THE BARBER’S CHAIR.
Chapter I.
SCENE.—A Barber’s Shop in Seven Dials. Nutts (the Barber) shaving Nosebag. Pucker, Bleak, Tickle, Slowgoe, Nightflit, Limpy, and other customers, come in and go out.
Nightflit. Any news, Mr Nutts? Nothin’ in the paper?
Nutts. Nothing.
Nightflit. Well, I’m blest if, according to you, there ever is. If an earthquake was to swallow up London to-morrow, you’d say, “There’s nothin’ in the paper: only the earthquake.”
Nutts. The fact is, Mr Nightflit, I’ve had so much news in my time, I’ve lost the flavour of it. ’Couldn’t relish anything weaker than a battle of Waterloo now. Even murders don’t move me. No; not even the pictures of ’em in the newspapers, with the murderer’s hair in full curl, and a dresscoat on him: as if blood, like prime Twankay, was to be recommended to the use of families.
Tickle. There you go agin, Nutts: always biting at human nature. It’s only that we’re used to you, else I don’t know who’d trust you to shave him.
Slowgoe. Tell me—Is it true what I have heard? Are the Whigs really in?
Nutts. In! Been in so long that they’re half out by this time. As you’re always so long after everybody else, I wonder you ain’t in with ’em.
Bleak. Come now! I was born a Whig, and won’t stand it. In the battle of Constitution aren’t the Whigs always the foremost?
Nutts. Why, as in other battles, that sometimes depends upon how many are pushing ’em behind.
Tickle. There’s another bite! Why, Nutts, you don’t believe good of nobody. What a cannibal you are! It’s my belief you’d live on human arts.
Nutts. Why not? It’s what half the world lives upon. Whigs and Tories. Tell you what; you see them two cats. One of them I call Whig, and t’ other Tory; they are so like the two-legged ones. You see Whig there, a-wiping his whiskers. Well, if he in the night kills the smallest mouse that ever squeaked, what a clatter he does kick up! He keeps my wife and me awake for hours; and sometimes—now this is so like Whig—to catch a mouse not worth a fardin’, he’ll bring down a row of plates or a teapot or a punch-bowl worth half-a-guinea. And in the morning when he shows us the measly little mouse, doesn’t he put up his back and purr as loud as a bagpipe, and walk in and out my legs, for all the world as if the mouse was a dead rhinoceros. Doesn’t he make the most of a mouse, that’s hardly worth lifting with a pair of tongs and throwing in the gutter? Well, that’s Whig all over. Now there’s Tory lying all along the hearth, and looking as innocent as though you might shut him up in a dairy with nothin’ but his word and honour. Well, when he kills a mouse, he makes hardly any noise about it. But this I will say, he’s a little greedier than Whig; he’ll eat the varmint up, tail and all. No conscience for the matter. Bless you, I’ve known him make away with rats that he must have lived in the same house with for years.
Bleak. Well, I hate a man that has no party. Every man that is a man ought to have a side.
Nutts. Then I’m not a man; for I’m all round like a ninepin. That will do, Mr Nosebag. Now, Mr Slowgoe, I believe you are next. (Slowgoe takes the chair.)
Slowgoe. Is it true what I have heard, that the Duke of Wellington (a great man the Duke; only Catholic ’Mancipation is a little spick upon him)—is it true that the Duke’s to have a ’questrian statue on the Hyde Park arch?
Tickle. Why, it was true, only the cab and bus men have petitioned Parliament against it. They said it was such bad taste ’twould frighten their horses.
Slowgoe. Shouldn’t wonder. And what’s become of it?
Tickle. Why, it’s been at livery in the Harrow Road, eating its head off, these two months. Sent up the iron trade wonderful. Tenpenny nails are worth a shilling now.
Slowgoe. Dear me, how trade fluctuates! And what will Government do with it?
Tickle. Why, Mr Hume’s going to cut down the army estimates—going to reduce ’em—our Life Guardsmen; one of the two that always stands at the Horse Guards; and vote the statue of the Duke there instead. Next to being on the top of a arch, the best thing, they say, is to be under it. Besides, there’s economy. For Mr Hume has summed it up; and in two hundred years, five weeks, two days, and three hours, the statue—bought at cost price, for the horse is going to the dogs—will be cheaper by five and twopence than a Life-Guardsman’s pay for the same time.
Slowgoe. The Duke’s a great man, and it’s my opinion——
Nutts. Never have an opinion when you’re being shaved. If you whobble your tongue about in that way, I shall nick you. Sorry to do it; but can’t wait for your opinion. Have a family, and must go on with my business. Anything doing at the playhouses, Mr Nosebag?
Nosebag. Well, I don’t know; not much. I go on sticking their bills in course, as a matter of business; but I never goes. Fash’nable hours—for now I always teas at seven—won’t let me. As I say, I stick their posters, but I haven’t the pride in ’em I used to have.
Tickle. How’s that, Nosey?
Nosebag. Why, seriously, they have so much gammon. I’ve stuck “Overflowing Houses” so often, I wonder I haven’t been washed off my feet. And then the “Tremendous Hits” I’ve contin’ally had in my eye—Oh, for a lover of the real drama—you don’t know my feelings!
Nutts. The actors do certainly bang away in large type now.
Nosebag. And the worst of it is, Mr Nutts, there seems a fate in it; for the bigger the type the smaller the player. I could show you a playbill with Mr Garrick’s name in it not the eighth of an inch. And now, if you want to measure on the wall “Mr Snooks as Hamlet,” why, you must take a three-foot rule to do it. Don’t talk on it. The players break my heart; but I go on sticking ’em of course.
Nutts. To be sure. Business before feelings. Have you seen Miss Rayshall, the French actress at the St James’s?
Nosebag. Not yet. I’m waiting till she goes to the ’Aymarket.
Tickle. But she isn’t a-going there.
Nosebag. Isn’t she? How can she help it? Being of the French stage, somebody’s safe to translate her.
Tickle. Ha, so I thought. But all the French players have been put on their guard; and there isn’t one of ’em will go near the Draymatic Authors’ Society without two policemen.
Pucker. Well, I’m not partic’lar; but really, gen’l’men, to talk in this way about plays and players, on a Sunday morning too, is a shocking waste of human life. I was about to say——
Nutts. Clean as a whistle, Mr Slowgoe. Mr Tickle, now for you. (Tickle takes the chair.)
Pucker. I was about to say, it’s nice encouragement to go a-soldiering—this flogging at Hounslow.
Nutts. Yes, it’s glory turned a little inside out. For my part, I shall never see the ribbands in the hat of a recruiting soldier again—the bright blue and red—that I shan’t think of the weals and cuts in poor White’s back.
Pucker. Or his broken heart-strings.
Nutts. What a very fine thing a soldier is, isn’t he? See him in all his feathers, and with his sword at his side, a sword to cut laurels with—and in my ’pinion, all the laurels in the world was never worth a bunch of wholesome watercresses. See him, I say, dressed and pipeclayed and polished, and turned out as if a soldier was far above a working man, as a working man’s above his dog—see him in all his parade furbelows, and what a splendid cretur he is, isn’t he? How stupid ’prentices gape at him, and feel their foolish hearts thump at the drum parchment, as if it was played upon by an angel out of heaven! And how their blood—if it was as poor as London milk before—burns in their bodies, and they feel for the time—and all for glory—as if they could kill their own brothers! And how the women——
Female voice. (From the back.) What are you talking about the women, Mr Nutts? Better go on with your shaving, like a husband and a father of a family, and leave the women to themselves.
Nutts. Yes, my dear. (Confidentially.) You know my wife? Strong-minded cretur.
Pucker. For my part, to say nothin’ against Mrs Nutts, I hate women of strong minds. To me they always seem as if they wanted to be men, and couldn’t. I love women as women love babies, all the better for their weakness.
Nosebag. Go on about the sojer.
Nutts. (In a low voice.) As for women, isn’t it dreadful to think how they do run after the pipeclay? See ’em in the Park—if they don’t stare at rank and file, and fall in love with hollow squares by the heap. It is so nice, they think, to walk arm-in-arm with a bayonet. Poor gals! I do pity ’em. I never see a nice young woman courtin’ a soldier—or the soldier courtin’ her—as it may be, that I don’t say to myself, “Ha! it’s very well, my dear. You think him a sweet cretur, no doubt; and you walk along with him as if you thought the world ought to shake with the sound of his spurs and the rattling of his sword, and you hold on to his arm as if he was a giant that was born to take the wall of everybody as wasn’t sweetened with pipeclay. Poor gal! You little think that that fine fellow—that tremendous giant—that noble cretur with mustarshis to frighten a dragon, may to-morrow morning be stript to his skin, and tied up, and lashed till his blood—his blood, dearer to you than the blood in your own good-natured heart—till his blood runs, and the skin’s cut from him;—and his officer, who has been, so he says, ‘devilishly’ well-whipt at schools perhaps, and therefore thinks flogging very gentlemanly—and his officer looks on with his arms crossed, as if he was looking at the twisting of an opera-dancer, and not at the struggling and shivering of one of God’s mangled creturs—and the doctor never feels the poor soul’s pulse (because there is no pulse among privates), and the man’s taken to the hospital to live or to die, according to the farriers that lashed him. You don’t think, poor gal, when you look upon your sweetheart, or your husband, as it may be, that your sweetheart, or the father of your children, may be tied and cut up this way to-morrow morning, and only for saying ‘Hollo’ in the dark, without putting a ‘sir’ at the tail of it. No: you never think of this, young woman; or a red coat, though with ever so much gold-lace upon it, would look like so much raw flesh to you.”
Nosebag. I wonder the women don’t get up a Anti-Bayonet ’Sociation—take a sort of pledge not to have a sweetheart that lives in fear of a cat.
Slowgoe. Doesn’t the song say, “None but the brave deserve the fair”?
Nosebag. Well, can’t the brave deserve the fair without deserving the cat-o’-nine-tails?
Nutts. It’s sartinly a pity they should go together. I only know they shouldn’t have the chance in my case, if I was a woman.
Mrs Nutts. (From within.) I think, Mr Nutts, you’d better leave the women alone, and——
Nutts. Certainly, my dear. (Again confidentially.) She’s not at all jealous; but she can’t bear to hear me say anything about the women. She has such a strong mind! Well, I was going to say, if I was a sojer, and was flogged——
Nosebag. Don’t talk any more about it, or I shan’t eat no dinner. Talk o’ somethin’ else.
Slowgoe. Tell me—Is it true what I have heard? Have they christened the last little Princess? And what’s the poppet’s name?
Nosebag. Her name? Why, Hél-ena Augusta Victoria.
Slowgoe. Bless me! Helleena——
Nosebag. Nonsense! You must sound it Hél—there’s a-goin’ to be a Act of Parliament about it. Hél—with a haccent on the first synnable.
Slowgoe. What’s a accent?
Nosebag. Why, like as if you stamped upon it. Here’s a good deal about this christening in this here newspaper; printed, they do say, by the ’thority of the Palace. The man that writes it wears the royal livery; scarlet run up and down with gold. He says (reads), “The particulars of this interesting event are subjoined; and they will be perused by the readers with all the attention which the holy rite as well as the lofty ranks of the parties present must command.”
Nutts. Humph! “Holy rite” and “lofty rank,” as if a little Christian was any more a Christian for being baptized by a archbishop! Go on.
Nosebag. Moreover, he says (reads), “The ceremony was of the loftiest and most magnificent character, befitting in that respect at once the service of that all-powerful God who commanded His creatures to worship Him in pomp and glory under the old law.”
Nutts. Hallo! Stop there. What have we to do with the “old law” in christening? I thought the “old law” was only for the Jews. Isn’t the “old law” repealed for Christians?
Nosebag. Be quiet. (Reads.) “The vase which contained the water was brought from the river of Jordan”——
Nutts. Well, when folks was christened then, I think there was no talk about magnificence; not a word about the pomp of the “old law.” Don’t read it through. Give us the little nice bits here and there.
Nosebag. Well, here’s a procession with field-marshals in it, and major-generals, and generals.
Nutts. There wasn’t so much as a full private on the banks of the Jordan.
Nosebag. And “the whole of the costumes of both ladies and gentlemen were very elegant and magnificent; those of the former were uniformly white, of valuable lace, and the richest satins or silks. The gentlemen were either in uniform or full Court dress.”
Nutts. Very handsome indeed; much handsomer than any coat of camel’s hair.
Nosebag. The Master of the Royal Buckhounds was present——
Nutts. With his dogs?
Nosebag. Don’t be wicked,—and “the infant Princess was dressed in a rich robe of Honiton lace over white satin.”
Nutts. Stop. What does the parson say? “Dost thou in the name of this child renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of this world?”
Nosebag. (Reads.) “The Duke of Norfolk appeared in his uniform as Master of the Horse. The Duke of Cambridge wore the Orders of the Garter, the Bath, St Michael, and St George. Earl Granville appeared”——
Nutts. That will do. There was no “vain pomp,” and not a bit of “glory.”