PAGE 22
Cobb’s Anatomy
by
You go to the portals and hesitate and then, stumbling across the threshold, you either dive on through to the barber shop–if there is a barber shop in connection–or else you mumble something about being in a hurry and coming back again, and retreat with all the grace and ease that would be shown by a hard shell crab that was trying to back into the mouth of a milk-bottle. You are likely to do this several times; but finally some day you stick. You slump down into one of those little chairs and offer your hands or one of them to a calm and slightly arrogant looking young lady and you tell her to please shine them up a little. You endeavor to appear as though you had been doing this at frequent periods stretching through a great number of years, but she–bless her little heart!–she knows better than that. The female of the manicuring species is not to be deceived by any such cheap and transparent artifices. If you wore a peekaboo waist she couldn’t see through you any easier. Your hands would give you away if your face didn’t. In a sibulent aside, she addresses the young lady at the next table–the one with the nine bracelets and the hair done up delicatessen store mode–sausages, rolls and buns–whereupon both of them laugh in a significant, silvery way, and you feel the back of your neck setting your collar on fire. You can smell the bone button back there scorching and you’re glad it’s not celluloid, celluloid being more inflammable and subject to combustion when subjected to intense heat.
When both have laughed their merry fill, the young woman who has you in charge looks you right in the eye and says:
“Dearie me; you’ll pardon me saying so, but your nails are in a perfectly turrible state. I don’t think I’ve seen a jumpman’s nails in such a state for ever so long. Pardon me again–but how long has it been since you had them did?”
To which you reply in what is meant to be a jaunty and off-hand tone:
“Oh quite some little while. I’ve–I’ve been out of town.”
“That’s what I thought,” she says with a slight shrug. It isn’t so much what she says–it’s the way she says it, the tone and all that, which makes you feel smaller and smaller until you could crawl into your own watch pocket and live happily there ever after. There’d be slews of room and when you wanted the air of an evening you could climb up in a buttonhole of your vest and be quite cosy and comfortable. But shrink as you may, there is now no hope of escape, for she has reached out and grabbed you firmly by the wrist. She has you fast. You have a feeling that eight or nine thousand people have assembled behind you and are all gazing fixedly into the small of your back. The only things about you that haven’t shrivelled up are your hands. You can feel them growing larger and larger and redder and redder and more prominent and conspicuous every instant.
The lady begins operations. You are astonished to note how many tools and implements it takes to manicure a pair of hands properly. The top of her little table is full of them and she pulls open a drawer and shows you some more, ranged in rows. There are files and steel biters and pigeon-toed scissors and scrapers and polishers and things; and wads of cotton with which to staunch the blood of the wounded, and bottles of liquid and little medicinal looking jars full of red paste; and a cut glass crock with soap suds in it and a whole lot of little orange wood stobbers.
In the interest of truth I have taken the pains to enquire and I have ascertained that these stobbers are invariably of orange wood. Say what you will, the orange tree is a hardy growth. Every February you read in the papers that the Florida orange crop, for the third consecutive time since Christmas has been entirely and totally destroyed by frost and yet there is always an adequate supply on hand of the principal products of the orange-phosphate for the soda fountains, blossoms for the bride, political sentiment for the North of Ireland and little sharp stobbers for the manicure lady. Speaking as an outsider I would say that there ought to be other varieties of wood that would serve as well and bring about the desired results as readily–a good thorny variety of poison ivy ought to fill the bill, I should think. But it seems that orange wood is absolutely essential. A manicure lady could no more do a manicure properly without using an orange wood stobber at certain periods than a cartoonist could draw a picture of a man in jail without putting a ball and chain on him or a summer resort could get along without a Lover’s Leap within easy walking distance of the hotel. It simply isn’t done, that’s all.