The Perfect Gentleman | Page 6

feel differently; and I know of one man who, returning
home with a new haircut, was compelled to turn round again and take
what his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the
haircut was more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it
happened to that man but once.
The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors. Yet it
describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,' a
euphemism that indicates a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at the
barber's and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that is
most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be
gathered by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession,
there is a period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is
admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never
satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has the
evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must grow
steadily--count on it for that!--until for a brief period it is 'just right,'
æsthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut of his features,
and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long again.
Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must
go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.' But
the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
When he goes, he goes suddenly.
There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that
postpones a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to

do with the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal
soul cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has
never entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal.
Probably it converses, on subjects remote from our bodily
consciousness, with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting
until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.
Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never
at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip
Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is
why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last
hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from
dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent
condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the
rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep
them from attaining it: a seeming anomaly which can be explained only
on the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must
be quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly
is the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the
Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of
their heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his
polished shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the
scheme had a weakness; the back of the head had to be shaved; and the
fashion doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it.
One simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of
sitting up straight.
Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think,
and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are
losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant that
men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of
hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other
refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less
refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in
and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in
pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this kind in
Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with, plays on

a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal soul peeping
in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city that is
known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I remember a barber--he was the only one available in a small
town--who cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a
story. It was a pretty little cut, he said,--filling it with alum,--and
reminded him of another gentleman whose left ear