Hairdressers Here and There

As a class, I like hairdressers; they are usually kind to me. My own particular man is soothing. Years ago he realized that I should never be a credit to him, and that henna and permanents and tints leave me unmoved. He knows that I am an unobtrusive person, and that I would not add to my charms by being cropped, or Etoned, or wind-swept, or wild-waved; so he lets it go at that.

But twice a year he comes down to the hardpan of facts and says, ‘Your hair’s failin’ out a bit, Madame,’and I say, ‘Yes; it’s the spring, is n’t it?’ —and he recommends a bottle, which I buy for the good of the house. In October he says, casually, ‘Your hair’s coming out rather more than it should, Madame,’ and I say, ‘ Yes; has n’t it something to do with the fall of the leaf?’ — and another bottle changes hands.

The spring bottle I never touch; in the autumn I am full of good intentions, about settling down to a course of winter reading and arranging my Christmas presents early, so I rub my poor old scalp nightly, for about a week. The bottle, minus a couple of teaspoonfuls, goes in the next package to the Salvation Army; the spring one, intact, I give to some girl friend, who thinks it wonderful of me to give her such a gorgeous present out of the blue.

When I am among hairdressers who know me and my straight locks, I am at home; neither of us worries the other. And in big towns, where I am just an uninteresting stray, nobody cares. I am trimmed and shampooed, and I am ready with my references to one of the best-known London hairdressers when conversation edges round to the fall of the leaf or the spring of the year. But the farther I get from the big towns, the more personal becomes the hair cutting, for village hairdressers say what they think.

I remember once, in the Roussillon, far from Paris and indifference, a clean little hairdresser’s shop tempted me. The proprietor was merciless. English, was I? Very few came there; none to his shop; in fact, he could say with truth that this was the first English head on which he had had the honor of performing.

Then he began. He spared me nothing. He implored me to let him dye my gray hairs, to allow him to do something to a spot which, he declared, untouched, would be bald in a month; he put his shop, and his bottles, and his instruments and himself, at my feet; he got me by the scruff of the neck and held me down, first in nearly boiling water, and then in an icecold stream, ‘straight from the mountains, Madame,’ only bringing me up to the surface at intervals, to tell me exactly what I should look like at the end of two years if I did not put myself unreservedly in his hands. ‘A shampoo, only a shampoo?’ he kept repeating, in his singing southern French.

Finally, he said, ‘Well, be it so. I have heard and I have read of the English heads. Now I have seen one. My God! Unbelievable. My son told me of them. He was nursed by English ladies in his hospital — beautiful, devoted, charming, good, skilled, indefatigable, fearless in every way; but without one permanent or water wave in the whole hospital. Now I have seen you; I believe it; I believe anything.’

Then he tried another plan. Did not Madame wish to give pleasure to her husband, the bearded gentleman with the aspect so kindly, now waiting for Madame at the cafe opposite?

Yes, Madame did — emphatically; the kindly-aspected gentleman thought the graying hair of Madame simply beautiful.

This made the hairdresser gasp, and he took a good look at my unsuspecting professor; he was just beginning a new lure when I stopped him for good, ‘Monsieur does not seem to realize that the grandmother of three grandchildren deserves and desires respect, and that gray hair is, in England, a grandmother’s greatest asset,’ I said coldly.

That settled him. I did not say I was a grandmother; that would have been too far from the truth. But I gained my point, and the rest of the proceedings interested neither of us very much.

I was in New Zealand when the craze for bobbed hair had just reached its conservative shores. To bob or not to bob was a question that apparently the men of the family were all helping to discuss. Two women hairdressers, hundreds of miles apart, each told me that they declined to bob any feminine head without the written or the spoken authority of the head of the house. I asked reasons for this surprising trace of an early Victorian attitude toward a woman’s chief glory, and learned that each of my hairdressers had had unpleasant interviews with irate fathers, mothers, guardians, husbands. (I, however, saw no trace of such nonsense myself; rather, a singularly delightful and happy camaraderie, and much fine cooperation between men and women.)

Lately, I was being shampooed in Los Angeles; even there I know a shop where most of the unfashionable women congregate. They all have their favorite assistant, and of course the shop is absolutely up-todate. But the other day I went there to find my own girl on holiday, and all the heads-back basins busy; so a new girl shampooed me, in an old-fashioned basin, eyes screwed tight, face in the water. I was thinking how I should loathe to make my living by scrubbing dreary women’s heads, and when the girl brought me up to breathe, I said, pleasantly: —

‘How you must long to take me by the back of the neck and hold me down in the water for five minutes.’

‘How in the warld did ye know whut Ah wuz jist thinkin’?’ she gasped.