Cobb's Anatomy Part 2

'Tis much the same with a barber. You need a shave in a hurry and he is willing that you should have a shave, he being there for that purpose, but first and last he can think of upward of thirty or forty other things that you ought to have, including a shampoo, a hair cut, a hair singe, a hair tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial ma.s.sage, a scalp ma.s.sage, a Turkish bath, his opinion on the merits of the newest White Hope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, and a series of comparisons of the weather we are having this time this month with the weather we were having this time last month. Not all of us are gifted with the power of repartee by which my friend Frisbee turned the edge of the barber's desires.

"Your hair," said the barber, fondling a truant lock, "is long."

"I know it is," said Frisbee. "I like it long. It's so Roycrofty."

"It is very long," said the barber with a wistful expression.

"I like it very long," said Frisbee. "I like to have people come up to me on the street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask me how I left my sisters? I like to be mistaken for a Russian pianist. I like for strangers to stop me and ask me how's everything up at East Aurora. In short, I like it long."

"Yes, sir," said the barber, "quite so, sir; but it's very long, particularly here in the back--it covers your coat collar."

"Indeed?" said Frisbee. "You say it covers my coat collar?"

"Yes, sir," said the barber. "You can't see the coat collar at all."

"Have you got a good sharp pair of shears there?" said Frisbee.

"Oh, yes, sir," said the barber.

"All right then," said Frisbee; "cut the collar off."

But not all of us, as I said before, have this ready gift of parry and thrust that distinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we weakly surrender.

Or if we refuse to surrender, demanding just a shave by itself and nothing else, what then follows? In my own case, speaking personally, I know exactly what follows. I do not like to have any powder dabbed on my face when I am through shaving. I believe in letting the bloom of youth show through your skin, providing you have any bloom of youth to do so. I always take pains to state my views in this regard at least twice during the operation of being shaved--once at the start when the barber has me all lathered up, with soapsuds dripping from the f.l.a.n.g.es of my sh.e.l.l-like ears and running down my neck, and once again toward the close of the operation, when he has laid aside his razor and is sousing my defenseless features in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deal like those scented pink blotters they used to give away at drug-stores to advertise somebody's cologne.

Does the barber respect my wishes in this regard? Certainly not. He insists on powdering me, either before my eyes or surrept.i.tiously and in a clandestine manner. If he didn't powder me up he would lose his sense of self-respect, and probably the union would take his card away from him. I think there is something in the const.i.tution and by-laws requiring that I be powdered up. I have fought the good fight for years, but I'm always powdered. Sometimes the crafty foe dissembles. He pretends that he is not going to powder me up. But all of a sudden when my back is turned, as it were, he grabs up his powder swab and makes a quick swoop upon me and the h.e.l.lish deed is done. I should be pleased to hear from other victims of this practice suggesting any practical relief short of homicide. I do not wish to kill a barber--there are several other orders in ahead, referring to the persons I intend to kill off first--but I may be driven to it.

After he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down my helpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable hand washing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up the traces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and folds it over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, and then he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundred and seventy-four--974--separate and distinct times. I know the exact number of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I may be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel--he dabs me until reason totters on her throne--sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that the whole cerebral structure is involved--and then when he is apparently all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and seventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it's in the ritual that I and you and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibbering idiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown by being dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience that I can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of me every time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogether and there'll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on the back door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope to escape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filled with a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs.

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at this point we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some few among us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retain the bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of us the circ.u.mstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don't seem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to the realization that your head is working its way up through the hair. You start in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope of inducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it has heard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There's no detaining it. You soak your skull in lotions until your brain softens and your hat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it is gone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; but if most of it goes there is something about you that suggests the Glacial Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You are bald then, a subject fit for the j.a.pes of the wicked and universally coupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with the front row of orchestra chairs at a musical show.

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered--thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a good amateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as far as it conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair at frequent intervals coincide with my desires in this respect? Again I reply he does not. Every time I go in I speak to him about it. I say to him: "Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a single strand; in youth it sheltered me and I'll protect it now." Or in substance that.

He says yes, he will, but he doesn't mean it. He waits until he can catch me with my guard down. Then he seizes a comb, and using the edge of his left hand as a bevel and operating his right with a sort of free-arm Spencerian movement, he roaches my hair up in a scallop effect on either side, and upon reaching the crest he fights with it and wrestles with it until he makes it stand erect in a feather-edged design. I can tell by his expression that he is pleased with this arrangement. He loves to send his victims forth into the world tufted like the fretful c.o.c.katoo. He likes to see surging waves of hair dash high on a stern and rockbound head. His sense of the artistic demands such a result.

What cares he how I feel about it so long as the higher cravings of his own nature are satisfied? But I resent it--I resent it bitterly.

I object to having my head look like a real-estate development with an opening for a new street going up each side and an ornamental design in fancy landscape gardening across the top. If I permit this I won't be able to keep on saying that I was twenty-seven on my last birthday, with some hope of getting away with it. So I insist that he put my front hair right back where he found it. He does so, under protest and begrudgingly, it is true, but he does it. And then, watching his opportunity, he runs in on me and overpowers me and roaches it up some more.

If I weaken and submit he is happy as the day is long. If he gets it roached up on both sides that will make me look like a horizontal-bar performer, which is his idea of manly beauty. Or if he gets it roached up on one side only there is still some consolation in it for him I'm liable to be mistaken anywhere for a trained-animal performer. But once in a very great while he doesn't get it roached up on either side, but has to stand there and suffer as he sees me walk forth into the world with my hair combed to suit me and not him. I can tell by his look that he is grieved and downcast, and that he will probably go home and be cross to the children. He has but one solace--he hopes to have better luck with me next time. And probably he will.

The last age of hair is a wig. But wigs are not so very satisfactory either. I've seen all the known varieties of wigs, and I never saw one yet that looked as though it were even on speaking terms with the head that was under it. A wig always looks as though it were a total stranger to the head and had just lit there a minute to rest, preparatory to flying along to the next head. Nevertheless, I think on the whole I'll be happier when my time comes to wear one, because then no barber can roach me up.

HANDS AND FEET

Nearly every boy has a period in his life when he is filled with an envious admiration for the East India G.o.d with the extra set of arms--Vishnu, I think this party's name is. To a small boy it seems a grand thing to have a really adequate a.s.sortment of hands. He considers the advantage of such an arrangement in school--two hands in plain view above the desk holding McGuffy's Fourth Reader at the proper angle for study and the other two out of sight, down underneath the desk engaged in manufacturing paper wads or playing crack-a-loo or some other really worth while employment.

Or for robbing birds' nests. There would be two hands for use in skinning up the tree, and one hand for scaring off the mother bird and one hand for stealing the eggs. And for hanging on behind wagons the combination positively could not be beaten. Then there would be the gaudy conspicuousness of going around with four arms weaving in and out in a kind of spidery effect while less favored boys were forced to content themselves with just an ordinary and insufficient pair. Really, there was only one drawback to the contemplation of this scheme--there'd be twice as many hands to wash when company was coming to dinner.

Generally speaking a boy's hands give him no serious concern during the first few years of his life except at such times as his mother grows officious and fussy and insists that they ought to be washed up as far as the regular place for washing a boy's hands, to wit, about midway between the knuckles and the wrist. The fact that one finger is usually in a state of mashedness is no drawback, but a benefit. The presence of a soiled rag around a finger gives to a boy's hand a touch of distinctiveness--singles it out from ordinary unmaimed hands. Its presence has been known to excuse its happy possessor from such ch.o.r.es as bringing in wood for the kitchen stove or pulling dock weeds out of the gra.s.s in a front yard where it would be much easier and quicker to pull the gra.s.s out of the dock weeds. It may even be made a source of profit by removing the wrappings and charging two china marbles a look.

I seem to recall that in the case of a specially attractive injury, such as a thumb nail knocked off or a deep cut which has refused to heal by first intention or an imbedded splinter in process of being drawn out by a sc.r.a.p of fat meat, that as much as four china marbles could be charged.

On the Fourth of July you occasionally burned your hands and in cold winters they chapped extensively across the knuckles but these were but the marks and scars of honorable endeavor and a hardy endurance. In our set the boy whose knuckles had the deepest cracks in them was a prominent and admired figure, crowned, as you might say, with an imaginary chaplet by reason of his chaps.

With girls, of course, it was different.

Girls were superfluous and unnecessary creatures with a false and inflated idea of the value of soap and water. Their hands weren't good for much anyway. Later on we discovered that a girl's hands were excellent for holding purposes in a hammock or while coming back from a straw ride, but I am speaking now of the earlier stages of our development, before the presence of the ostensibly weaker s.e.x began to awaken responsive throbs in our several bosoms--in short when girls were merely nuisances and things to be ignored whenever possible. In that early stage of his existence hands have no altruistic or sentimental or ornamental value for a boy--they are for useful purposes altogether and are regarded as such.

It is only when he has reached the age of tail coats and spike-fence collars that he discovers two hands are frequently too many and often not enough. They are too many at your first church wedding when wearing your first pair of white kids and they are not enough at a five o'clock tea. There is a type of male who can go to a five o'clock tea and not fall over a lot of Louie Kahn's furniture or get himself hopelessly tangled up in a hanging drapery and who can seem perfectly at ease while holding in his hands a walking stick, a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel in it, a tea spoon, a lump of sugar, a seed cookie, an olive, and the hand of a lady with whom he is discussing the true meaning of the message of the late Ibsen but these gifted mortals are not common. They are rare and exotic.

There are also some few who can do ushing at a church wedding with a pair of white kids on and not appear overly self-conscious. These are also the exceptions. The great majority of us suffer visibly under such circ.u.mstances. You have the feeling that each hand weighs fully twenty-four pounds and that it is hanging out of the sleeve for a distance of about one and three-quarters yards and you don't know what to do with your hands and on the whole would feel much more comfortable and decorative if they were both sawed off at the wrists and hidden some place where you couldn't find 'em. You have that feeling and you look it. You look as though you were working in a plaster of paris factory and were carrying home a couple of large sacks of samples. It would be grand to be a Vishnu at a five o'clock tea, but awful to be one at a church wedding.

About the time you find yourself embarking on a career of teas and weddings you also begin to find yourself worrying about the appearance of your hands. Up until now the hands have given you no great concern one way or the other, but some day you wake to the realization that you need to be manicured. Once you catch that disease there is no hope for you. There are ways of curing you of almost any habit except manicuring.

You get so that you aren't satisfied unless your nails run down about a quarter of an inch further than nails were originally intended to run, and unless they glitter freely you feel strangely distraught in company.

Inasmuch as no male creature's finger nails will glitter with the desired degree of brilliancy for more than twenty-four short and fleeting hours after a treatment you find yourself constantly in the act of either just getting a manicure or just getting over one. It is an expensive habit, too; it takes time and it takes money. There's the fixed charge for manicuring in the first place and then there's the tip.

Once there was a manicure lady who wouldn't take a tip, but she is now no more. Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death with hat pins and nail-files. Manicuring as a public profession is a comparatively recent development of our civilization. The fathers of the republic and the founders of the const.i.tution, which was founded first and has been foundering ever since if you can believe what a lot of people in Congress say--they knew nothing of manicuring. Speaking by and large, they only got their thumbs wet when doing one of three things--taking a bath, going in swimming or turning a page in a book. Washington probably was never manicured nor Jefferson nor Franklin; it's a cinch that Daniel Boone and Israel Putnam and George Rogers Clark weren't and yet it is generally conceded that they got along fairly well without it. But as the campaign orators are forever pointing out from the hustlers and the forum, this is an age calling for change and advancement. And manicuring is one of the advancements that likewise calls for the change--for fifty cents in change anyhow and more if you are inclined to be generous with the tip.

Shall you ever forget your first manicure? The shan'ts are unanimously in the majority. It seems an easy thing to walk into a manicure parlor or a barber shop and shove your hands across a little table to a strange young woman and tell her to go ahead and shine 'em up a bit--the way you hear old veteran manicurees saying it. It seems easy, I say, and looks easy; but it isn't as easy as it seems. Until you get hardened, it requires courage of a very high order. You, the abashed novice, see other men sitting in the front window of the manicure shop just as debonair and cozy as though they'd been born and raised there, swapping the ready repartee of the day with dashing creatures of a frequently blonde aspect, and you imagine they have always done so. You little know that these persons who are now appearing so much at home and who can snap out those bright, witty things like "I gotcher Steve," and "Well, see who's here?" without a moment's hesitation and without having to stop and think for the right word or the right phrase but have it right there on the tip of the tongue--you little reck that they too pa.s.sed through the same initiation which you now contemplate. Yet such is the case.

You have dress rehearsals--private ones--in your room. In the seclusion of your bed chamber you picture yourself opening the door of the marble manicure hall and stepping in with a brisk yet graceful tread--like James K. Hackett making an entrance in the first act--and glancing about you casually--like John Drew counting up the house--and saying "h.e.l.lo girlies, how're all the little Heart's Delights this afternoon?" just like that, and picking out the most sumptuous and attractive of the flattered young ladies in waiting; and sinking easily into the chair opposite her--see photos of William Faversham and throwing the coat lapels back, at the same time resting the left hand clenched upon the upper thigh with the elbow well out--Donald Brian asking a lady to waltz--and offering the right hand to the favored female and telling her to go as far as she likes with it. It sounds simple when you figuring it out alone, but it rarely works out that way in practice. It is my belief that every woman longs for the novelty of a Turkish bath and every man for the novelty of a manicure long before either dares to tackle it.

I may be wrong but this is my belief. And in the case of the man he usually makes a number of false starts.

You go to the portals and hesitate and then, stumbling across the threshold, you either dive on through to the barber shop--if there is a barber shop in connection--or else you mumble something about being in a hurry and coming back again, and retreat with all the grace and ease that would be shown by a hard sh.e.l.l crab that was trying to back into the mouth of a milk-bottle. You are likely to do this several times; but finally some day you stick. You slump down into one of those little chairs and offer your hands or one of them to a calm and slightly arrogant looking young lady and you tell her to please shine them up a little. You endeavor to appear as though you had been doing this at frequent periods stretching through a great number of years, but she--bless her little heart!--she knows better than that. The female of the manicuring species is not to be deceived by any such cheap and transparent artifices. If you wore a peekaboo waist she couldn't see through you any easier. Your hands would give you away if your face didn't. In a sibulent aside, she addresses the young lady at the next table--the one with the nine bracelets and the hair done up delicatessen store mode--sausages, rolls and buns--whereupon both of them laugh in a significant, silvery way, and you feel the back of your neck setting your collar on fire. You can smell the bone b.u.t.ton back there scorching and you're glad it's not celluloid, celluloid being more inflammable and subject to combustion when subjected to intense heat.

When both have laughed their merry fill, the young woman who has you in charge looks you right in the eye and says:

"Dearie me; you'll pardon me saying so, but your nails are in a perfectly turrible state. I don't think I've seen a jumpman's nails in such a state for ever so long. Pardon me again--but how long has it been since you had them did?"

To which you reply in what is meant to be a jaunty and off-hand tone:

"Oh quite some little while. I've--I've been out of town."

"That's what I thought," she says with a slight shrug. It isn't so much what she says--it's the way she says it, the tone and all that, which makes you feel smaller and smaller until you could crawl into your own watch pocket and live happily there ever after. There'd be slews of room and when you wanted the air of an evening you could climb up in a b.u.t.tonhole of your vest and be quite cosy and comfortable. But shrink as you may, there is now no hope of escape, for she has reached out and grabbed you firmly by the wrist. She has you fast. You have a feeling that eight or nine thousand people have a.s.sembled behind you and are all gazing fixedly into the small of your back. The only things about you that haven't shrivelled up are your hands. You can feel them growing larger and larger and redder and redder and more prominent and conspicuous every instant.

The lady begins operations. You are astonished to note how many tools and implements it takes to manicure a pair of hands properly. The top of her little table is full of them and she pulls open a drawer and shows you some more, ranged in rows. There are files and steel biters and pigeon-toed scissors and sc.r.a.pers and polishers and things; and wads of cotton with which to staunch the blood of the wounded, and bottles of liquid and little medicinal looking jars full of red paste; and a cut gla.s.s crock with soap suds in it and a whole lot of little orange wood s...o...b..rs.

In the interest of truth I have taken the pains to enquire and I have ascertained that these s...o...b..rs are invariably of orange wood. Say what you will, the orange tree is a hardy growth. Every February you read in the papers that the Florida orange crop, for the third consecutive time since Christmas has been entirely and totally destroyed by frost and yet there is always an adequate supply on hand of the princ.i.p.al products of the orange-phosphate for the soda fountains, blossoms for the bride, political sentiment for the North of Ireland and little sharp s...o...b..rs for the manicure lady. Speaking as an outsider I would say that there ought to be other varieties of wood that would serve as well and bring about the desired results as readily--a good th.o.r.n.y variety of poison ivy ought to fill the bill, I should think. But it seems that orange wood is absolutely essential. A manicure lady could no more do a manicure properly without using an orange wood s...o...b..r at certain periods than a cartoonist could draw a picture of a man in jail without putting a ball and chain on him or a summer resort could get along without a Lover's Leap within easy walking distance of the hotel. It simply isn't done, that's all.

Well, as I was saying, she gets out her tool kit and goes to work on you. You didn't dream that there were so many things--mainly of a painful nature--that could be done to a single finger nail and you flinch as you suddenly remember that you have ten of them in all, counting thumbs in with fingers. She takes a finger nail in hand and she files it and she trims it and she softens it with hot water and hardens it with chemicals and parboils it a little while and then she cuts off the hang nails--if there aren't any hang nails there already she'll make a few--and she shears away enough extra cuticle to cover quite a good-sized little boy. She goes over you with a bristle brush, and warms up your nerve ends until you tingle clear back to your dorsal fin and then she takes one of those orange wood s...o...b..rs previously referred to, and goes on an exploring expedition down under the nail, looking for the quick. She always finds it. There is no record of a failure to find the quick. Having found it she proceeds to wake it up and teach it some parlor tricks. I may not have set forth all these various details in the exact order in which they take place, but I know she does them all. And somewhere along about the time when she is half way through with the first hand she makes you put the other hand in the suds.

Later on when you have had more practice at this thing you learn to wait for the signal before plunging the second hand into the suds, but being green on this occasion, you are apt to mistake the moving of the crock of suds over from the right hand side to the left hand side as a notice and to poke your untouched hand right in without further orders, hoping to get it softened up well so as to save her trouble in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g it down to a size which will suit her. But this is wrong--this is very wrong, as she tells you promptly, with a pitying smile for your ignorance.

Manicure girls are as careful about boiling a hand as some particular people are about bailing their eggs for breakfast of a morning. A two minute hand is no pleasure to her absolutely if she has diagnosed your hand as one calling for six minutes, or vice versa. So, should you err in this regard she will s.n.a.t.c.h the offending hand out and wipe it off and give it back to you and tell you to keep it in a dry place until she calls for it. Manicure girls are very funny that way.

Thus time pa.s.ses on and on and by degrees you begin to feel more and more at home. Your bashfulness is wearing off. The coherent power of speech has returned to you and you have exchanged views with her on the relative merits of the better known brands of chewing gum and which kind holds the flavor longest, and you have swapped ideas on the issue of whether ladies should or should not smoke cigarettes in public and she knows how much your stick pin cost you and you know what her favorite flower is. You are getting along fine, when all of a sudden she dabs your nails with a red paste and then s.n.a.t.c.hes up a kind of a polishing tool and ferociously rubs your fingers until they catch on fire. Just when the conflagration threatens to become general she stops using the polisher and proceeds to cool down the ruins by gently burnishing your nails against the soft, pink palm of her hand. You like this better than the other way. You could ignite yourself by friction almost any time, if you got hold of the right kind of a chamois skin rubber, but this is quite different and highly soothing. You are beginning to really enjoy the sensation when she roguishly pats the back of your hand--pitty pat--as a signal that the operation is now over. You pay the check and tip the lady--tip her fifty cents if you wish to be regarded as a lovely jumpman or only twenty-five cents if you are satisfied with being a vurry nice fella--and you secure your hat and step forth into the open with the feeling of one who has taken a trip into a distant domain and on the whole has rather enjoyed it.