Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0152/01522.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 9KB | 148 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01522}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Sketches, Old And New
About Barbers}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{barbers
hair
face
now
razor
always
began
next
time
towel}
$Date{1893}
$Log{}
Title:       Sketches, Old And New
Book:        About Barbers
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1893

About Barbers

     All things change exept 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 vacant chair, the one presided over by the best
barber.  It always happens so.  I 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 waiting
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 him as strongly as if he had never heard it.  He shoved up my head,
and put a 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" behind, and brushing
the two wings forward over his ears with nice exactness.  In 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 the 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 that way.
Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel, as if a 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 toothwash 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.