The Perfect Gentleman | Page 8

color? The question of color
becomes strangely important, as if it made any real difference. Green?
Red? Purple? Blue? No, he uses the brush dry, tickling your forehead,
tickling your ears, tickling your nose, tickling you under the chin and
down the back of your neck. After the serious business of the haircut, a
barber must have some relaxation.
There is one point on which you are independent: you will not have the
bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which
nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He
humors you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of
business economy.
He takes off your bib.
From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to give his head to
the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours--already as
remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is always waiting,
and whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible--horrible--horrible!

OH, SHINING SHOES!
In a democracy it is fitting that a man should sit on a throne to have his
shoes polished, or, to use a brighter, gayer word, shined. We are all
kings, and this happy conceit of popular government is nicely

symbolized by being, for these shining moments, so many kings
together, each on his similar throne and with a slave at his feet. The
democratic idea suffers a little from the difficulty of realizing that the
slave is also a king, yet gains a little from the fair custom of the livelier
monarchs of turning from left foot to right and from right to left, so that,
within human limits, neither shoe shall be undemocratically shined
first.
Nor is it uncommon for the kings on the thrones to be symbolically and
inexpensively served by yet other sovereign servants. Newspapers in
hand, they receive the reports of their lord high chancellors, digest the
social gossip of their realm, review its crimes, politics, discoveries, and
inventions, and are entertained by their jesters, who, I have it on the
authority of a current advertisement, all democratically smoke the same
kind of tobacco. 'You know 'em all, the great fun-makers of the daily
press, agile-brained and nimble-witted, creators of world-famed
characters who put laughter into life. Such live, virile humans as they
must have a live, virile pipe-smoke.' There are, to be sure, some who
find in this agile-brained and nimble-witted mirth an element of
profound melancholy; it seems often a debased coin of humor, which
rings false on the counter of intelligence; yet even at its worst it is far
better than many of the waggeries that once stirred laughter in
mediæval monarchs. The thought renders them bearable, these live,
virile humans, who only a few centuries ago would have been too
handicapped by their refinement to compete successfully with
contemporary humorists.
But there are a good many of us, possessors of patience, self-control,
and a sponge in a bottle, who rarely enjoy this royal prerogative. We
shine our own shoes. Alone, and, if one may argue from the particular
to the general, simply dressed in the intermediate costume, more or less
becoming, that is between getting up and going out, we wear a shoe on
our left hand, and with the other manipulate the helpful sponge.
Sometimes, too anxious, it polka-dots our white garments, sometimes
the floor; it is safe only in the bottle, and the wisest shiner will perhaps
approach the job as an Adamite, bestriding, like a colossus, a
wide-spread newspaper, and taking a bath afterward. Or it may be that

instead of the bottle we have a little tin box, wedded to its cover,--how
often have we not exclaimed between clenched teeth, 'What man hath
joined together man can pull asunder!'--and containing a kind of black
mud, which we apply with an unfortunate rag or with a brush
appropriately called the 'dauber.' Having daubed, we polish, breathing
our precious breath on the luminous surface for even greater luminosity.
The time is passing when we performed this task of pure lustration, as
Keats might have called it, in the cellar or the back hall, more fully, but
not completely, dressed, coatless, our waistcoats rakishly unbuttoned or
vulgarly upstairs, our innocent trousers hanging on their gallowses, our
shoes on our feet, and our physical activity not altogether unlike that
demanded by a home-exerciser to reduce the abdomen. Men of girth
have been advised to saw wood; I wonder that they never have been
advised to shine their own shoes--twenty-five times in the morning and
twenty-five times just before going to bed.
My own observation, although not continuous enough to have scientific
value, leads me to think that stout men are the more inveterate patrons
of the shoe-blacking parlor,--Cæsar should have run