Cobb's Anatomy

by Irvin S. Cobb

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 sex 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 circumstances. 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 constitution, 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 passed 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 "Hello 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 shell 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 button 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?"