“No, Polly, my pigeon, he won’t come back.”
“Didn’t he like us?” asked the child.
The barber stood dumb before her bright searching eyes.
“He was better than my father,” said the child, “or me uncle, or the schoolmaster.”
“He’s the goodest man alive, Polly,” said Mr. P.
“Didn’t he like us?” again she asked; and as Mr. P. could only look vaguely about the room she went out and closed the latch of the door very softly behind her.
In the succeeding days the barber lathered and cut or sat smoking meditatively in his saloon; the doom began to work its will, and business, which for a quarter of a century had flourished like a plant, as indeed it was, of constant and assured growth, suddenly declined. On weekdays the barber cleaned up the chins of his fellow townsmen alone, but on Sunday mornings he would seek the aid of a neighbour, a youngster whom he called Charleyboy, when four men would be seated at one time upon his shaving-chairs, towel upon breast and neck bared for the sacrifice, while Charleyboy dabbed and pounded their crops into foam. Mr. Piffingcap would follow him, plying his weapon like the genius he was, while Charleyboy again in turn followed him, drying with linen, cooling with rhum, or soothing with splendid unguent. “Next gent, please!” he would cry out, and the last shorn man would rise and turn away, dabbing his right hand into the depths of his breeches pocket and elevating that with his left before producing the customary tribute.
But the genius of Piffingcap and the neat hand of Charley languished in distress. There was no gradual cessation, the thing completely stopped, and Piffingcap did not realize until too late, until, indeed, the truth of it was current in the little town everywhere but in his own shop, that the beards once shaven by him out of Grafton’s pot grew no more in Bagwood; and there came the space of a week or so when not a soul entered the saloon but two schoolboys for the cutting of hair, and a little housemaid for a fringe net.
Then he knew, and one day, having sat in the place the whole morning like a beleaguered rat, with ruin and damnation a hands-breath only from him, he rushed from his shop across to the hardware merchant’s and bought two white china mugs, delicately lined with gold and embossed with vague lumps, and took them back to the saloon.
At dinner time he put the cup of lead into his coat pocket and walked down the street in an anxious kind of way until he came to the bridge at the end of the town. It was an angular stone bridge, crossing a deep and leisurely flowing river, along whose parapet boys had dared a million times, wearing smooth, with their adventuring feet, its soft yellow stone. He stared at the water and saw the shining flank of a tench as it turned over. All beyond the bridge were meads thick with ripe unmown grass and sweet with scabious bloom. But the barber’s mind was harsh with the rancour of noon heats and the misfortunes of life. He stood with one hand resting upon the hot stone and one upon the heavy evil thing in his pocket. The bridge was deserted at this hour, its little traffic having paused for the meal. He took, at length, the cup from his pocket, and whispering to himself “God forgive you, Grafton,” he let it fall from his fingers into the water; then he walked sharply home to his three daughters and told them what he had done.