Part 4

I do not refer so much to the actual process of being shaved. Indeed there is something restful and soothing to the average male adult in the feel of a sharp razor being guided over a bristly jowl by a deft and skillful hand, to the accompaniment of a gentle grating sound and followed by a sensation of transient silken smoothness. Nor do I refer to the barber's habit of conversation. After all, a barber is human--he has to talk to somebody, and it might as well be you. If he didn't have you to talk to he'd have to talk to another barber, and that would be no treat to him.

What I do refer to is that which precedes a shave and more especially that which follows after it. You rush in for a shave. In ten minutes you have an engagement to be married or something else important, and you want a shave and you want it quick. Does the barber take cognizance of the emergency? He does not. Such would be contrary to the ethics of his calling. Knowing from your own lips that you want a shave and that's positively all, he nevertheless is instantly filled with a burning desire to equip you with a large number of other things. In this regard the barbering profession has much in common with the haberdashering or gents'-furnishing profession as practiced in our larger cities. You invade a haberdashering establishment for the purpose, let us say, of investing in a plain and simple pair of half hose, price twenty-five cents. That emphatically is all that you do desire. You so state in plain, simple language, using the shorter and uglier word socks.

Does the youth in the pale mauve shirt with the marquise ring on the little finger of the left hand rest content with this? Need I answer this question? In succession he tries to sell you a fancy waistcoat with large pearl buttons, a broken lot of silk pajamas, a bath-robe, some shrimp-pink underwear--he wears this kind himself he tells you in strict confidence--a pair of plush suspenders and a knitted necktie that you wouldn't be caught wearing at twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal mine during a total eclipse of the moon. If you resist his blandishments and so far forget that you are a gentleman as to use harsh language, and if you insist on a pair of socks and nothing else, he'll let you have them, but he will never feel the same toward you as he did.

'Tis much the same with a barber. You need a shave in a hurry and he is willing that you should have a shave, he being there for that purpose, but first and last he can think of upward of thirty or forty other things that you ought to have, including a shampoo, a hair cut, a hair singe, a hair tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial massage, a scalp massage, a Turkish bath, his opinion on the merits of the newest White Hope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, and a series of comparisons of the weather we are having this time this month with the weather we were having this time last month. Not all of us are gifted with the power of repartee by which my friend Frisbee turned the edge of the barber's desires.

"Your hair," said the barber, fondling a truant lock, "is long."

"I know it is," said Frisbee. "I like it long. It's so Roycrofty."

"It is very long," said the barber with a wistful expression.

"I like it very long," said Frisbee. "I like to have people come up to me on the street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask me how I left my sisters? I like to be mistaken for a Russian pianist. I like for strangers to stop me and ask me how's everything up at East Aurora. In short, I like it long."

"Yes, sir," said the barber, "quite so, sir; but it's very long, particularly here in the back--it covers your coat collar."

"Indeed?" said Frisbee. "You say it covers my coat collar?"

"Yes, sir," said the barber. "You can't see the coat collar at all."

"Have you got a good sharp pair of shears there?" said Frisbee.

"Oh, yes, sir," said the barber.

"All right then," said Frisbee; "cut the collar off."

But not all of us, as I said before, have this ready gift of parry and thrust that distinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we weakly surrender. Or if we refuse to surrender, demanding just a shave by itself and nothing else, what then follows? In my own case, speaking personally, I know exactly what follows. I do not like to have any powder dabbed on my face when I am through shaving. I believe in letting the bloom of youth show through your skin, providing you have any bloom of youth to do so. I always take pains to state my views in this regard at least twice during the operation of being shaved--once at the start when the barber has me all lathered up, with soapsuds dripping from the flanges of my shell-like ears and running down my neck, and once again toward the close of the operation, when he has laid aside his razor and is sousing my defenseless features in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deal like those scented pink blotters they used to give away at drug-stores to advertise somebody's cologne.

Does the barber respect my wishes in this regard? Certainly not. He insists on powdering me, either before my eyes or surreptitiously and in a clandestine manner. If he didn't powder me up he would lose his sense of self-respect, and probably the union would take his card away from him. I think there is something in the constitution and by-laws requiring that I be powdered up. I have fought the good fight for years, but I'm always powdered. Sometimes the crafty foe dissembles. He pretends that he is not going to powder me up. But all of a sudden when my back is turned, as it were, he grabs up his powder swab and makes a quick swoop upon me and the hellish deed is done. I should be pleased to hear from other victims of this practice suggesting any practical relief short of homicide. I do not wish to kill a barber--there are several other orders in ahead, referring to the persons I intend to kill off first--but I may be driven to it.

After he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down my helpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable hand washing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up the traces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and folds it over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, and then he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundred and seventy-four--974--separate and distinct times. I know the exact number of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I may be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel--he dabs me until reason totters on her throne--sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that the whole cerebral structure is involved--and then when he is apparently all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and seventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it's in the ritual that I and you and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibbering idiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown by being dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience that I can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of me every time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogether and there'll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on the back door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope to escape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filled with a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs.

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at this point we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some few among us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retain the bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of us the circumstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don't seem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to the realization that your head is working its way up through the hair. You start in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope of inducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it has heard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There's no detaining it. You soak your skull in lotions until your brain softens and your hat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it is gone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; but if most of it goes there is something about you that suggests the Glacial Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You are bald then, a subject fit for the japes of the wicked and universally coupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with the front row of orchestra chairs at a musical show.

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered--thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a good amateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as far as it conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair at frequent intervals coincide with my desires in this respect? Again I reply he does not. Every time I go in I speak to him about it. I say to him: "Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a single strand; in youth it sheltered me and I'll protect it now." Or in substance that.

He says yes, he will, but he doesn't mean it. He waits until he can catch me with my guard down. Then he seizes a comb, and using the edge of his left hand as a bevel and operating his right with a sort of free-arm Spencerian movement, he roaches my hair up in a scallop effect on either side, and upon reaching the crest he fights with it and wrestles with it until he makes it stand erect in a feather-edged design. I can tell by his expression that he is pleased with this arrangement. He loves to send his victims forth into the world tufted like the fretful cockatoo. He likes to see surging waves of hair dash high on a stern and rockbound head. His sense of the artistic demands such a result.

What cares he how I feel about it so long as the higher cravings of his own nature are satisfied? But I resent it--I resent it bitterly. I object to having my head look like a real-estate development with an opening for a new street going up each side and an ornamental design in fancy landscape gardening across the top. If I permit this I won't be able to keep on saying that I was twenty-seven on my last birthday, with some hope of getting away with it. So I insist that he put my front hair right back where he found it. He does so, under protest and begrudgingly, it is true, but he does it. And then, watching his opportunity, he runs in on me and overpowers me and roaches it up some more.

If I weaken and submit he is happy as the day is long. If he gets it roached up on both sides that will make me look like a horizontal-bar performer, which is his idea of manly beauty. Or if he gets it roached up on one side only there is still some consolation in it for him I'm liable to be mistaken anywhere for a trained-animal performer. But once in a very great while he doesn't get it roached up on either side, but has to stand there and suffer as he sees me walk forth into the world with my hair combed to suit me and not him. I can tell by his look that he is grieved and downcast, and that he will probably go home and be cross to the children. He has but one solace--he hopes to have better luck with me next time. And probably he will.

The last age of hair is a wig. But wigs are not so very satisfactory either. I've seen all the known varieties of wigs, and I never saw one yet that looked as though it were even on speaking terms with the head that was under it. A wig always looks as though it were a total stranger to the head and had just lit there a minute to rest, preparatory to flying along to the next head. Nevertheless, I think on the whole I'll be happier when my time comes to wear one, because then no barber can roach me up.

HANDS AND FEET

Nearly every boy has a period in his life when he is filled with an envious admiration for the East India god with the extra set of arms--Vishnu, I think this party's name is. To a small boy it seems a grand thing to have a really adequate assortment of hands. He considers the advantage of such an arrangement in school--two hands in plain view above the desk holding McGuffy's Fourth Reader at the proper angle for study and the other two out of sight, down underneath the desk engaged in manufacturing paper wads or playing crack-a-loo or some other really worth while employment.

Or for robbing birds' nests. There would be two hands for use in skinning up the tree, and one hand for scaring off the mother bird and one hand for stealing the eggs. And for hanging on behind wagons the combination positively could not be beaten. Then there would be the gaudy conspicuousness of going around with four arms weaving in and out in a kind of spidery effect while less favored boys were forced to content themselves with just an ordinary and insufficient pair. Really, there was only one drawback to the contemplation of this scheme--there'd be twice as many hands to wash when company was coming to dinner.

Generally speaking a boy's hands give him no serious concern during the first few years of his life except at such times as his mother grows officious and fussy and insists that they ought to be washed up as far as the regular place for washing a boy's hands, to wit, about midway between the knuckles and the wrist. The fact that one finger is usually in a state of mashedness is no drawback, but a benefit. The presence of a soiled rag around a finger gives to a boy's hand a touch of distinctiveness--singles it out from ordinary unmaimed hands. Its presence has been known to excuse its happy possessor from such chores as bringing in wood for the kitchen stove or pulling dock weeds out of the grass in a front yard where it would be much easier and quicker to pull the grass out of the dock weeds. It may even be made a source of profit by removing the wrappings and charging two china marbles a look. I seem to recall that in the case of a specially attractive injury, such as a thumb nail knocked off or a deep cut which has refused to heal by first intention or an imbedded splinter in process of being drawn out by a scrap of fat meat, that as much as four china marbles could be charged.