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 afterward 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
customers' 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 far 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 bayrum bottles; read the
names and noted the numbers on the private shaving-cups in the
pigeonholes; 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 center-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
plowed 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 mean time 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 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 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 ruin 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
forevermore, no doubt, if I had not rebelled and begged off. He
powdered my whole face now, straightened me up, and began to plow
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's 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.