Chapter Thirty Three.
The Missing Man.
Jerry Brigley was operating upon his master’s head, a few days later, with a couple of hair-brushes, and these he used in the most dexterous manner; and the results were wonderfully different from those produced by the people who brushed one’s boyish hair in the good old times.
“Oh! for the days when I was young!” people cry, and they may well make use of that interjection; but it ought to be in something else than regret.
I, for one, would prefer not to be young again, to go through all that suffering connected with my head.
Pray, do not imagine that I refer to learning the three “R’s” or to working out those angular puzzles invented by Euclid, whose problems would only stop in my brain one at a time—that is to say, when I had mastered one perfectly, and could repeat and illustrate it throughout upon slate with pencil, upon paper with pen, upon blackboard with chalk, the process of acquiring another made a clean sweep of the first, which was utterly demolished and had to be relearned, only in its turn to destroy “Proposition Two.”
I meant nothing of that sort, but rather the external suffering that my unfortunate little head received at the hands of nurses, who half-suffocated me with the soap that produced temporary blindness in my eyes, and deafness in my ears, before the best family yellow or mottled was “slooshed” away, leaving me panting and hot. Then came the tremendous rubbing, followed by the jigging out of knots of hair with a cruel comb and the brushing which seemed to make numberless little holes in my tender scalp; while my head was knocked to this side and to that, and then tapped with the back of the brush, because I was a naughty boy and would not hold still.
Lieutenant Lacey’s treatment at the hands of Jerry Brigley was of a very different type. When he was shampooing, Jerry could have given Cinquevalli, the great juggler, long odds and beaten him. This man performs wonderful feats with cannon-balls, but they are nothing to Jerry’s graceful acts with the human head, which he would take in hand and keep in a perfect state of equilibrium, balancing the pressure of one set of fingers by the resistance of the other; the same when towelling, and, above all, when finishing with a pair of the lieutenant’s ivory-backed brushes. His master’s head was kept floating, as it were, on the points of the bristles, while a pleasant stimulation was kept up on what Jerry termed “the scallup.”
“By the way, Brigley,” said the lieutenant, who sat back in his chair, with his eyes half-shut, “I shall have three or four friends here to-night.”
“Yes, sir.”