Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 45
The barber began removing the wet towels from my face one by one. He peeled them off with the professional neatness of an Egyptologist unwrapping a mummy. When he reached my face he looked searchingly at it. There was suspicion in his eye.
“Been out of town?” he questioned.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Who’s been doing your work?” he asked. This question, from a barber, has no reference to one’s daily occupation. It means “who has been shaving you.”
I knew it was best to own up. I’d been in the wrong, and I meant to acknowledge it with perfect frankness.
“I’ve been shaving myself,” I said.
My barber stood back from me in contempt. There was a distinct sensation all down the line of barbers. One of them threw a wet rag in a corner with a thud, and another sent a sudden squirt from an atomizer into his customer’s eyes as a mark of disgust.
My barber continued to look at me narrowly.
“What razor do you use?” he said.
“A safety razor,” I answered.
The barber had begun to dash soap over my face; but he stopped — aghast at what I had said.
A safety razor to a barber is like a red rag to a bull.
“If it was me,” he went on, beating lather into me as he spoke, “I wouldn’t let one of them things near my face: No, sir: There ain’t no safety in them. They tear the hide clean off you — just rake the hair right out by the follicles,” as he said this he was illustrating his meaning with jabs of his razor,— “them things just cut a man’s face all to pieces,” he jabbed a stick of alum against an open cut that he had made,— “And as for cleanliness, for sanitation, for this here hygiene and for germs, I wouldn’t have them round me for a fortune.”
I said nothing. I knew I had deserved it, and I kept quiet.[Illus]
When he reached my face he looked searchingly at it.
The barber gradually subsided. Under other circumstances he would have told me something of the spring training of the baseball clubs, or the last items from the Jacksonville track, or any of those things which a cultivated man loves to hear discussed between breakfast and business. But I was not worth it. As he neared the end of the shaving he spoke again, this time in a confidential, almost yearning, tone.
“Massage?” he said.
“No thank you.”
“Shampoo the scalp?” he whispered.
“No thanks.”
“Singe the hair?” he coaxed.
“No thanks.”
The barber made one more effort.
“Say,” he said in my ear, as a thing concerning himself and me alone, “your hair’s pretty well all falling out. You’d better let me just shampoo up the scalp a bit and stop up them follicles or pretty soon you won’t—”
“No, thank you,” I said, “not to-day.”
This was all the barber could stand. He saw that I was just one of those miserable dead-beats who come to a barber shop merely for a shave, and who carry away the scalp and the follicles and all the barber’s perquisites as if they belonged to them.
In a second he had me thrown out of the chair.
“Next,” he shouted.
As I passed down the line of the barbers, I could see contempt in every eye while they turned on the full clatter of their revolving shampoo brushes and drowned the noise of my miserable exit in the roar of machinery.
PARISIAN PASTIMES
I. — The Advantages of a Polite Education
“TAKE IT FROM me,” said my friend from Kansas, leaning back in his seat at the Taverne Royale and holding his cigar in his two fingers— “don’t talk no French here in Paris. They don’t expect it, and they don’t seem to understand it.”
This man from Kansas, mind you, had a right to speak. He knew French. He had learned French — he told me so himself — good French, at the Fayetteville Classical Academy. Later on he had had the natural method “off” a man from New Orleans. It had cost him “fifty cents a throw.” All this I have on his own word. But in France something seemed to go wrong with his French.
“No,” he said reflectively, “I guess what most of them speak here is a sort of patois.”
When he said it was a patois, I knew just what he meant. It was equivalent to saying that he couldn’t understand it.
I had seen him strike patois before. There had been a French steward on the steamer coming over, and the man from Kansas, after a couple of attempts, had said it was no use talking French to that man. He spoke a hopeless patois. There were half a dozen cabin passengers, too, returning to their homes in France. But we soon found from listening to their conversation on deck that what they were speaking was not French but some sort of patois.
It was the same thing coming through Normandy. Patois, everywhere, not a word of French — not a single sentence of the real language, in the way they had it at Fayetteville. We stopped off a day at Rouen to look at the cathedral. A sort of abbot showed us round. Would you believe it, that man spoke patois, straight patois — the very worst kind, and fast. The man from Kansas had spotted it at once. He hadn’t listened to more than ten sentences before he recognized it. “Patois,” he said.
Of course, it’s fine to be able to detect patois like this. It’s impressive. The mere fact that you know the word patois shows that you must be mighty well educated.
Here in Paris it was the same way. Everybody that the man from Kansas tried — waiters, hotel clerks, shop people — all spoke patois. An educated person couldn’t follow it.
On the whole, I think the advice of the man from Kansas is good. When you come to Paris, leave French behind. You don’t need it, and they don’t expect it of you.
In any case, you soon learn from experience not to use it.
If you try to, this is what happens. You summon a waiter to you and you say to him very slowly, syllable by syllable, so as to give him every chance in case he’s not an educated man:
“Bringez moi de la soupe, de la fish, de la roast pork et de la fromage.”
And he answers:
“Yes, sir, roast pork, sir, and a little bacon on the side?”
That waiter was raised in Illinois.
Or suppose you stop a man on the street and you say to him:
“Musshoo, s’il vous plait, which is la direction pour aller à le Palais Royal?”
And he answers:
“Well, I tell you, I’m something of a stranger here myself, but I guess it’s straight down there a piece.”
Now it’s no use speculating whether that man comes from Dordogne Inférieure or from Auvergne-sur-les-Puits because he doesn’t.
On the other hand, you may strike a real Frenchman — there are some even in Paris. I met one the other day in trying to find my way about, and I asked him:
“Musshoo, s’il vous plait, which is la direction pour aller à Thomas Cook & Son?”
“B’n’m’ss’ulvla’n’fsse’n’sse’pas!”
I said: “Thank you so much! I had half suspected it myself.” But I didn’t really know what he meant.
So I have come to make it a rule never to use French unless driven to it. Thus, for example, I had a tremendous linguistic struggle in a French tailors shop.
There was a sign in the window to the effect that “completes” might be had “for a hundred.” It seemed a chance not to be missed. Moreover, the same sign said that English and German were spoken.
So I went in. True to my usual principle of ignoring the French language, I said to the head man:
“You speak English?”
He shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands and looked at the clock on the wall.
“Presently,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, “you’ll speak it presently. That’s splendid. But why not speak it right away?”
The tailor again looked at the clock with a despairing shrug.
“At twelve o’clock,” he said.
“Come now,” I said, “be fair about this. I don’t want to wait an hour and a half for you to begin to talk. Let’s get at it right now.”
But he was obdurate. He merely shook his head and repeated:
“Speak English at twelve o’clock.”
Judging that he must be under a vow of abstinence during the morning, I tried another idea.
“Allemand?” I asked, “German, Deutsch, eh! speak that?”
Again the French tailor shook his head, this time with great decision.
The tailor shrugged his shoulders.
[Illus]”Not till four o’clock,” he said.
This was evidently final. He might be lax enough to talk English at noon, but he refused point-blank to talk German till he had his full strength.
I was just wondering whether there wasn’t some common sense in this after all, when the solution of it struck me.
“Ah!” I said, speaking in French, “très bong! there is somebody who comes at twelve, quelqu’un qui vient à midi, who can talk English.”
“Precisément,” said the tailor, wreathed in smiles and waving his tape coquettishly about his neck.
“You flirt!” I said, “but let’s get to business. I want a suit, un soot, un complete, complet, comprenez-vous, veston, gilet, une pair de panteloon — everything — do you get it?”
The tailor was now all animation.
“Ah, certainement,” he said, “monsieur desires a fantasy, une fantaisie, is it not?”
A fantasy! Good heavens!
The man had evidently got the idea from my naming so many things that I wanted a suit for a fancy dress carnival.
“Fantasy nothing!” I said— “pas de fantaisie! un soot anglais” — here an idea struck me and I tapped myself on the chest— “like this,” I said, “comme ceci.”
“Bon,” said the tailor, now perfectly satisfied, “une fantaisie comme porte monsieur.”
Here I got mad.
“Blast you,” I said, “this is not a fantaisie. Do you take me for a dragon-fly, or what? Now come, let’s get this fantaisie business cleared up. This is what I want” — and here I put my hand on a roll of very quiet grey cloth on the counter.
“Très bien,” said the tailor, “une fantaisie.”
I stared at him.
“Is that a fantaisie?”
“Certainement, monsieur.”
“Now,” I said, “let’s go into it further,” and I touched another piece of plain pepper and salt stuff of the kind that is called in the simple and refined language of my own country, gents’ panting.
“This?”
“Une fantaisie,” said the French tailor.
“Well,” I said, “you’ve got more imagination than I have.”
Then I touched a piece of purple blue that would have been almost too loud for a Carolina nigger.
“Is this a fantaisie?”
The tailor shrugged his shoulders.
“Ah, non,” he said in deprecating tones.
“Tell me,” I said, speaking in French, “just exactly what it is you call a fantasy.”
The tailor burst into a perfect paroxysm of French, gesticulating and waving his tape as he put the sentences over the plate one after another. It was fast pitching, but I took them every one, and I got him.
What he meant was that any single colour or combination of single colours — for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind — is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers’ meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is a plain, simple scene.
I thanked him. Then I said:
“Measure me, mesurez-moi, passez le tape line autour de moi.”
He did it.
I don’t know what it is they measure you in, whether in centimètres or cubic feet or what it is. But the effect is appalling.
The tailor runs his tape round your neck and calls “sixty!” Then he puts it round the lower part of the back — at the major circumference, you understand, — and shouts, “a hundred and fifty!”
It sounded a record breaker. I felt that there should have been a burst of applause. But, to tell the truth, I have friends — quiet sedentary men in the professoriate — who would easily hit up four or five hundred on the same scale.
Then came the last item.
“Now,” I said, “when will this ‘complete’ be ready?”
“Ah, monsieur,” said the tailor, with winsome softness, “we are very busy, crushed, écrasés with commands! Give us time, don’t hurry us!”
“Well,” I said, “how long do you want?”
“Ah, monsieur,” he pleaded, “give us four days!”
I never moved an eyelash.
“What!” I said indignantly, “four days! Monstrous! Let me have this whole complete fantasy in one day or I won’t buy it.”
“Ah, monsieur, three days?”
“No,” I said, “make it two days.”
“Two days and a half, monsieur.”
“Two days and a quarter,” I said; “give it me the day after to-morrow at three o’clock in the morning.”
“Ah, monsieur, ten o’clock.”
“Make it ten minutes to ten and it’s a go,” I said.
“Bon,” said the tailor.
He kept his word. I am wearing the fantaisie as I write. For a fantaisie, it is fairly quiet, except that it has three pockets on each side outside, and a rolled back collar suitable for the throat of an opera singer, and as many buttons as a harem skirt. Beyond that, it’s a first-class, steady, reliable, quiet, religious fantaisie, such as any retired French ballet master might be proud to wear.
II. — The Joys of Philanthropy
“GOOD-MORNING,” SAID THE valet de chambre, as I stepped from my room.
“Good-morning,” I answered. “Pray accept twenty-five centimes.”
“Good-morning, sir,” said the maître d’hôtel, as I passed down the corridor, “a lovely morning, sir.”
“So lovely,” I replied, “that I must at once ask you to accept forty-five centimes on the strength of it.”
“A beautiful day, monsieur,” said the head waiter, rubbing his hands, “I trust that monsieur has slept well.”
“So well,” I answered, “that monsieur must absolutely insist on your accepting seventy-five centimes on the spot. Come, don’t deny me. This is personal matter. Every time I sleep I simply have to give money away.”
“Monsieur is most kind.”
Kind? I should think not. If the valet de chambre and the maître d’hôtel and the chef de service and the others of the ten men needed to supply me with fifteen cents worth of coffee, could read my heart, they would find it an abyss of the blackest hatred.
Yet they take their handful of coppers — great grown men dressed up in monkey suits of black at eight in the morning — and bow double for it.
If they tell you it is a warm morning, you must give them two cents. If you ask the time, it costs you two cents. If you want a real genuine burst of conversation, it costs anywhere from a cent to a cent and a half a word.
Such is Paris all day long. Tip, tip, tip, till the brain is weary, not with the cost of it, but with the arithmetical strain.
No pleasure is perfect. Every rose has its thorn. The thorn of the Parisian holiday-maker is the perpetual necessity of handing out small gratuities to a set of overgrown flunkies too lazy to split wood.
Not that the amount of the tips, all added together, is anything serious. No rational man would grudge it if it could be presented in a bill as a lump sum at breakfast time every morning and done with for the day.
But the incessant necessity of handing out small tips of graded amounts gets on one’s nerves. It is necessary in Paris to go round with enough money of different denominations in one’s pocket to start a bank — gold and paper notes for serious purchases, and with them a huge dead weight of great silver pieces, five franc bits as large as a Quaker’s shoebuckle, and a jingling mass of coppers in a side pocket. These one must distribute as extras to cabmen, waiters, news-vendors, beggars, anybody and everybody in fact that one has anything to do with.
The whole mass of the coppers carried only amounts perhaps to twenty-five cents in honest Canadian money. But the silly system of the French currency makes the case appear worse than it is, and gives one the impression of being a walking treasury.
Morning, noon, and night the visitor is perpetually putting his hand into his side pocket and pulling out coppers. He drips coppers all day in an unending stream. You enter a French theatre. You buy a programme, fifty centimes, and ten more to the man who sells it. You hand your coat and cane to an aged harpy, who presides over what is called the vestiaire, pay her twenty-five centimes and give her ten. You are shown to your seat by another old fairy in dingy black (she has a French name, but I forget it) and give her twenty centimes. Just think of the silly business of it. Your ticket, if it is a good seat in a good theatre, has cost you about three dollars and a half. One would almost think the theatre could afford to throw in eight cents worth of harpies for the sake of international good will.
Similarly, in your hotel, you ring the bell and there appears the valet de chambre, dressed in a red waistcoat and a coat effect of black taffeta. You tell him that you want a bath. “Bien, monsieur!” He will fetch the maître d’hôtel. Oh, he will, will he, how good of him, but really one can’t witness such kindness on his part without begging him to accept a twenty-five centime remembrance. “Merci bien, monsieur.” The maître d’hôtel comes. He is a noble looking person who wears a dress suit at eight o’clock in the morning with patent leather shoes of the kind that I have always wanted but am still unable to afford. Yet I know from experience that the man merely lives and breathes at fifty centimes a breath. For fifty centimes he’ll bow low enough to crack himself. If you gave him a franc, he’d lie down on the floor and lick your boots. I know he would; I’ve seen them do it.
