 | Mark Twain's sketches, new and old |  |
ABOUT BARBERS.
ALL things change except barbers,
the ways of barbers, and
the surroundings of barbers.
These never change. What one experiences
in a barber's shop the first
time he enters one is what he always
experiences in barbers' shops afterwards
till the end of his days. I got
shaved this morning as usual. A man
approached the door from Jones Street
as I approached it from Main—a thing
that always happens. I hurried up, but it was of no use; he entered the door one
little step ahead of me, and I followed in on his heels and saw him take the only
sat down, hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the
remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man's hair, while his
comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer's locks. I
watched the probabilities with strong interest. When I saw that No. 2 was gaining
on No. 1 my interest grew to solicitude. When No. 1 stopped a moment to make
change on a bath ticket for a new comer, and lost ground in the race, my solicitude
rose to anxiety. When No. 1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were
pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customer's cheeks,
and it was about an even thing which one would say “Next!” first, my very breath
stood still with the suspense. But when at the culminating moment No. 1 stopped
to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer's eyebrows, I saw that he
had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to
keep from falling into the hands of No. 2; for I have none of that enviable firmness
that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he
will wait for his fellow-barber's chair.
I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck. Of
course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable,
distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are awaiting their turn
in a barber's shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old
sofa, and put in the time for a while reading the framed advertisements of all sorts
of quack nostrums for dyeing and coloring the hair. Then I read the greasy names
on the private bay rum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the
private shaving cups in the pigeon-holes; studied the stained and damaged cheap
prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous recumbent sultanas,
and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather's spectacles
on; execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few
barbers' shops are without. Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of last
year's illustrated papers that littered the foul centre-table, and conned their
unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.
At last my turn came. A voice said “Next!” and I surrendered to—No. 2, of
course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected
napkin under it. He ploughed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there.
He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming. I said
I did not want it trimmed. He explored again and said it was pretty long for the
present style—better have a little taken off; it needed it behind especially. I said
I had had it cut only a week before. He yearned over it reflectively a moment,
and then asked with a disparaging manner, who cut it? I came back at him
promptly with a “You did!” I had him there. Then he fell to stirring up his
lather and regarding himself
in the glass, stopping now and
then to get close and examine his
chin critically or inspect a
pimple. Then he lathered one
side of my face thoroughly, and
was about to lather the other,
when a dog fight attracted his attention,
and he ran to the window
and stayed and saw it out,
losing two shillings on the result
in bets with the other barbers, a
thing which gave me great satisfaction.
He finished lathering, and
then began to rub in the suds
with his hand.
He now began
to sharpen his razor on an old suspender, and was delayed a good deal on account
of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he had figured at the night before,
in red cambric and bogus ermine, as some kind of a king. He was so gratified
with being chaffed about some damsel whom he had smitten with his charms that
he used every means to continue the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at
the chaffings of his fellows. This matter begot more surveyings of himself in the
glass, and he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plastering
an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate “part”
the meantime the lather was drying on my face, and apparently eating into my
vitals.
Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my countenance to stretch the
skin and bundling and tumbling my head this way and that as convenience in
shaving demanded. As long as he was on the tough sides of my face I did not
suffer; but when he began to rake, and rip, and tug at my chin, the tears came.
He now made a handle of my nose, to assist him in shaving the corners of my
upper lip, and it was by this bit of
circumstantial evidence that I discovered
that a part of his duties in the
shop was to clean the kerosene
lamps. I had often wondered in an
indolent way whether the barbers
did that, or whether it was the
boss.
About this time
I was amusing myself trying to guess
where he would be most likely to cut
me this time, but he got ahead of
me, and sliced me on the end of the
chin before I had got my mind made
up. He immediately sharpened
his razor—he might have done it before.
I do not like a close shave, and
would not let him go over me a
second time. I tried to get him to put up his razor, dreading that he would make
for the side of my chin, my pet tender spot, a place which a razor cannot touch
twice without making trouble; but he said he only wanted to just smooth off one
little roughness, and in the same moment he slipped his razor along the forbidden
ground, and the dreaded pimple-signs of a close shave rose up smarting and
answered to the call. Now he soaked his towel in bay rum, and slapped it all over
my face nastily; slapped it over as if a human being ever yet washed his face in
human being ever dried his face in such a fashion; but a barber seldom rubs you
like a Christian. Next he poked bay rum into the cut place with his towel, then
choked the wound with powdered starch, then soaked it with bay rum again, and
would have gone on soaking and powdering it for evermore, no doubt, if I had not
rebelled and begged off. He powdered my whole face now, straightened me up,
and began to plough my hair thoughtfully with his hands. Then he suggested a
shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I shampooed
it myself very thoroughly in the bath yesterday. I “had him” again. He
next recommended some of “Smith's Hair Glorifier,” and offered to sell me a
bottle. I declined. He praised the new perfume, “Jones' Delight of the Toilet,”
and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again. He tendered me a tooth-wash
atrocity of his own invention, and when I declined offered to trade knives
with me.
He returned to business after the miscarriage of this last enterprise, sprinkled
me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in defiance of my protest against it,
rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the roots, and combed and brushed
the rest, parting it behind, and plastering the eternal inverted arch of hair down
on my forehead, and then, while combing my scant eyebrows and defiling them
with pomade, strung out an account of the achievements of a six-ounce black and
tan terrier of his till I heard the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes
too late for the train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly
about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily sang
out “Next!”
This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting over
a day for my revenge—I am going to attend his funeral.
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