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.
On the Fourth of July you occasionally burned your hands and in cold winters they chapped extensively across the knuckles but these were but the marks and scars of honorable endeavor and a hardy endurance. In our set the boy whose knuckles had the deepest cracks in them was a prominent and admired figure, crowned, as you might say, with an imaginary chaplet by reason of his chaps.
With girls, of course, it was different.
Girls were superfluous and unnecessary creatures with a false and inflated idea of the value of soap and water. Their hands weren't good for much anyway. Later on we discovered that a girl's hands were excellent for holding purposes in a hammock or while coming back from a straw ride, but I am speaking now of the earlier stages of our development, before the presence of the ostensibly weaker sex began to awaken responsive throbs in our several bosoms—in short when girls were merely nuisances and things to be ignored whenever possible. In that early stage of his existence hands have no altruistic or sentimental or ornamental value for a boy—they are for useful purposes altogether and are regarded as such.
It is only when he has reached the age of tail coats and spike-fence collars that he discovers two hands are frequently too many and often not enough. They are too many at your first church wedding when wearing your first pair of white kids and they are not enough at a five o'clock tea. There is a type of male who can go to a five o'clock tea and not fall over a lot of Louie Kahn's furniture or get himself hopelessly tangled up in a hanging drapery and who can seem perfectly at ease while holding in his hands a walking stick, a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel in it, a tea spoon, a lump of sugar, a seed cookie, an olive, and the hand of a lady with whom he is discussing the true meaning of the message of the late Ibsen but these gifted mortals are not common. They are rare and exotic. There are also some few who can do ushing at a church wedding with a pair of white kids on and not appear overly self-conscious. These are also the exceptions. The great majority of us suffer visibly under such circumstances. You have the feeling that each hand weighs fully twenty-four pounds and that it is hanging out of the sleeve for a distance of about one and three-quarters yards and you don't know what to do with your hands and on the whole would feel much more comfortable and decorative if they were both sawed off at the wrists and hidden some place where you couldn't find 'em. You have that feeling and you look it. You look as though you were working in a plaster of paris factory and were carrying home a couple of large sacks of samples. It would be grand to be a Vishnu at a five o'clock tea, but awful to be one at a church wedding.
About the time you find yourself embarking on a career of teas and weddings you also begin to find yourself worrying about the appearance of your hands. Up until now the hands have given you no great concern one way or the other, but some day you wake to the realization that you need to be manicured. Once you catch that disease there is no hope for you. There are ways of curing you of almost any habit except manicuring. You get so that you aren't satisfied unless your nails run down about a quarter of an inch further than nails were originally intended to run, and unless they glitter freely you feel strangely distraught in company. Inasmuch as no male creature's finger nails will glitter with the desired degree of brilliancy for more than twenty-four short and fleeting hours after a treatment you find yourself constantly in the act of either just getting a manicure or just getting over one. It is an expensive habit, too; it takes time and it takes money. There's the fixed charge for manicuring in the first place and then there's the tip. Once there was a manicure lady who wouldn't take a tip, but she is now no more. Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death with hat pins and nail-files. Manicuring as a public profession is a comparatively recent development of our civilization. The fathers of the republic and the founders of the constitution, which was founded first and has been foundering ever since if you can believe what a lot of people in Congress say—they knew nothing of manicuring. Speaking by and large, they only got their thumbs wet when doing one of three things—taking a bath, going in swimming or turning a page in a book. Washington probably was never manicured nor Jefferson nor Franklin; it's a cinch that Daniel Boone and Israel Putnam and George Rogers Clark weren't and yet it is generally conceded that they got along fairly well without it. But as the campaign orators are forever pointing out from the hustlers and the forum, this is an age calling for change and advancement. And manicuring is one of the advancements that likewise calls for the change—for fifty cents in change anyhow and more if you are inclined to be generous with the tip.
Shall you ever forget your first manicure? The shan'ts are unanimously in the majority. It seems an easy thing to walk into a manicure parlor or a barber shop and shove your hands across a little table to a strange young woman and tell her to go ahead and shine 'em up a bit—the way you hear old veteran manicurees saying it. It seems easy, I say, and looks easy; but it isn't as easy as it seems. Until you get hardened, it requires courage of a very high order. You, the abashed novice, see other men sitting in the front window of the manicure shop just as debonair and cozy as though they'd been born and raised there, swapping the ready repartee of the day with dashing creatures of a frequently blonde aspect, and you imagine they have always done so. You little know that these persons who are now appearing so much at home and who can snap out those bright, witty things like "I gotcher Steve," and "Well, see who's here?" without a moment's hesitation and without having to stop and think for the right word or the right phrase but have it right there on the tip of the tongue—you little reck that they too passed through the same initiation which you now contemplate. Yet such is the case.
You have dress rehearsals—private ones—in your room. In the seclusion of your bed chamber you picture yourself opening the door of the marble manicure hall and stepping in with a brisk yet graceful tread—like James K. Hackett making an entrance in the first act—and glancing about you casually—like John Drew counting up the house—and saying "Hello girlies, how're all the little Heart's Delights this afternoon?" just like that, and picking out the most sumptuous and attractive of the flattered young ladies in waiting; and sinking easily into the chair opposite her—see photos of William Faversham and throwing the coat lapels back, at the same time resting the left hand clenched upon the upper thigh with the elbow well out—Donald Brian asking a lady to waltz—and offering the right hand to the favored female and telling her to go as far as she likes with it. It sounds simple when you figuring it out alone, but it rarely works out that way in practice. It is my belief that every woman longs for the novelty of a Turkish bath and every man for the novelty of a manicure long before either dares to tackle it. I may be wrong but this is my belief. And in the case of the man he usually makes a number of false starts.