ABOUT BARBERS
All things change except barbers, the ways of barbers, and the surroundings of barbers.These never change.What one experiences in a barber's shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbers' shops afterward till the end of his days.I got shaved this morning as usual.A man approached the door from Jones Street as Iapproached it from Main--a thing that always happens.I hurried up, but it was of no use; he entered the door one little step ahead of me, and Ifollowed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber.It always happens so.I sat down, hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man's hair, while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer's locks.I watched the probabilities with strong interest.
When I saw that No.2 was gaining on No.1 my interest grew to solicitude.When No.1 stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a new-comer, and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to anxiety.When No.1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customers'
cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say "Next!" first, my very breath stood still with the suspense.But when at the culminating moment No.1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer's eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling into the hands of No.2 ; for I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his fellow-barber's chair.
I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck.
Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are waiting their turn in a barber's shop.I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the time far a while reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack nostrums for dyeing and coloring the hair.Then I read the greasy names on the private bayrum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving-cups in the pigeonholes; studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather's spectacles on; execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few barbers' shops are without.
Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of last year's illustrated papers that littered the foul center-table, and conned their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.
At last my turn came.A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to--No.2, of course.It always happens so.I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it.He shoved up my head, and put a napkin under it.He plowed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there.He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming.I said I did not want it trimmed.He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style--better have a little taken off; it needed it behind especially.I said I had had it cut only a week before.He yearned over it reflectively a moment, and then asked with a disparaging manner, who cut it? I came back at him promptly with a "You did!" I had him there.Then he fell to stirring up his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or inspect a pimple.Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction.He finished lathering, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand.
