I could feel it growing, and the first scrubbiness of it filled me with rage. But as time slipped by it became softer and more pliable, and ceased to irritate me. Freed, too, from the agony of shaving, I soon found myself eating my breakfast in a more equable frame of mind than I had enjoyed for years. I began also to notice in my walks all sorts of things that had not struck me at first—the lark a-twitter in the blue, the good smell of wet earth after rain, the pale gold of ripening wheat. And at last, before ever I saw it, very gradually I came to love my beard, to love the warm comfort and cosiness of it, and to wonder half timidly what it looked like.
When I left, just before my departure for the six-miles-distant station, I called for a looking-glass. They brought me a piece of the one I had cast away. It was very small, but it served my purpose. I gazed and heaved a sigh of rapturous content; a sigh that came from my very heart. My beard was short and thick, its colour a deep glorious brown, with golden lights here and there where the sunbeams danced in some lighter cluster of its curling strands. A beard that a king might wear.
I have never shaved again. Every morning now, while untold millions of my suffering fellows are groaning beneath their razors, I steal an extra fifteen minutes from the day and lie and laugh inside my beard.
"And what of Emily?" you ask.
Almost immediately after my return she left us. She gave no reason. She was not unhappy, she said. She wished to make a change, that was all. To this day my wife cannot account for her departure. But I know why she went. Emily was a patriot with a purpose. A month after she parted from us I received a letter from her:—
"Dear Sir,—May I ask you to take into consideration the fact that by having ceased to shave you will in future be effecting a slight economy in your daily expenditure? Might I also suggest to you that during the remainder of the War you should make a voluntary contribution to the national exchequer of every shilling saved under this head? The total sum will not be large, but everything counts. Yours is, if I may be allowed to say so, the finest beard I have been instrumental in producing during my two and a half years' experience in domestic service. I am now hard at work on my sixth case, which is approaching its crisis.
Apologising for any temporary inconvenience I may have caused you, I am,
Yours faithfully,
Emily Johnson,
Foundress and President of the
Housemaids' Society for the
Promotion of Patriotic Beards."
I never showed the letter to my wife, but I have acted on Emily's suggestion. I often think of her still, her whole soul afire with her patriotic mission, flitting, the very flower of housemaids, from home to home, lingering but a little while in each, in each content for that little while to be loathed and stormed at by an exasperated shaver, whom she transforms into a happy bearded contributor to her fund.