccinated, I have always remained singularly immune.