bench to probe the speculation that jumped grasshopper-like into the
field of his inquisitorial mind: ’Why does a man become a barber?
Well, what _is_ it that persuades a man, not by the mere compulsion of
destiny, but by the sweet reasonableness of inclination, to dedicate
his activities to the excision of other people’s pimples and the
discomfiture of their hairy growths? He had glanced through the two
papers, _Punch_ and _John Bull_, handed him by the boy in buttons,
and now, awaiting his turn, posed himself with this inquiry. There
was a girl at it, too, at the end of the saloon. She seemed to have
picked him out from the crowd of men there; he caught her staring, an
attractive girl. It seemed insoluble; misfortunate people may, indeed
must, by the pressure of circumstances, become sewermen, butchers,
scavengers, and even clergymen, but the impulse to barbery was, he
felt, quite indelicately ironic. How that girl stared at him—if she was
not very careful she would be clipping the fellow’s ear—did she think
she knew him? He rather hoped she would have to attend to him; would
he be lucky enough? Huxley tried to estimate the chances by observing
the half-dozen toilets in progress, but his calculations did not
encourage the hope at all. It was very charming for an agreeable woman,
a stranger, too, to do that kind of service for you. He remembered
that, after his marriage five years ago, he had tried to persuade his
wife to lather and shave him, “just for a lark, you know,” but she was
adamant, didn’t see the joke at all! Well, well, he decided that the
word barber derived in some ironic way from the words barbarism or
barbarity, expressing, unconsciously perhaps, contempt on the part of
the barber for a world that could only offer him this imposture for
a man’s sacred will to order and activity. Yet it didn’t seem so bad
for women—that splendid young creature there at the end of the saloon!
The boy in buttons approached, and Huxley Rustem was ushered to that
vacant chair at the end; the splendid young thing had placed a wrapper
about him—she had almost “cuddled” it round his neck—and stood demurely
preparing to do execution upon his poll, turning her eyes mischievously
upon his bright-hued socks, which, by a notable coincidence, were the
same colour as her own handsome hose. Huxley had a feeling that she had
cunningly arranged the succession of turns in order to secure him to
her chair—which shows that he was still young and very impressionable.
Such a feeling is one of the customary assumptions of vanity, the
natural and prized, but much-denied, possession of all agreeable
people. Huxley, as the girl had already noted, and now saw more vividly
in the mirror fronting them, _was_ agreeable, was attractive. (My dear
reader, both you and Huxley Rustem are right, the dainty barbaress
_had_ laid her nets for this particular victim.)
“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.
“Ben,” said Mrs. Squance, “'ave you a pistol?”
“No, I ’ave not,” said Ben.
“Then we’re done,” she had declared. “Oh, no, we ain’t, though! You
’old ’im, Ben, and I’ll go and get a pistol; ’old ’im!”
Ben valiantly seized the lion by its mane and tail, but it did not
care for such treatment; it began to snarl and swish about the room,
dragging poor Ben as if he had been just a piece of rabbit pie.
“'Old ’im! ’old ’im!” exhorted Mrs. Squance, as she popped on her
bonnet and shawl. “You ’old 'im!”
“All right,” breathed Ben, as she ran off and began the descent of the
long narrow staircase. Almost at the bottom she met a piano coming
upwards. It was not a very large piano, but it was large enough to
prevent her from descending any further. It was resting upon the backs
of two men, one in front, whose entirely bald, perspiring, projecting
head reminded her of the head of a tortoise, and one who followed him
unseen. They crawled on all fours, while the piano was balanced by a
man who pulled it in front and another who pushed it from behind.
“Dear me!” exclaimed Mrs. Squance. “I ’ope you won’t be long.”
They made no reply; the piano continued to advance, the bald man
swaying his head still more like a tortoise. She began to retire before
them, and continued retiring step by step until she became irritated
and demanded to know the owner of that piano. The men seemed to be
dumb, so she skipped up to the second floor to make enquiries, knocking
at the first door with her left hand—the right one still hurting her
very much. It was exasperating. Someone had just painted and varnished
the doors, and she was compelled to tap very lightly instead of giving
the big bang the occasion required. Consequently no one heard her,
while her hand became covered with a glutinous evil liquid. She ran up
to the third floor. Here the doors were all right, but although she
set up a vigorous cannonade again no one heard her, at least, no one
replied except some gruff voice that kept repeating “Gone, no address!
Gone, no address!” She opened the doors, but there seemed to be no one
about, although each room had every appearance of recent occupation:
fires alight, breakfast things recently used, and in the bedrooms the
disordered beds. She was now extremely annoyed. She opened all the
doors quickly until she came to the last room, which was occupied
by the old clergyman who kept ducks there and fed them on macaroni
cheese. It was just as she feared; the ducks were waiting, they flocked
quacking upon the passage and stairs before she could prevent them.
“I’m sure,” screamed Mrs. Squance, in her dreadful rage, “it’s that
lion responsible for all this!”
She wasted no more time upon the matter. She rapidly descended the
stairs again, treading upon innumerable indignant ducks, until she
came to the piano. Here she said not a word, but, brushing the leading
man aside, placed her foot roughly upon the slippery head of the first
crawling man and scrambled over the top of the instrument, jumping
thence upon the back part of the hindmost man, who turned his feet
comically inwards, and wore round his loins a belt as large as the
belly-band of a waggon horse.
She proceeded breathlessly until she came to the last flight, where,
behold! the stairs had all been smashed in by those awkward pianists,
and she stood on the dreadful verge of a drop into a cellar full of
darkness and disgusting smells. But she was able to leap upon the
banister-rail which was intact, and slide splendidly to the ground
floor. An unusual sight awaited her. Mrs. Squance did not remember
ever to have seen such a thing before, but there in the hall a
marvellous eustacia tree was growing out of the floor. She was not
surprised at the presence of a tree in that unwonted situation. She had
not noticed it before, but it did not seem out of place. Why shouldn’t
trees grow where they liked? They always did. Mrs. Squance invariably
took life as she found it, even in dreams. While she was surveying
the beautiful proportions of the eustacia tree, the richness of its
leaves, and its fine aroma a small bird, without warning or apology,
alighted upon her right hand—which she carried against her chest as if
it were in a sling, though it wasn’t—and laid an egg on it. It _was_
so annoying, she did not know what to do with it; she was afraid of
smashing it. She rushed from the building, and entered the butcher’s
shop a few doors away. The shop was crowded with customers, and the
butcher perspired and joked with geniality, as is the immemorial
custom with butchers. His boy, a mere tot of five or six years of age,
observed to Mrs. Squance that it was “a lovely day, ma’am,” and she
replied that it was splendid. So it was. People were buying the most
extraordinarily fleshly fare, the smelt of an ox, a rib of suet, a
fillet of liver, and one little girl purchased nineteen lambs’ tongues,
which she took away secretly in a portmanteau.
“Now Mrs. Squance, what can I do for you?” enquired the butcher.
Without comment she handed him the egg of the bird. He cast it into the
till as if it were a crown piece. “And the next thing, ma’am?”
“'Ave you got such a thing as a pistol, Mr. Verryspice?”
Mr. Verryspice had, he had got two, and drawing them from the belt
wherefrom dangled his sharpener, he laid two remarkable pieces of
ordnance before her. In her renewed agitation she would have snatched
up one of the pistols, but Mr. Verryspice prevented her.
“No, no, ma’am, I shall have to get permission for you to use it first.”
“But I really must ’ave it immediate....”
“Yes?” said the butcher.
“ ... for my husband.”
“I see,” he replied sympathetically. “Well, come along then and I’ll
get an interim permission at once.” Seizing a tall silk hat from
its hook and placing it firmly upon his head he led her from his
establishment.
“Singular that the trams are all so full this morning,” commented Mrs.
Squance as they awaited a conveyance.
“Most unusual, ma’am,” replied Mr. Verryspice. But at last they
persuaded a bathchair man to give them a lift to their destination,
where they arrived a little indecorously perhaps, for the top-hatted
butcher was sitting as unconcernedly and as upright as a wax figure
upon Mrs. Squance’s knees. The office they sought lay somewhere in a
vast cavernous building full of stairs and corridors, long, exhausting,
hollow corridors like the Underground railway, and on every floor and
turning were signposts of the turnpike variety with directions:
“To the Bedel of St. Thomas’s Basket, 3 miles.”
“Registrar of Numismatics and Obligations, 2¼.”
Along one of these passages they plunged, and after some aggravating
hindrances, including a demand from a humpty-backed clerk for a packet
of No. 19 egg-eyed sharps, and five pennyworth of cachous which she
found in her bosom, the permission was secured, and the butcher
thereupon handed the weapon to Mrs. Squance.
“What did you say you wanted it for?” he asked.
Mrs. Squance’s gratitude was great, but her indignation was deep and
disdained reply. She seized the pistol and began to run home. Rather
a stout lady, too, and the exercise embarrassed her. Her hair fetched
loose, her stockings slipped down, and her strange, hurrying figure,
brandishing a pistol, soon attracted the notice of policemen and a
certain young greengrocer with a tray of onions, who trotted in her
wake until she threatened them all with the firearm.
Breathlessly at last she mounted the tremendous staircase. Happily in
the interval the damage had been repaired, the tree chopped down, piano
delivered, and ducks recaptured. She reached her rooms only in time to
hear a great crash of glass from within. Old Ben was strutting about
with a triumphant air.
“I done ’im—I done ’im,” he called. “You can come in now; I’ve just
chucked ’im through the window!” And sure enough he had. The sash
looked as if it had been blown out by a cannon-ball. Mrs. Squance
peered out, and there, far down at the front door, curled up as if
asleep, lay the lion. At that moment the milkman arrived, with that
dissonant clatter peculiar to milkmen. He dashed down his cans close
by the nose of the lion, which apparently he had not seen. The scared
animal leaped up in its terror, and darting down an alley was seen no
more.
So far this narrative, devoid as it is of moral grandeur and literary
grace, has subjected the reader’s comprehension to no scientific
rigours; but he who reads on will discern its cunning import—a
psychological outcome with the profoundest implications. Listen. Mrs.
Squance awoke that morning in her own hard-looking little house of one
floor, with the hard-looking shop, startled to find the window of their
room actually smashed, and inexplicable pains in her right hand. She
related these circumstances in after years with so many symptoms of
truth and propriety that she herself at last vividly believed in the
figure of old Ben as a lion-slayer. “Saved my life when I was ’tacked
by a lion!” she would say to her awed grandchildren, and she would
proceed to regale them with a narration which, I regret to say, had
only the remotest likeness to the foregoing story.
_The Poor Man_
One of the commonest sights in the vale was a certain man on a bicycle
carrying a bag full of newspapers. He was as much a sound as a sight,
for what distinguished him from all other men to be encountered there
on bicycles was not his appearance, though that was noticeable; it was
his sweet tenor voice, heard as he rode along singing each morning from
Cobbs Mill, through Kezzal Predy Peter, Thasper, and Buzzlebury, and
so on to Trinkel and Nuncton. All sorts of things he sang, ballads,
chanties, bits of glees, airs from operas, hymns, and sacred anthems—he
was leader of Thasper church choir—but he seemed to observe some sort
of rotation in their rendering. In the forepart of the week it was
hymns and anthems; on Wednesday he usually turned to modestly secular
tunes; he was rolling on Thursday and Friday through a gamut of love
songs and ballads undoubtedly secular and not necessarily modest,
while on Saturday—particularly at eve, spent in the tap of “The White
Hart”—his programme was entirely ribald and often a little improper.
But always on Sunday he was the most decorous of men, no questionable
liquor passed his lips, and his comportment was a credit to the church,
a model even for soberer men.
Dan Pavey was about thirty-five years old, of medium height and of
medium appearance except as to his hat (a hard black bowler which
seemed never to belong to him, though he had worn it for years) and as
to his nose. It was an ugly nose, big as a baby’s elbow; he had been
born thus, it had not been broken or maltreated, though it might have
engaged in some pre-natal conflict when it was malleable, since when
nature had healed, but had not restored it. But there was ever a soft
smile that covered his ugliness, which made it genial and said, or
seemed to say: Don’t make a fool of me, I am a friendly man, this is
really my hat, and as for my nose—God made it so.
The six hamlets which he supplied with newspapers lie along the
Icknield Vale close under the ridge of woody hills, and the inhabitants
adjacent to the woods fell the beech timber and, in their own homes,
turn it into rungs or stretchers for chair manufacturers who, somewhere
out of sight beyond the hills, endlessly make chair, and nothing but
chair. Sometimes in a wood itself there may be seen a shanty built
of faggots in which sits a man turning pieces of chair on a treadle
lathe. Tall, hollow, and greenly dim are the woods, very solemn places,
and they survey the six little towns as a man might look at six tiny
pebbles lying on a green rug at his feet.