“How would you like it cut, sir?” she asked, placing a hand upon each of his shoulders, and peering round at him with enamouring eyes.
“Oh, with a pair of scissors, don’t you think?” he replied at a venture, for he was not often waggish. But it was a very successful sally, the girl chuckled with rapture, loose fringes of her hair tickled his cheek, and he caught puffs of her sweet-scented breath. She was gold-haired, not very tall, and had pleasant turns about her neck and face and wrists that almost fascinated him. When they had agreed upon the range and extent of his shearing, the girl proceeded to the accomplishment of the task in complete silence, almost with gravity. Huxley began wondering how many hundreds and thousands of crops were squeezed annually by the delicious fingers, how many polls denuded by those competent shears. Very sad. Once a year, he supposed, she would go holidaying for a week or ten days; she would go to Bournemouth for the bathing or for whatever purpose it is people go to Bournemouth, Barmouth, or Blackpool. He determined to come in again the day after to-morrow and be shaved by her.
At the conclusion of the rite she brushed his coat collar very meticulously, tiptoeing a little, and remarked in a bright manner upon the weather, which was also bright. Then she went back to shave what Huxley described to himself as a “red-faced old cockalorum,” whom he at once disliked very thoroughly. She had given him a check with a fee marked upon it; he took this down the stairs and paid his dues to “a bald-headed old god-like monster”—Huxley felt sure he was—who sat in the shop below, surrounded by fringe-nets, stuffings, moustache wax, creams, toothbrushes, and sponges.
Two days later Huxley Rustem repeated his visit, but not all the intrigue of the girl nor his own manœuvring could effect the happy arrangement again, although he sat for a long time feeling sure that there was no other establishment of its kind in which the elements of celerity were so unreservedly abandoned, and the flunkeyism so peculiarly viscous. The many mirrors, of course, multiplied the objects of his factitious contempt; those male barbers were small vain beings of disagreeable outline to whom the doom of shaving tens of thousands of chins for ever and ever afforded a white-faced languid happiness. Huxley was exasperated—his personality always ran so easily to exasperation—by the care with which the wrinkled face of a sportive old gent of sixty was being massaged with steaming cloths. He wore pretty brown button boots and large check trousers; there was still a vain wisp or two of white hair left upon his tight round skull and his indescribably silly old face. In the outcome our hero had perforce to be shaved by a youth of the last revolting assiduity, who caressed his chin with strong, excoriating palms.
In the ensuing weeks Huxley Rustem became a regular visitor to the saloon, but he suffered repeated disappointments. He was disconsolate; it was most baffling; not once did he secure the bliss of her attentions. He felt himself a fool; some men could do these things as easily as they grew whiskers, but Rustem was not one of them, for the traditions of virtue and sweet conduct were very firmly rooted in him; he was like a mouse living in a large white empty bath which, if it was unscaleable, was clean, and if it was rather blank was never terrifying. It is easy, so very easy, to be virtuous when you can’t be anything else. But still he very much desired to take the fair barber out to dinner, say, just for an hour or two in a quiet place where one eats and chats and listens to the pleasant shrilling of restaurant violins. He would be able to amuse her with tales and recitals of his experiences and she would constantly exclaim “Really!” as if entranced—as she probably would be. In his imagined hour her conversational exchanges never developed beyond that, yet it was enough to thrill him with a mild happiness. An egoist is a mystic without a god, but seldom ever without a goddess. It was bliss to adore her, but very heaven for her to be adoring him. To be just to Huxley Rustem that was all he meant, but try as he would he could never make up the happy occasion. It was a most discomfiting experience. It is true that he saw her in the street on three or four occasions, but each time he was accompanied by his wife, and each time he was guilty of a vain pretence, his behaviour to his companion being extremely casual—as if she were just an acquaintance instead of being an important alliance. But no one could possibly have mistaken the lady for anything but Huxley’s very own wife, and the little barber was provocatively demure at these encounters. Once, however, he was alone, and she passed, ogling him in a very frank way. But she did not understand egoists like Rustem. He was impervious to any such direct challenge; he thought it a little silly, coarse even. Had she been shy and diffident, allowing him to be masterful instead of confusing him, he would have fluttered easily into her flame.
So the affair remained, and would have remained for ever but that, by the grace of fortune, he found himself one day at last actually sitting again in front of the charming girl, who was not less aware of the attraction than he himself. She was nervous and actually with her shears clipped a part of his ear. Huxley was rather glad of that, it eased the situation, but on his departure he committed the rash act for which he never afterwards forgave himself. Her fingers were touching his as she gave him the pay check, when he took suddenly from his pocket a silver coin and pressed it into her hand, smiling. It was as if he had struck her a blow. He was shocked at the surprised resentment in the fierce glance she flung him. She tossed the coin into a tray for catching tobacco ash and cigarette ends. He realized at once the enormity of the affront; his vulgar act had smashed the delicate little coil between them. Vague and almost frivolous as it was, she had prized it. Poor as it was, it could yet deeply humiliate him. But it was a blunder that could never be retrieved, and he turned quickly and sadly out of the saloon, feeling the awful sting of his own contempt. Crass fool that he was, didn’t he realize that even barbers had their altitudes? Did he think he could buy a jewel like that, as he bought a packet of tobacco, with a miserable shilling? Perhaps Huxley Rustem was unduly sensitive about it, but he could never again bring himself to enter the saloon and meet that wounded gaze. He only recovered his balance when, a fortnight later, he encountered her in the street wearing the weeds of a widow! Then he felt almost as indignant as if she had indeed deceived him!
Big Game
Old Squance was the undertaker, but in the balmy, healthy, equable air of Tamborough undertaking was not a thriving trade; its opportunities were but an ornamental adjunct to his more vital occupation of builder. Even so those old splendid stone-built cottages never needed repairs, or if they did Squance didn’t do them. Storms wouldn’t visit Tamborough, fires didn’t occur, the hand of decay was, if anything, more deliberate than the hand of time itself, and no newcomer, loving the old houses so much, ever wanted to build a new one: so Mrs. Squance had to sell hard-looking bullseyes and stiff-looking fruit in a hard, stiff-looking shop. Also knitting needles and, in their time of the year, garden seeds. Squance was a meek person whom you would never have credited with heroic tendencies; nevertheless, with no more romantic background than a coffin or two, a score of scaffold poles, and sundry hods and shovels, he had acquired in a queer, but still not unusual, way the repute of a lion-slayer. Mrs. Squance was not so meek, she was not meek at all, she was ambitious—but vainly so. Her ambitions secured their fulfilment only in her nocturnal dreams, but in that sphere they were indeed triumphant and she was satisfied. The most frequent setting of her unconscious imagination happened to be a tiny modern flat in which she and old Ben seemed to be living in harmony and luxury. It was a delightful flat, very high up—that was the proper situation for a flat, mind you, just under the roof—with stairs curling down, and down, and down till it made you giddy to think of them. The kitchen, well, really Mrs. Squance could expatiate endlessly on that and the tiny corner place with two wash-basins in it and room enough to install a bath if you went in for that kind of thing. Best of all was the sitting-room in front, looking into a street so very far below that Mrs. Squance declared she felt as if she had been sitting in a balloon. Here Mrs. Squance, so she dreamed, would sit and browse. She didn’t have to look at ordinary things like trees and mud and other people’s windows. That was what made it so nice, Mrs. Squance declared. She had instead a vista of roofs and chimneys, beautiful telephone standards, and clouds. The people, too, who walked far down beneath were always unrecognizable; a multitude of hat crowns seemed to collect her gaze, linked with queer movements, right, left, right, left, of knees and boots, though sometimes she would be lucky enough to observe a very fat man, just a glimpse perhaps of his watch-guard lying like a chain of oceanic islands across a scholastic globe. In the way of dreams she knew the street by the name of Lather Lane. It was cobbled with granite setts. There was a barber’s shop at one corner and a depot for foreign potatoes and bananas at another. That flat was so constantly the subject of her dream visitations that she came to invest it with a romantic reality, to regard it as an ultimate real possession lying fortuitously somewhere, at no very great remove, in some quarter she might actually, any day now, luckily stumble across.
And it was in that very flat she beheld Mr. Squance’s heroism. It seemed to be morning in her dream, early; it must have been early. She and Squance were at breakfast when what should walk deliberately and astoundingly into the room but a lion. Mrs. Squance, never having seen a lion before, took it to be a sheepdog, and she shouted, “Go out, you dirty thing!” waving a threatening hand towards it. But the animal did not go out; it pranced up to Mrs. Squance in a genial way, seized her admonishing hand and playfully tried to bite it off. Really! Mr. Squance had risen to his startled feet shouting “Lion! lion!” and then Mrs. Squance realized that she had to contend with a monster that kept swelling bigger and bigger before her very eyes, until it seemed that it would never be able to go out of that door again. It had a tremendous head and mane, with whiskers on its snout as stiff as knitting needles, and claws like tenpenny nails; but its tail was the awfullest thing, long and very flexible, with a bush of hair at the end just like a mop, which it wagged about, smashing all sorts of things.