with a "k." It comes from the Greek "kosmetikos," meaning one skilled
in ornament. Honest to heaven, it does! We looked it up in the
dictionary; and who are we that we should quarrel with a ten-pound
lexicon? As a concession to custom, however, and to the beauty-experts
who spell it with a "c," we will so far unbend from our classical
austerity as to use the vulgar form "cosmetics" in the present article.
The Greeks aren't likely to buy this book, anyway.
In the meantime the reader is probably wondering what in the world
should cause us to write about the subject at all. The reader, we hope,
is too well aware of our chaste aloofness of soul to suppose for a
second that we have perhaps been cavorting about with persons who dye
and stencil themselves--God bless us, no! We wouldn't do such a thing,
even if the income taxes left us any money to do it with.
To tell the whole truth as simply as possible--and the person who tells
the whole truth is obviously very simple--we were walking down to the
office the other morning with a good churchman. Oh, a real pillar of
ecclesiasticism! Not that we are in the habit of hunting up good
churchmen to walk down with, but if we run into one--hang it all! we
have to walk with him. We can't very well shout for a policeman.
Well, as we were walking down with him, and he was telling us some
pretty little thing or other about something in the Thirty-Nine
Articles--not to be confused with the Fifty-Seven, which are much
spicier--we met a young lady, another pretty little thing. We meet her
quite often. Morning after morning she walks up the street just about
the time that we walk down. We don't know her. We don't even speak to
her. But she looks sweetly at us, and we regard her in the tenderly
paternal way befitting our years. A very nice little girl, indeed, and
one of these days we are going to raise our hat, and...
This morning she dimpled daintily as usual, and we felt that soft glow
which even the middle-aged can acknowledge without shame. It was
pleasant meeting her. It gave a headier zest to the morning air, an
additional sparkle to the winter sunshine, a sudden glamor as of green
leaves and singing birds amid the bleak trees of December. It was as
though old Pan had suddenly blown a few wild notes on his pipes and set
a host of little elves peeping roguishly around the posts and porches of
that monotonous and respectable street. For a moment we felt quite
young and--well, rather devilish, you know.
"Tut, tut, tut," said our religious friend. "My, my, my--too bad, too
bad!"
We wondered what the dickens he was tut-tutting about. He couldn't read
our thoughts, and in any case they were entirely innocent. So why the
tut-tutting? Why should a well-known drygoods merchant with a grown-up
family go along making a noise like a sick Ford?
"What's the matter?" we asked. "Have you left something behind you at
the house, or have you forgotten to shut off the draught of the furnace?
That's the worst of furnaces, you have to be so...."
But he turned on us an appalled countenance as though he had just caught
the rector kissing the president of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Instinctively
we felt he was going to say something about our little friend of the
dimples. He did.
"She paints!" he gasped. "Isn't it terrible to see a young girl--and
rather comely, too, so far as I could observe in passing--paint the way
she does?"
The old snooper! And he looked at us in the confident expectation that
we would agree with him. We affected to misunderstand him and said that
perhaps she did paint badly, and that Cubism and Futurism and the other
new movements were playing the very devil with art. Painting wasn't at
all what it used to be, and we proceeded to instance two or three men we
know who also paint very badly indeed.
"They seem to have lost their sense of tonality and chiaroscuro," we
remarked desperately, hoping the technical balderdash would distract his
attention. "The vibration seems to have gone out of their paint, and
their brush-work is..."
"But she paints herself!" he insisted.
Isn't that characteristic of the truly religious mind? They never miss
a thing, those chaps. They seem to know instinctively--at least, we hope
it is instinctively--everything that a woman shakes, smears, or pours on
herself. They can tell rouge, face-powder, or hair-dye blocks away. If
they tried hard they could probably tell you where every woman on the
street buys her complexion, her coiffure, and her contours, and how they
are put on. It is a great gift. Personally, it takes us years of
acquaintance to find out.
We remember once a very churchly young man--the kind that always shows
you to a pew and opens the hymn-book at the right place for you--telling
us of a musical comedy into which he would seem to have wandered under a
misapprehension. We had gone ourself, and it had struck us as being
decidedly tame. But he was filled with indignant wonder that the Censor
should permit such shameless and Babylonian displays.
"Fortunately I sat at the back of the house," he said, "or I wouldn't
have known where to look. One of the girls in the chorus, the second
from the right, didn't even wear tights, but danced in her bare legs!"
Great guns! And there we had sat up in Row E on the aisle--the Dramatic
Critic let us have the seats that night--and hadn't seen a darn thing.
Verily there is some power that sharpeneth the eye of the virtuous man
and revealeth unto him the dishabille of the wicked. For an upright
heart is more powerful than opera-glasses, and sanctity more exciting
than a seat in the front row.
But to return to the young lady we met on our walk down to the office.
Naturally we assured our godly friend that he must be mistaken in his
suspicions. A little powder, perhaps, to give that pearly translucency
to the complexion and soften the high-lights on the nose, but no
paint--nothing like that.
"But powder won't make your face that funny shell-pink color," he
argued. For a man of pious pursuits, it struck us, his knowledge was
fairly broad.
We told him that powder was liable to make your face any shade in the
spectrum. We know from personal experience. Occasionally after
shaving, when our face feels more than usually lacerated, we rub some
talcum on. It seems to take part of the sting out. It also covers the
places on our neck where we have made futile and fumbling slashes at our
jugular vein.
One morning we shook some powder out of a new tin, patted ourself with
it, and then hurried down to breakfast. Our landlady looked at us with
an interest and sympathy that were entirely unexpected and a little
disquieting.
"Are you feeling well?" she asked, instead of demanding acrimoniously as
usual what under heaven we had been doing upstairs for the last half
hour or so, while the coffee was boiling itself to a poisonous
consistency on the back of the stove.
We said we were perfectly all right, thanks, and would she please pass
the prunes?
"But you don't look well," she persisted. "You got an awfully queer
color this morning--kind of mauve."
A vague suspicion struck us that all was not well. We went over to the
side-board and squinted at ourself in the silly little mirror which
furniture-makers put in the back of such things. "Mauve" was right,
though perhaps it would be more exact to state that we were a lovely
shade of heliotrope, very decorative but rather Futurist in general
effect. We looked as if we had succeeded in cutting our throat at last,
and were now a pale and beautiful corpse. We suddenly recalled that our
heart had been acting a little strangely of late, especially when we
were introduced to new and pretty girls. Perhaps there really was
something wrong with our old carburetor--or should we say our ignition
system? We were scared a still paler shade of lavender.
Then we remembered the powder--somehow it hadn't seemed quite the same
as the old stuff, though we had been in too much of a hurry to look
closely at it. We ran upstairs and shook some of it out in our hand--it
was a pretty and quite distinct violet, both as to color and perfume.
Naturally there is no serious objection to smelling like a violet, but
we had no ambition to have a complexion like one--we prefer that the
resemblance should be confined to the beautiful modesty of our
disposition.
We took the tin back to our druggist on the way down-town, and asked him
with some asperity what the big idea was. We assured him that we hadn't
bought the powder as part of the make-up to play the leading role at a
wake, and that even in the event of our being laid out we didn't intend
the dash of lavender to be so brazenly conspicuous--a little purple on
our tie, perhaps, but none on our countenance.
"Oh, that's too bad," he said calmly--druggists are always calm--"I must
have given you the powder for brunettes by mistake."
For brunettes!--but why, in the name of all that is sensible, we asked,
should brunettes powder themselves with pale purple? He explained
patiently that ladies of a dusky complexion sometimes used it to give
their faces that fashionable pallor which is deemed a symptom of a
certain blueness of the blood. He had several other shades, too, for
other complexions, natural or desired.
We told our censorious walking companion all about this little
experience of ours, but it had not the slightest effect on his
opinion--you never saw such a hard man to convince. He still persisted
that the young lady painted. In fact, he went so far as to describe how
they rub the rouge on, spreading it out carefully with a rabbit's
foot--for luck, we presume--and then cover it up with powder. Where the
devil do these pious fellows get their information, anyway? He was too
much for us. We had to let him have the last word.
After all, suppose she does paint--where's the harm? See how healthy
and attractive it makes her look. Of course, the thing has to be done
skilfully and with judgment. One must display artistic restraint in
such matters, and not lay the color on with a palette-knife. Just a
_nuance_, a _soupcon_, that's all.
Mind you, there is nothing like the real complexion--for one thing, it
doesn't rub off on the shoulder of a fellow's coat. But suppose a lady
hasn't a complexion which she can afford to display in unadorned
splendor, what's she to do about it? She can't very well go out without
a complexion, can she? The thing seems hardly decent.
Personally we have never sympathized with the censorious outcry against
the more ruddy cosmetics. Why should this particular bit of camouflage
be taboo, when so many other forms of it are regarded as permissible or
even obligatory? Look at the liberties ladies take with their
waist-line, for instance. Sometimes it is up under their
shoulder-blades, and a few months later it is so low they are sitting on
it. Half the time a man has to look twice to know where to place his
arm.
It is true that the added brilliancy imparted to the female countenance
by the judicious use of cosmetics constitutes a very formidable weapon
against masculine peace of mind. So clearly is this recognized that in
Kansas, the home of fearless and advanced legislation, there is a law
forbidding the use of rouge by any woman under forty-five years of age.
After that age it is felt they are entitled to every possible
assistance--barring shot-guns, of course, or other forms of physical
violence.
Perhaps it is a realization of the danger to himself that causes the
average man to inveigh so furiously against cosmetics. But his attitude
is more than a little absurd. He is bound to fall sooner or later, poor
chap, and how does it really matter if he falls a bit sooner and a bit
harder? Nevertheless, the average man is usually bitterly opposed to his
fair friends making themselves still fairer by deftly heightening or
counterfeiting the rosy bloom of youth. He is opposed to his own
sisters doing it--the mean old thing!--and he frankly rages when he
catches his wife at it. Extraordinary how sore hubbies get when they
find wifey thus striving to make herself beautiful in their eyes--can it
be that they are not quite sure whose eyes?
The deliciously inconsistent part of the whole thing is that no
respectable woman ever dreamed of daubing herself up with cosmetics the
way the ordinary barber plasters most men with powder and perfumed
hair-tonic and toilet dope of all sorts. We have seen fat middle-aged
men come out of a barber-shop with their face massaged and powdered,
their hair greased back, their mustache waxed, their eyebrows smoothed
into place, and their hands manicured, doing their utmost to look and
smell like beautiful Circassian slaves. And yet those are the chaps who
go home and holler if they catch their wives rubbing a little powder on
their noses!
Not that it makes the slightest difference, of course! The ladies,
bless their hearts, will go right on making themselves beautiful in
every old way they know how, no matter what men say. And you are quite
right, girls. Personally we feel that you can't go too far or be too
successful. So do your darndest! It's a sad old world just now, in
spite of peace with victory.
But there is just one little word of warning, girls. We know you will
take it in good part from a man who has grown grey in the intensity of
his admiration for you. And that is, don't do it in public. A
bachelor, it is true, dearly loves to be initiated into the little
mysteries of the toilet, but not at dinner. That talcum powder has an
unpleasant way of floating on the soup or the salad dressing. And you
can't possibly spread it with the true artistic evenness at the table.
You nearly always get too much on one side of your nose. This gives us
an almost irresistible impulse to lean over and brush it off for you,
and--well, what would the head-waiter think? It would probably cost us
five dollars in hush money.
[Illustration: CLURKS AND CLARKS]
*Clurks and Clarks*
The chief difference between a "clurk" and a "clark" is about six
dollars a week--the difference, that is, in mere vulgar coin of the
post-war period. There are tremendous differences, however, in clothes,
dignity, _savoir faire_, and such intangible things. There is also a
very pronounced difference between the kinds of service they give you.
A mere "clurk" may keep you waiting, but he or she never manages to make
you feel apologetic. "Clarks" always do--it is their social privilege.
It is at the blessed season of Christmas that we are especially reminded
of these things. It is a time when we are much exposed to
clerks--"clerks" being the generic term. We consort--not to say
cohabit--with both species. If hanging over a counter for hours at a
time, yelling futile directions at a monomaniac who insists on dragging
down everything on the shelves except the thing one wants--if this
doesn't amount to cohabitation, we would like to know what does. But, of
course, there is something to be said in extenuation for the clerks.
Some day when we are a lot older and have made our pile, and have the
whole four hundred and sixty dollars salted away carefully in some nice
safe mining-stock--some day, in short, when we are independently rich
and careless of what we say, we will write down our frank and
unexpurgated opinion of Christmas shoppers, and then spend the rest of
our life trying to induce some paper to print it. But that is a long
way off yet. For the present we will compromise with the simple
generalization that the average Christmas shopper is a lineal and
typical descendant of such Gadarenes as managed to swim to safety after
they had taken that historic jump off the cliff.
We feel that it is only fair to make this statement before we go on
writing about the Christmas "clurk" and the Christmas "clark." For the
Christmas shopper explains many things. To have to stand for ten,
twelve, perhaps fifteen hours a day, while a lot of people, who have
gone insane from starting in to do their Christmas shopping early and
keeping at it without intermission ever since, howl impossible orders at
one, would make the patient man of Uz himself pick up a bolt of
dress-goods or a reading-lamp or some such handy trifle and clear a
breathing space with it. Samson used the jaw-bone of an ass. But the
asses who wedge themselves up against counters and scream at the clerk
for things that are sold either two floors up or three circles over,
keep their jaw-bones to jaw with.
The movement in favor of doing your Christmas shopping early is no
solution of the problem. It has been worked to death. If you want to
get ahead of the Christmas shoppers now, you have to start in the latter
part of August. In that case your Christmas presents are likely to
consist of lawn-mowers, mosquito netting, and parasols.
As a matter of fact, the wise man will do his shopping--unless he is so
darn wise that he doesn't shop at all--the very last thing on Christmas
Eve. By then all the red-eyed shock-troops will have got through their
deadly work in the stores, and will be strapped to their beds surrounded
by anxious nurses. A week earlier an ordinary man who plunged into a
department-store at any hour of the day would take his life in his
hand--along with his eighty-seven cents. If he managed to get through
alive, he wouldn't have enough clothes left on him to make it safe to
meet a modest policeman.
Another advantage of putting off your Christmas shopping is that you are
bound to forget a lot of people to whom you would otherwise have sent a
collection of assorted junk. Of course, it is too late by the time you
do think of them. You are just that much in pocket, and they are
relieved because they won't have to send you anything next year.
But, to return to the clerks, we had a simply awful experience last
Christmas. There is a nice old lady for whom we buy a present every
year. As she isn't our grandmother--grandmothers are satisfied with any
old token of affectionate regard whether it be a postcard or a hot-water
bottle--we have to exercise a certain care and judgment. And naturally
our knowledge of the personal needs and tastes of old ladies is somewhat
limited.
Well, we were standing deep in thought before a shop-window full of
fluffy white garments with frills and ribbons, intended for purposes
mysterious to bachelor men, when a friend's wife, who occasionally takes
a maternal--or perhaps we should say sororal--interest in us, came up
and asked us what we were doing there. Her tone suggested that she did
not believe our interest to be entirely innocent. But we did not take
offence. We told her frankly that we were trying to pick out something
that would be suitable as a gift for an old lady.
"But you don't suppose, do you, that a nice old lady would be willing to
wear anything in that window?" she asked.
We said we didn't see why not, and that personally we thought that
cute-looking garment up there in the corner, with the baby ribbon at the
top and the two ruffles around the bottoms, would be just the thing. We
spoke in complete guilelessness, but we spent the next ten minutes
trying to convince her that we hadn't intended to be objectionable.
Will someone please tell us why it isn't all right to talk about a thing
that it is all right to display brazenly in a window? If it isn't fit
to be mentioned it surely isn't fit to be shown. But you know what
women are when they get an idea of that sort in their minds. This one
looked us sternly in the eye.
"I don't believe there is any old lady at all," she said, "but if there
is and you really want to buy her a present that won't cause her to
write and complain to your family when she gets it, why not buy her a
hug-me-tight?"
A hug-me-tight!--now that sounded like the very last thing we would have
nerve enough to send a lady, no matter how old she was. Besides, we
didn't know that a hug-me-tight was a thing one could send. We thought
it was something one did. But we are always ready to learn, especially
about things that have to do with hugging, figuratively or
otherwise--and the more figuratively the better. But, of course, a good
deal depends on the figure. So we got a few more directions, and then
we walked right into that department-store and accosted a tall superior
person in a morning-coat.
"Where do they sell hug-me-tights?" we asked.
"What's that?" he barked at us, in a manner which would have been
offensive in anyone but a real silver-mounted "clark."
"A hug-me-tight," we repeated with emphasis, "a woolly business used by
old ladies to protect the chest and back against draughts--the kind that
come through the window, not out of a bottle."
We thought to cheer him up with this little touch about the
"draughts"--mild, you know, but still a pun. Somehow he didn't seem to
like it. Perhaps he didn't get it--these toffs often don't. Stately,
you know, but a little slow.
"Woollen goods--third floor!" he finally grunted.
His manner was not of the sort to inspire much confidence, but we took
his word--also the elevator. And when we say that we "took" the
elevator, we mean that we fought our way into it through an army of
maddened suffragettes. We bit the ends off two feathers; we were
stabbed in several places with hat-pins; and finally at the third floor
we were disgorged into the woolliest woollen department we have ever
seen. It was full of woolly garments--some of a most embarrassingly
intimate description--and ladies. There wasn't a man in sight. It was
rather trying for us. There was on view a great deal of raiment of the
sort that is "knit to fit," and--well, it has always seemed to us that
there is something rather gross about wool. Now muslin--especially if
complicated with lace and insertion--is filmy and charmingly illusive.
But wool--no!
We picked out a plump little clerk-lady with woolly hair and brown eyes.
We don't know why we picked her out particularly, except that she was
the sort of girl we would naturally pick out. She seemed a young person
who would know about hug-me-tights. So we went right up to her
and--remembering just in time not to take off our hat as if she were a
"ladifren" of ours--we asked her as casually as the nature of the case
would permit where we could get a hug-me-tight.
"A hug-me-tight--you want a hug-me-tight? You--you?" and the shameless
little huzzy buried her face in a pair of blankets with blue borders and
bleated convulsively.
We moved on--with dignity, but hurriedly. It was a painful thing to have
happen. There are dissolute and daring characters who would perhaps
have enjoyed the situation. They might even have taken occasion from it
to enter into conversation and find out the young lady's Christian
name--if Christian--and whether or not she liked movie-shows. But ours
is a mind above such trivial manoeuvres. We moved on, while a clammy
perspiration bedewed our brow.
The next time we picked out the oldest and homeliest clerk we could see
in that department. Taking courage from the thought that here was a
woman who could not possibly put any personal significance into a
request for a hug-me-tight, we went up to her and told her we wanted
one. Involuntarily we lowered our voice till it was little above a
whisper. Too late we realized our mistake. She gave us one horrified
glance, and then, no doubt, recalling all the terrible stories she had
read of young and pretty girls being "loored" to "roon" and never heard
of more, she turned to cry for help. But we stopped her short.
"Madam," we said sternly, "the hug-me-tight referred to is a nice
garment for a woolly old lady--no, no, a woolly garment for a nice old
lady--and the sole motive in asking you for it is the hope that you
might direct----"
"Three circles to the left!" she snapped in a sour tone, which for a
wild moment suggested that she was disappointed. But we would hate to
think that--at her age, too!
It was fully ten minutes before we could nerve ourself sufficiently to
go to that third circle. Instead, we went over and looked at a lot of
assorted mittens for children. We gazed at them with an intensity that
must have given the young lady behind the counter the impression that we
were the father of at least ten children--all small.