Volume Two—Chapter Fourteen.
Wimble finds a Curiosity.
Any one who could have watched Michael Wimble shaving himself at early morn would have wondered whether the man were really sane, for, as he performed the operation upon himself, he worked as if it was for practice—to keep his hand in, just as acrobats and instrumentalists go through their tasks constantly, so as to keep a tight hold upon that which has taken them so much time and labour to acquire.
Being a barber, he considered that those who shaved should shave well, and that the wearing of moustache, or the very smallest morsel of whisker was but a wreak pandering to the savages who had introduced or followed the moustache movement in the time of the Crimean war.
“It’s filthy, that’s what it is, filthy,” Wimble used to say; “and how a man can go about with his face like the back of a wild beast, beats me.”
Consequently, soon after springing from his solitary bed, the owner of the Museum used to set light to a spirit lamp to boil a small shaving pot of water, and then, as there were signs of ebullitions at the side, the brush was dipped in, and the performance commenced with a tremendous lathering.
There were no half-measures. Wimble passed the brush deftly all over his quaintly wrinkled face, till masses of lather hung on to his ears, and covered his cheeks, so that only his eyes were seen. Then, as he glared at himself in a shaving glass, he set to and scraped and scraped his countenance all over, applied the brush again and again in obstinate places, and finished off by grinning hideously in the little mirror, as he stood, with the razor passing over the skin in a way that would have suggested horrors about to be perpetrated by a maniac, weary of his life, to any one who could have seen the process.
Clever as he was, too, in the manipulation, there were at times, however, suggestions that a looker-on might have been right in his ideas. As, for instance, upon the morning in question, when a slip or a pimple—it is needless to say which—necessitated the use of sponge and sticking-plaster.
Then the task was done, and Michael Wimble finished dressing, talking to himself rapidly the while, sundry words which were spoken more loudly than others, giving the key to the subject of the man’s thoughts—the old, old theme, love. Other words told too of disappointment and jealousy, and all this tended to make Mr Wimble go the wrong way when he started for his regular morning walk along the shore.
His way was always west, but he went east, so as to pass Chris Lisle’s lodgings; and as he did so, staring hard at the drawn-down blinds, and the chimney pot innocent as yet of smoke, he gnashed his teeth softly, for there were two new flowers in Chris’s bedroom window—a fuchsia and a geranium, in pots of dazzling red, and the mignonette box, full of nasturtiums, which flowed over and hung down, had been newly painted a delicate green.