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Clearchus sat on the counter with three friends,—come not to trade but to barter the latest gossip from the barber-shops: Agis the sharp, knavish cockpit and gaming-house keeper, Crito the fat mine-contractor, and finally Polus, gray and pursy, who “devoted his talents to the public weal,” in other words was a perpetual juryman and likewise busybody.
He dried my features with a towel and was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused. I said, with withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned I declined to be scalped. I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never, never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.
The main street of the town consists mainly of bar-rooms, livery-stables, barber-shops, and hotels, with an occasional store of merchandise sandwiched between; and, if you saw only this main street, you would conceive but a poor opinion of the people.
They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs out of your nose and ears. There is no special quarter for separate trades.
Charles street the drinking-saloons and gamblers' drawing-rooms, and the barber-shops, and the show-cases full of shirt-bosoms and walking-canes, were lighted up. The smell of lemons and mint grew finer than ever. Wide Canal street, out under the darkling crimson sky, was resplendent with countless many-colored lamps. From the river the air came softly, cool and sweet.
Amsterdam Avenue was, even in the dusk of early autumn, disappointing in its walls of yellow flat-buildings cluttered with fire-escapes, the first stories all devoted to the same sort of shops over and over again delicatessens, laundries, barber-shops, saloons, groceries, lunch-rooms. She ventured down a side-street, toward a furnace-glow of sunset.
Prominent citizens who were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of men with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy stubble.
The two Greeks bade each other adieu, and Actæon returned to the Forum, not without thinking that he saw again, strolling about the Acropolis, the mysterious Celtiberian shepherd. As he entered the porticos he heard hisses and shouting; the crowds were agitated, laughing and jeering; people rushed from the barber-shops and perfumeries.
There were twoscore saloons which held overflow meetings, accommodating those whom the Cottage bar would not hold. There were three barber-shops, to which went only the very weary. The corral of the Cottage, where the drovers stopped, was large enough to hold two hundred horses, with comfortable space for roping, and the snubbing post was grooved with the wear of many ropes.
All of these remarks apply to barber-shops in the city, and not to country places. In the country there is only one barber and one customer at a time. The thing assumes the aspect of a straight-out, rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can fight, with a few spectators sitting round the shop to see fair play. In the city they can shave a man without removing any of his clothes.
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