The Orthodox Barber - Page 2

barber talks
about it with an astonishing, nay incredible, freshness of interest.
It is objected to him that he tells people that they are going bald.
That is to say, his very virtues are cast up against him;
he is blamed because, being a specialist, he is a sincere specialist,
and because, being a tradesman, he is not entirely a slave.
But the only proof of such things is by example; therefore I will prove
the excellence of the conversation of barbers by a specific case.
Lest any one should accuse me of attempting to prove it by fictitious
means, I beg to say quite seriously that though I forget the exact
language employed, the following conversation between me and a human
(I trust), living barber really took place a few days ago.

. . . . .

I had been invited to some At Home to meet the Colonial Premiers,
and lest I should be mistaken for some partly reformed bush-ranger out of
the interior of Australia I went into a shop in the Strand to get shaved.
While I was undergoing the torture the man said to me:

"There seems to be a lot in the papers about this new shaving, sir.
It seems you can shave yourself with anything--with a stick or a stone
or a pole or a poker" (here I began for the first time to detect
a sarcastic intonation) "or a shovel or a----"

Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about
the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.

"Or a button-hook," I said, "or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram
or a piston-rod----"

He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, "Or a curtain rod
or a candle-stick, or a----"

"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet
for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me.
He explained the thing eloquently and at length.

"The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all.
It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.
There is always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow.
But none of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe
myself that this will."

"Why, as to that," I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying
to put on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case
of you and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you,
is a trivial and materialistic thing, and in such things
startling inventions are sometimes made. But what you say
reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something else.
I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident
experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new.
My friend, the human