IN THE CHAIR
About once in so often a man must go to the barber for what, with contemptuous brevity, is called a haircut. He must sit in a big chair, a voluminous bib (prettily decorated with polka dots) tucked in round his neck, and let another human being cut his hair for him. His head, with all its internal mystery and wealth of thought, becomes for the time being a mere poll, worth two dollars a year to the tax-assessor: an irregularly shaped object, between a summer squash and a cantaloupe, with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends have advised him. His identity vanishes.
As a rule, the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: he has given it to the barber, and the barber will do as he pleases with it. It is only when the man is little and is brought in by his mother, that the job will be done according to instructions; and this is because the man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Also because the weakest woman under such circumstances has strong convictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow him to see the haircut cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man in a thousand—nay, in ten thousand—would dare express himself as dissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is no barber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man who, returning home with a new haircut, was compelled to turn round again and take what his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircut was more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it happened to that man but once.
The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors. Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,' a euphemism that indicates a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at the barber's and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that is most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must grow steadily—count on it for that!—until for a brief period it is 'just right,' æsthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long again.
Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.' But the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. When he goes, he goes suddenly.
There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal. Probably it converses, on subjects remote from our bodily consciousness, with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.
Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep them from attaining it: a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must be quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a weakness; the back of the head had to be shaved; and the fashion doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of sitting up straight.
Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think, and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with, plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I remember a barber—he was the only one available in a small town—who cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was a pretty little cut, he said,—filling it with alum,—and reminded him of another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the same place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now doing. Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!' said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I didn't nip him again in just the same place!'