Frederick’s Folly
In a popular Dublin suburb, not quite a day’s forced march from Rathmines,—which, as every tourist in Ireland knows, is the Back Bay of the Hibernian metropolis,—there boarded, lodged, and sent out his washing last Christmas an æsthetic and highly “cul-chawed” young gentleman who had come all the way from London to take up a position in that branch of the civil service which hangs its banners from the outer walls of the Custom House, and receives for idling four hours a day whatever filthy Irish lucre may be presented in the shape of income. To spare the harrowed feelings of his afflicted relatives, I shall expose to a heartless world only his baptismal appellation, Frederick. In the clammy tomb of the miserable past I shall bury the remainder of his official signature.
Fred came, he saw, but he didn’t conquer, for alas! while he saw he was also seen, and his personal charms were not of a nature to strike his landlady’s daughter, a neat little, sweet little, captivating, sparkling Irish maiden, with the amorous feelings that his ardent soul desired. But on this Christmas eve of 1882, fortune had smiled upon Fred with a quarter’s salary, and he determined to add such embellishments to his face and form as should entrance and fill with rapture even a less susceptible heart than beat within the tender bosom of Norah Flaherty. He would pave the way by a Christmas present. He had a work-box. He would fill it with all the little knick-knacks dear to feminine weakness. But it was rather shabby. He would varnish it. Hamilton & Long, of Grafton Street, sold a celebrated composition warranted to change the plainest deal kitchen table into a highly ornamental walnut article-de-luxe, fit to adorn the library of a duke or the boudoir of a countess.
He left home to secure that miraculous compound. He secured it. Having time on hand, he resolved to devote it to the adornment of his person. He dropped into a barber’s temple in Wicklow Street. Now, in the British Isles, you cannot visit a barber for a five-cent shave without being subjected by him to eloquent seductions to purchase three or four dollars’ worth of hair-dyes, washes, cosmetics, and face powders. Frederick’s barber was like the rest of his insular tribe. He had barely got his devastating scissors ready for action on our hero’s cranium before he ventured to suggest that Fred’s hair was not—well, not quite a fashionable color. As the locks in question were of the decidedly martial color usually associated with the uniform of the English line or the—hem—nether garments of the French infantry, Frederick assented.
“You should try our hair-dye, Balsam of Peru,” said the tonsorial artist. “It will make your hair as black as the hob of—I mean as the raven’s wing.”
Fred was about, like an editor, to decline with thanks, when he thought of Norah, pretty little Norah, and in a fatal moment he invested in the dye.
“Your mustache ain’t quite a miracle,” suggested the knight of the scissors.
It wasn’t quite a miracle. It was a somewhat dilapidated, disjointed sort of a mustache—what there was of it. It grew in stray patches and odd hairs, with five minutes’ desert intervals for reflection between the stray oases of tufts and vegetation. Fred mournfully indorsed the coiffeur’s opinion.
“Ah, try our Formula. It would grow whiskers on a billiard ball or a beard on a foundation stone with a single application. Only a shilling.”
A bottle of Formula found its way into Frederick’s pocket.
“Those hairs on your nose don’t remarkably add to the striking beauty of your classic features,” once more insinuated the demon of the lather-pot.
They didn’t. It was strange, but Norah had made a precisely similar remark. In fact, that capillary addition to his proboscis was one of the principal barriers between Frederick and his fondest hopes. He agreed with his evil genius.
“You should use our Depilatory. Bound to make a clothes brush as bare as a smoothing iron. Costs a mere trifle. Only two shillings.”
Alas! He took the Depilatory.
“You’re not a painter?” queried the inquisitive fiend of the curling-tongs.
No, he wasn’t.
“Ah, my mistake. Seemed to me you’d been eating yellow ochre to-day. Natural color of your teeth, I suppose?”
Fred looked disgusted. These personal reflections were becoming monotonous. However, he admitted that the speculator who bought his teeth to retail as imitation pearl studs would scarcely realize a fortune by the investment.
“You really ought to take a bottle of our Fluid Dentifrice. Brush your teeth every night with a few drops, and in a short time ivory would look gloomy beside them. Never knew it to fail. Dirt cheap. Sevenpence-halfpenny, bottle included.”
Frederick purchased, and then, happy in the possession of the magic talismans which were to transform him into an Adonis, he left the hair dresser’s and made his way to a convenient liquor saloon, where he had arranged to meet some of his civil-service associates, ejaculating every now and then en route, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” much to the bewilderment of the passers-by who overheard him. He met his friends. He was so elated with visions of conquest that he “set ’em up” twice. Then another fellow set ’em up. In fact, they set ’em up more or less for about two hours. It must have been more, for, on the occasion of the last reviver, in response to a query about the population of Shanghai, he replied, inanely, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” When shaking hands for the seventh time with his friends on leaving them, he volunteered the mystifying information that little Norah wouldn’t know him in the morning. He even propounded the problem about Norah’s astonishment to the cabman who drove him home, and that unromantic personage, thinking that it referred to the feelings of the lady of the house when his Bacchanalian passenger should be deposited on the domestic doorstep, replied emphatically, “I should rather think so!” upon which Fred shook hands with the Jehu most effusively.
When he reached the abode of his virtuous but far-seeing landlady, that Roman matron, knowing Fred’s weakness for reading in bed, but doubting his capacity for remaining awake much longer, took the precaution of supplying him with a brevity of a candle some ninety per cent. below Griffith’s valuation. When, in the solitude of his two-pair back, Fred gazed upon the diminutive specimen of the chandler’s art, he felt that there was not a second to lose. He ranged his beautifying treasures on the table, read the directions, secured the tooth-brush, divested himself of his outer clothing, and prepared for action.
At that momentous instant, with a splutter and a gasp, like the warning sob of fate, the candle went out!
For a moment Fred deliberated. Should he kick up a row for more composite? No. The Gorgon of the house might suspect something. Besides, he knew where each wonderful phial lay. To work! to work! Won’t little Norah be surprised? Won’t he whelm those conceited Irish rivals of his with envy and chagrin?
He grabbed the Depilatory, and gave his nose five minutes’ determined friction. He seized the tooth-brush, and, saturating that toilet requisite with Fluid Dentifrice, he applied it to his teeth till his jaws ached. He groped around till his fingers closed upon the Balsam of Peru, and he drenched his fiery locks with it until his head felt like a sponge. And then with loving hand he sought the Formula. He found it. He tenderly moistened his upper lip. Should he have an imperial? Why not? He traced the imperial artistically out. And now, his task of decoration complete, he stumbled into bed, and murmuring softly, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” sank peacefully to slumber—to dream he had Hyperion curls and pearly teeth, the mustachios of D’Artagnan the Musketeer, and the nose of an Adonis.
Bold chanticleer had been proclaiming the dawn for an hour or two when Frederick awoke. The top of his head felt queer—that last toddy, no doubt. He was rather stiff about the mouth. Oh, joy! joy! the mustache. Not even waiting to encase his lower limbs in the nameless appendages of civilization he rushed to the looking-glass. And then there rang out upon the morning air a dismal, prolonged, forty-horse-power howl that made the matutinal milkman drop his cans in the gutter and settled the last lingering doubts of a stray cur in the street, which was meditating madness, for the electrified canine wanderer went for that indefatigable officer Q3½, and helped himself to a Christmas breakfast, composed of a square foot of blue cloth and a few ounces of metropolitan police manhood. The astounded constable started for the nearest druggist’s, and, charging impetuously into the store, knocked over an old lady with a parcel of chamomile and poppy-heads, and so alarmed the salesman that he could only express his feelings by vociferating “Fire!” at the top of his lungs, which appalling cry had such an effect upon the other assistant, who was swilling the snow-slushy footway in front, that he promptly turned the nozzle of the hose in through the door, and belched forth such a flood that he swept lady, policeman, poppy-heads, chamomile, half a dozen bottles, three or four gross of pills, and a varied assortment of drugs into the back premises, where he bombarded them for ten minutes with aqueous artillery, and left them deluged in wild and dripping confusion.
That unearthly cry also brought scrambling up into Frederick’s room an excited crowd of boarders and servants, headed by the landlady, and there, in the middle of the floor, arrayed only in a picturesque night-shirt, was a strange figure with bald head, black teeth, walnut lips and chin, with a beard a foot long drooping from his nose—cavorting round in a Sioux war-dance, to the strains of a weird melody, the refrain of which was “Won’t little Norah be surprised?”
It was Frederick. He had mixed things in the dark. He had brushed his teeth with the hair-dye, Balsam of Peru, and they had gone into mourning over the outrage. He had tried to tone down the fiery aspect of his curls with the Depilatory, and he had toned them off his head altogether. He had sought to remove the superfluous hirsute attraction of his nose with the Formula, and he had added twelve inches to its growth. To improve the undecided tendencies of his mustache he had invoked the aid of the renowned Furniture Renovator, and he had so renovated the surroundings of his mouth that it resembled the drawer of a walnut escritoire.
Sad, sad fate. Little Norah was surprised even more than Fred had anticipated, but so little did she appreciate his sacrifice that she is now another’s.