|WHEN I got off the Pennsylvania train yesterday I went to a barber shop
before I did anything else. I have a thick, Venetian red, chinchilla
beard, which grows rapidly, and which gives me a fuzzy appearance every
twenty-four hours, unless I place myself frequently into the hands of a
barber. At first I used to shave myself, but I cut myself to pieces in
such a sickening manner, without seeming to impede the growth of the
rich and foxy beard, that until last summer I gave up being my own
barber. At that time I was presented with a safety razor which the
manufacturer said would not cut my face, because it was impossible
for it to cut anything except the beard. The safety razor resembles in
appearance several other toilet articles, such as the spoke shave, the
road scraper, the can opener, the lawn mower and the turbine water wheel,
but it does not look like a razor. It also looks like a carpet sweeper
some, and reminds me of a monkey wrench. It is said that you can shave
yourself on a train if you will use this instrument. I tried it once
last winter while going west. In fact, I took the trip largely to see
if one could shave on board the train safely with this razor. I had no
special trouble. At least I did not cut off any features that I cared
anything about, but I was disappointed in the results, and also in the
length of time consumed in cleaning the razor after I got through. I was
shaving myself only from Forty-second street to Albany, but it took
me from Albany to Omaha to pull the razor apart, and to dig out the
coagulated lather and the dear, dear whiskers. I now employ a valet
whose name is Patria McGloria. He irons my trousers, shaves and dresses
me, and mows the lawn. When I come to Washington, I am too democratic
to travel with a valet, fearing that it might cost me several thousand
votes some day, and so I leave my maid at home to wash and dress
the salad. In that way he does not miss me, and I get the credit at
Washington of being a man who spends so much time thinking of his
country's welfare that he doesn't have a chance to look pretty.
I did not fall into a very gaudy barber shop. The appointments were like
some of the president's appointments, I thought--viz., in poor taste,
but this is not a political letter. I do not wish to antagonize anybody,
especially the president of the United States. He has always treated me
well.
I will now return to the barber shop. It was a plain structure, with
beautiful sarsaparilla pictures here and there on the walls and a faint
odor of rancid pomatum and overworked hair restoratives.
There were three chairs richly upholstered in two-ply carpeting of some
inflammatory hue, with large vines and the kind of flowers which grow
on carpets but nowhere else. I have seen blossoms woven into ingrain
carpets, varying in color from a dead black to the color of a hepatized
lung, but I have never seen one that reminded me of anything I ever saw
in nature. The chair I sat in also had springs in it. They were made of
selections from the Washington monument.
The barber who waited on me asked me if I wanted a shave. A great many
barbers ask me this during the year. Sometimes they do it from habit,
and sometimes they do it to brighten up my life and bring a smile to
my wan cheek. As I have no hair, the thinking mind naturally and by a
direct course of reasoning arrives at the conclusion that when I go into
a barber shop and climb into a chair, I do so for the purpose of getting
shaved and not with the idea of having my fortune told or my deposition
taken. Still barbers continue to ask me this question and look at each
other with ill concealed mirth.
I said yes, I would like a shave unless he preferred to take my
temperature, or amuse me by making a death mask of himself. He then
began to strap a large razor with a double shuffle movement and to size
me up at the same time.
He was a colored man, but he had lived in Washington a long time and
knew a great deal more than he would if his lot had fallen elsewhere.
He spoke with some feeling and fed me with about the most unpalatable
lather I think I ever participated in. He also did an odd thing when he
went for the second time over my face. I never have noticed the custom
outside of that shop. Most barbers, in making the second trip over a
customer's face, moisten one side at a time with a sponge or the damp
hand as they go along, but in this case a large quantity of lather was
put in my ear and, as he needed it, he took out what he required from
time to time, using his finger like a paint brush and spreading on the
lather as he went along. So accurately had he learned to measure the
quantity of lather which an ear will hold that when he got through with
me and I went away there was not over a tablespoonfnl in either ear and
possibly not that much.
While I sat in the chair I heard a man, who seemed to be in about the
third chair from me, saying that a certain bill numbered so-and-so had
been referred to a certain committee and would undoubtedly by reported
favorably. If so, it would in its regular order come up for discussion
and reach a vote so-and-so. I was charmed with the man's knowledge of
the condition of affairs in both houses and the exact status of all
threatened legislation, because I always have to stop and think a good
while before I can tell whether a bill originates on the floor of the
house or in the rotunda.
I could not see this man, but I judged that he was a senator or
sergeant-at-arms. He talked for some time about the condition of
national affairs, and finally some one said something about evolution.
I was perfectly wrapped up in what he was saying and remember distinctly
how he referred to Herbert Spencer's definition of evolution as a
change from indefinite, coherent heterogeneity through continuous
differentiations and integrations.
When I arose from my chair and looked over that way I saw that the
gentleman who had been talking on the condition of congressional
legislation was a colored hotel porter of Washington, who was getting
shaved in the third chair, and the man who was discussing the merits of
evolution was the colored man who was shaving him.
Here in Washington the colored man has the air of one who is holding up
one corner of the great national structure. Whether he is opening your
soft boiled eggs for you in the morning, or putting bay rum on your
nose, or checking your umbrella or brushing you with a wilted whisk
broom, his thoughts are mostly upon national affairs. He is naturally
an imitator wherever he goes, and this old resident of Washington
has watched and studied the air and language of eminent statesmen so
carefully that when he goes forth in the morning with his whitewashing
portfolio on his arm he walks unconsciously like Senator Evarts or John
James Ingalls. I saw a colored man taking a perpendicular lunch at the
depot yesterday, and evidently the veteran Georgia senator is his model,
for he cut his custard pie into large rectangular hunks and pushed
it back behind his glottis with a caseknife, after which he drew in
a saucerful of tea, with a loud and violent ways-and-means committee
report which reminded me of the noise made by an unwearied cyclone
trying to suck a cistern dry. I think that the colored man exaggerated
the imitation somewhat, but he was evidently trying to assume the table
manners of Senator Brown of Georgia.
For this reason, if for no other, members of the cabinet, senators,
representatives, judges and heads of departments cannot be too careful
in their daily walk and conversation. Unconsciously they are molding the
customs, the manners, and the styles of dress which are to become the
customs, the manners, and the dress of a whole race. If I could to-day
take our statesmen all apart, not so much for the purpose of examining
their works, but so that we could be alone and talk this matter over
by ourselves, I would strive in my poor, weak, faltering way to impress
upon them the awful responsibility which rests upon them not only as
polite and fluent conversationalists, classical and courteous debators.
speaking pieces for the benefit of future conventions, of referring to
each other as liars, traitors, thieves, deserters, bummers, beats, and
great moral abscesses on the body politic; rehearsing campaign speeches
in congress at an expense of $20 per day each, and meantime obstructing
wholesome tariff legislation, but as the conservators of etiquette,
statesmanship, and morality for a race of people the great responsibility
for whose welfare still rests upon us as a nation.
Only the day before yesterday I saw a thin, wiry, and colored gentleman
pawing around in an ash barrel for something, and I waited to see what
he was after. He resurrected a sad and dejected plug hat, and, though it
was not half so good as the one he wore, he seemed much pleased with
it and put it on. I ventured to ask him why he had done so without
improving his appearance, and he said that for a long time he had been
looking for a hat which would highten the resemblance which people had
often noticed and remarked in days gone by, both in person, sah, and
general carriage, walk, and conversation, sah, also in the matter of
clear cut and logical life sentences, as existing between himself, sah,
and Senator Evarts, sah. He believed that he had struck it, sah.
As spring warms up the air about Washington the heating apparatus of
the capitol building begins to relax its interest, and now you can visit
most any part of the stately pile without being scrambled in your own
embonpoint. Last winter I heard Senator Frye of Maine make his great
tariff speech, and although there was nothing, about the speech itself
which seemed to evolve much exercise or industry--for it was the same
speech in every essential quality that I have heard every November since
I began to take an interest in politics--the perspiration ran down his
face in small washouts and sweatlets and fell in the arena with a mellow
plunk.
I believe this unnatural heat to be the cause of much ill health among
our law-makers, and I freely admit that the unhealthy surroundings of
Washington and the great contrast between the hot air of the capitol and
the cold air outside have done a great deal towards keeping me out of
the senate. The night air of Washington is also filled with malaria and
is much worse than any night air I have ever used before.