The Perfect Gentleman | Page 8

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 medi?val 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,--C?sar should have run one,--and that the present popularity of the sponge in a bottle may derive from superfluous girth. Invented as a dainty toilet accessory for women, and at first regarded by men as effeminate, it is easy to see how insidiously the sponge in a bottle would have attracted a stout husband accustomed to shine his own shoes in the earlier contortionist manner. By degrees, first one stout husband and then another, men took to the bottle; the curse