Читать книгу Things That Have Interested Me - Arnold Bennett - Страница 17

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I was staying in an agreeable English village. And my hair grew as usual. I asked an acquaintance of mine, a chauffeur, for information about local barbers. He replied that there was a good barber in the county town twelve and a half miles off, and that there was no other. Discouraged, I put the inconvenient matter aside, hoping, as one does of an inconvenient matter, that in some mysterious way time would purge it of its inconvenience. But my hair kept on inexorably growing, growing. No shutting of my eyes, no determination not to be inconvenienced, would stop it. My hair was as irresistible as an avalanche or as the evolution of a society. I foresaw the danger of being mistaken on the high road for a genius, and I spoke to the chauffeur again. He repeated what he had said. "But," I protested, "there are fifteen hundred people living within a couple of miles of this spot. Surely they don't all travel twelve and a half miles to get their hair cut!" He smiled. Oh no! A barber's shop existed in the hinterland of the village. "But it would be quite impossible for you, sir. Quite impossible!" His tone was convinced. An experienced gardener confirmed his judgment with equal conviction. I accepted it. The chasms which separate one human being from another are often unsuspected and terrible. Did the chauffeur submit himself to the village barber? He did not. The gardener did, but not the chauffeur. The chauffeur, I learnt, went to the principal barber's at X, a seaside resort about four miles off. Being a practically uneducated man, incapable even of cutting my own hair, and thus painfully dependent on superiors in skill, I was bound to yield somehow in the end, and I compromised. Travel twelve and a half miles for so simple an affair I would not. But I would travel four. "Couldn't I go to the barber's at X?" I asked. The chauffeur, having reflected, admitted that perhaps I might. And after a few moments he stated that the place was clean, and indeed rather smart.

X is a very select resort, and in part residential. It has a renowned golf-links, many red detached houses with tennis lawns, many habitable bathing-cabins, two frigid and virtuous hotels, and no pier or band. In summer it is alive with the gawky elegance of upper-class Englishwomen, athletic or maternal. But this happened in the middle of winter. The principal barber's was in the broad main street, and the front shop was devoted to tobacco. I passed into the back shop, a very small room. The barber was shaving another customer. He did not greet me, nor show by any sign that my arrival had reached his senses. A small sturdy boy in knickers, with a dirty white apron too large for him, grinned at me amicably. When I asked him: "Is it you who are going to operate on me?" he grinned still more and shook his head. I was relieved. The shabby room, though small, was very cold. A tiny fire burned in the grate; and the grate, in this quite modern back shop, was such as one finds in servants' bedrooms—when servants' bedrooms have any grate at all. Clean white curtains partially screened a chilly French window that gave on to a backyard. The whiteness of these curtains and of three marble wash-basins gave to the room an aspect of cleanliness which had deceived the chauffeur's simplicity. The room was not clean. Thick dust lay on the opaline gas-shades, and the corners were full of cobwebs. A dirty apron and a cap hung on a nail in one corner. In another was a fitment containing about fifteen heavy mugs and shaving-brushes, numbered. The hair-brushes were poor. The floor was of unpolished dirty planks, perhaps deal. There was no sign of any antiseptic apparatus. I cannot say that I was surprised, because in England I already knew of towns of thirty-five to forty thousand inhabitants, not to mention vast metropolitan suburbs, without a single barber's shop that is not slatternly, dirty, and inadequate in everything except the sharpness of the razors. But I was disappointed in the chauffeur, whom I had deemed to be a bit of a connoisseur. The truth was that the chauffeur had imposed himself on me as a grenadier on a nurse girl. However, I now knew that chauffeurs are not necessarily what they seem.

I stood as close as I could with my back to the tiny fire, and glanced through the pages of the Daily Mirror. And while I waited I thought of all the barbers in my career. I am interested in barbers. I esteem hair-cutting a very delicate and intimate experience, and one, like going out to dinner, not to be undertaken lightly. I said once to a barber in Guernsey: "That's the first time I've ever been shaved!" I was proud of my sangfroid. He answered grimly: "I thought so, sir." He silenced me; but the fellow had no imagination. I bring the same charge against most New York barbers, who, rendered callous by the harsh and complex splendour of their catacombs, take hold of your head as if it was your foot, or perhaps a detachable wooden sphere. I like Denmark because there some of the barber's shops have a thin ascending jet of water whose summit just caresses the bent chin, which, after shaving, is thus laved without either the repugnant British sponge or the clumsy splashing practised in France and Italy. French barbers are far better than English. They greet you kindly when you enter their establishments and invariably create in you the illusion that you will not have to wait. I knew well a fashionable barber in Paris, and in his shop I reclined generally between a Count and a Marquis. This prevalence of the nobility amazed and pleased me until one day the barber addressed me as Monsieur le Marquis. He made a peer, but lost a customer. For years I knew very well indeed the sole barber of a small French village. This man was in his excellent shop fourteen hours a day seven days a week. He had one day's holiday every year, Easter Monday, when he went to Paris for the day. He was never ill and always placid. Then came the Weekly Repose Act, and the barber was compelled to close his shop one day a week. He chose Monday, and on Mondays he went fishing. He had been a barber; he was now a king; his gorgeous satisfaction in life impregnated the whole village like ozone. Not every Act of Parliament is ineffective.

Italian barbers are greater than French, both in quality and in numbers. Every Italian village has several big barbers; and in some of the more withdrawn towns, festering in their own history, the barber's seems to be the only industry that is left. On a certain afternoon I walked up and down the short and narrow Via Umberto Primo in that surpassingly monumental port, Civita Vecchia, and there were at least ten seductive barber's shops in the street, and they were all very busy, so that I entered none of them, though boys in white ran out at intervals and begged me to enter. These small boys in white are indispensable to the ceremonial of a good Italian barber's shop. After you are shaved they approach you reverently, bearing a large silver or brass bowl of water high in their raised hands, and you deign to rinse. In that industrial purgatory, Piombino, I found an admirable shop with three such acolytes, brothers, all tiny. The disadvantage of them, however, is grave; when you reflect that they work ninety hours a week your pleasure is spoilt. There are wondrous barbers in Rome, artists who comprehend that a living head is entitled to respect, and whose affectionate scissors create while destroying. Unnecessary to say to these men: "Please remember that the whole of my livelihood and stock-in-trade is between your hands." But the finest artist I know or have known is nevertheless in Paris. His life has the austerity of a monk's. I once saw him in the street; he struck me as out of place there, and he seemed to apologise for having quitted even for an instant his priest-like task. Whenever I visit him he asks me where I last had my hair cut. His criticisms of the previous barber are brief and unanswerable. But once, when I had come from Rome, he murmured, with negligent approval: "C'est assez bien coupé."

The principal barber at X signed to me to take the chair. The chair was very uncomfortable because it was too high in the seat. I mildly commented on this. The barber answered:

"It's not high enough for me as it is. I always have to stoop."

He was a rather tall man.

Abashed, I suggested that a footstool might be provided for customers.

He answered with quiet indifference:

"I believe that they do have them in some places."

He was a decent, sad, disappointed man, aged about thirty-five; and very badly shaved. No vice in him; but probably a touch of mysticism; assuredly a fatalist. I felt a certain sympathy with him, and I asked if business was good. No, it was not. X was nothing of a place. The season was far too short; in fact, it scarcely existed. Constant "improvements" involved high rates—twelve shillings in the pound—and there were too few ratepayers, because most of the houses stood in large gardens. The owners of these gardens enjoyed the "improvements" on the sea-front, which he paid for. His rent was too heavy—fifty pounds a year—and he was rated at thirty-two. Such was his conspectus of X, in which everything was wrong except his chairs—and even they were too low for him. He had been at Z with his uncle. Now Z was a town! But he could not set up against his uncle, so he had come to X.

Two young men entered the front shop. The barber immediately left me to attend to them. But as he reached the door between the two shops he startled me by turning round and muttering:

"Excuse me, sir."

Mollified by this unexpected urbanity, I waited cheerfully with my hair wet some time while he discussed at length with the two young men the repairing of a damaged tobacco-pipe. When he came back he parted my hair on the wrong side—sure sign of an inefficient barber. He had been barbering for probably twenty years and had not learnt that a barber ought to notice the disposition of a customer's hair before touching it. He was incapable, but not a bad sort. He took my money with kindly gloom, and wished me an amicable good-day, and I walked up the street away from the principal barber's hurriedly in order to get warm. The man's crass and sublime ignorance of himself was touching. He had not suspected his own incapacity. Above all, he had not guessed that he was the very incarnation of the spirit of British small retail commerce. Soon he and about ten thousand other barbers just like him will be discovering that something is wrong with the barber world, and, full of a grievance against the public, they will try to set it right by combining to raise prices.