The Perfect Gentleman | Page 7

Ralph Bergengren
he had nipped in
identically the same place. He had done his best with alum and apology,
as he was now doing. Two months later the gentleman came in again.
'And by golly!' said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own
cleverness, 'if I didn't nip him again in just the same place!'
A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime
Museum. Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation;
although, as I have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of
composition was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity
of the human mind at that time in the morning. Here, therefore, a man
can refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a
half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap,
and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and
then the other--that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to
invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once
invented an apparatus--a kind of helmet with multitudinous little
scissors inside it--which he hopefully believed would solve the problem;
but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he
tried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps he
committed suicide; for one can easily imagine that a man who thought
he had found a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't,
would be thrown into a suicidal depression. There is the possibility that
he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put away,'
by his sensitive family where nobody could see him but the hardened
attendants. The important fact is that the invention never got on the
market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practical
purpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must put
on the bib--

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are
bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of
satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the
newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still
intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons
of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend to
be deeply interested in the Illustrated London News. The patrons of the
barber's shop where I lost part of my ear--I cannot see the place, but
those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since
grown again--had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed
awkwardly to hold the Police Gazette. And this opportunity to hold the
Police Gazette without attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature
of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier--until my
ear was cut--to forget my position in the examination of this journal
than in the examination of the Illustrated London News. The pictures,
strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but
there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always
wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise
you may get to looking in the mirror.
Do not do that.
For one thing, there is the impulse to cry out, 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut it
all off!
'Oh, barber, spare that hair! Leave some upon my brow! For months it's
sheltered me! And I'll protect it now!
'Oh, please! P-l-e-a-s-e!--'
These exclamations annoy a barber, rouse a demon of fury in him. He
reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' Tell him how to cut hair, will
you! A little more and he'll shave your head--and not only half-way
either, like the Norman soldiery at the time of the Conquest! Even if
you are able to restrain this impulse, clenching your bib in your hands
and perhaps dropping or tearing the Illustrated London News, the
mirror gives you strange, morbid reflections. You recognize your face,
but your head seems somehow separate, balanced on a kind of

polka-dotted mountain with two hands holding the Illustrated London
News. You are afraid momentarily that the barber will lift it off and go
away with it.
Then is the time to read furiously the weekly contribution of G. K.
Chesterton. But your mind reverts to a story you have been reading
about how the Tulululu islanders, a savage but ingenious people,
preserve the heads of their enemies so that the faces are much smaller
but otherwise quite recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at
the barber to discover any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry.
And what is he going to get now? A kris? No, a paint-brush. Is he
going to paint you? And if so--what
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