Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man

by Sir H. H. Bashford

Permanently impaired as had been my father’s health by the ordeal referred to in Chapter VIII he had not permitted this, as I have said, to interfere with his duties as a sidesman; and there were still occasions upon which he would exhibit all his old-time fire and determination. Thus when my mother’s parents had been destroyed by a tram accident about a month after the decease of Silas Whey, it was he who had arranged the funeral, chosen the hymns, and designed the monument by which they were to be commemorated. The provision business having declined somewhat, the chief factor in the design had necessarily been one of economy, and my father had therefore confined himself to a broken column some three inches in diameter and a foot high. Insufficient to accommodate their full names, their initials had been tastefully engraved upon it, the surface of the grave being sprinkled with flints that would require no subsequent upkeep.

In conjunction with Mr. Balfour Whey too, it was he who had selected a house for my mother’s eight sisters, small but sufficient and in a remote part of Wales, where they would be able to husband their meagre income. Bitterly opposed as the eight sisters had been both to living together and leaving Walworth, my father had overcome them by the sheer power of his torrential eloquence and personality. Surrounded by strangers, as he had irresistibly reminded them, most of whom were unacquainted with the English language, fifteen miles from a railway station and three and a half from the nearest village, they would have neither the occasion nor the opportunity to dissipate their substance in convivial extravagance, while the precipitous roads, by which alone the house that he had chosen for them could be approached, would give them an appetite for the extremely simple fare which would be all that their means would allow them to purchase. To Wales they had gone, therefore, and though he continued to receive letters from them, couched in terms of the basest ingratitude, he neither replied to these nor permitted them to modify his kindly consideration for my mother.

Nor had he been less adequate in dealing with the circumstances that had arisen, a few months later, in connection with the demises of Mrs. Emily Smith and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs. Both these ladies, who had been living on Post Office annuities, had unhappily died after sharing a sausage, strongly suspected, though never actually proved, of harbouring the bacillus of botulism. Thanks to my father’s efforts, however, seconded by Mr. Balfour Whey, the firm by whom the sausage had been manufactured consented without prejudice to pay a sum of money sufficient to provide for the ladies’ interment. I have said sufficient, but after my father had reimbursed himself and paid the expenses of Mr. Whey, he was once more faced, as in the case of my grandparents, with an acute necessity for economy. Burying them in a double coffin, however, of his own design—a design for which he afterwards obtained the patent—he succeeded not only in keeping the undertaker’s bill within the balance at his disposal but in providing a surplus with which he afterwards obtained a small iron slab containing their names and ages. Nor was that all, for with the pound or two that was over he bought a third-class ticket to Aberdeen, where he had obtained a situation for Mrs. Emily Smith’s granddaughter as housemaid in a home for Xtian workers.

After every such exhibition of pristine vigour, however, my father experienced an acute reaction, and for many weeks would become a martyr not only to neurasthenic indigestion, but to digestive neurasthenia accompanied by flatulence of the severest order. For months on end, indeed, my mother would be obliged to sit by his bedside in case he should wake up and require abdominal kneading, and few were the nights upon which she had not in addition to go downstairs and make him some cocoa. But he would never allow himself to be daunted. His breakfast the next morning would be as hearty as usual. And he was never deterred by even the most obstinate inflation from the performance of a moral or religious duty. Despite his courage, however, he was leaning on me with ever-increasing emphasis, and I am proud to recall that, in what was so soon to prove the heaviest ordeal of his life, I was able to render him very material and indeed essential assistance.

Such then was the position when I parted with the Stools, after the evening meal that I have just recorded. And it was rather with their cries of thanks and gentle admiration resounding through the chill November night than with any sense of impending trouble that I turned my footsteps towards home. Indeed, as I buttoned up my overcoat and drew my scarf over my mouth, I had every reason to feel content both on my own account and my father’s, whose health for some weeks had been slowly improving. For not only had my mother’s parents been safely interred and her eight sisters satisfactorily disposed of, her two aunts competently buried, and Emily Smith junior despatched to Aberdeen, but my father, as I have indicated, had finally established himself as the senior sidesman of St. James-the-Least-of-All.

Conferring the right of leading the other sidesmen up the central aisle at the end of the collection, this was the more gratifying since my father had only obtained it as the result of a prolonged and determined struggle, in which his chief opponent had been a retired fishmonger, known as Alexander Carkeek. A northern Caledonian of the most offensive type, this gentleman, as he liked to consider himself, was now a sleeping partner in the firm of Carkeek and Carkeek, fishmongers and poulterers in the Kennington Road, and had long been suspected, both by my father and myself, of a secret addiction to alcohol. Of middle height—he was perhaps taller than my father by an inch and three-quarters or two inches—his abdominal circumference was equally extensive and his bullet-shaped face even more highly coloured. Unlike my father, however, he had signally failed in retaining the bulk of his hair, and even his two sons, Corkran and Cosmo, were showing signs of becoming bald. Sidesmen like their father, they were only less aggressive, and during the long contest for supremacy, they had seized every opportunity of detaining or distracting my father while their own got into position at the head of the line. Indeed on one occasion, when my father had paused for a moment to adjust a door-handle half-way up the aisle, they had deliberately encouraged their father to push himself in front and thereby head the procession. Naturally resenting this, my father had immediately plunged forward, with the painful result that the two of them had become wedged and had been unable, owing to their respective girths, either to advance or retreat. Needless to say, in the struggle that ensued, my father had been the first to break away and had arrived at the chancel half an abdomen ahead of his pertinacious rival.

Alexander Carkeek and his two sons

Ultimately, as I have said, however, thanks to repeated protests and an impassioned interview with the vicar, my father had definitely secured for himself the right of precedence, though the Carkeeks still remained sidesmen. Nor was that all. For it was now generally known that the vicar’s churchwarden was about to retire, and there could be little doubt, as my father had several times observed to me, as to the probable successor to this great position.

It was with a comparatively light heart therefore that I opened the front door, hung up my hat and coat and folded my scarf, and entered the parlour ready to describe to my father the events that had occupied my evening; and my distress can be imagined when I at once perceived him to be in a state of the acutest physical congestion. Facially suffused to an alarming extent, the hairs of his moustache were visibly projecting, and I naturally assumed at first that he must have become the subject of an exceptional degree of intestinal discomfort. On closer inspection, however, I observed that this could scarcely be the case since his waistcoat buttons were still fastened, and for a brief second I had a fearful apprehension that he was annoyed with myself. He did in fact ask me rather abruptly the reason for my absence from the evening meal. But his expression lightened a little when I told him where I had been and of the services rendered by me to Ezekiel Stool.