The Mirror at Monger's
IHAD my hair cut this morning, at Monger's in Mandrake Street. If I were a methodical person and kept a diary, today's entry might include (for very little else has happened so far) the words 'Had hair cut.' It is inconceivable that they would be followed by 'at Monger's,' since I have never, in London, had my hair cut anywhere else. It would be like writing 'Overslept in bed' or 'Wrote foolish article with pen.'
One of the differences—in these islands at any rate—between men and women is that men hardly ever look at their faces. They see them, but without really seeing them, when they shave, when they brush their hair, when they tie their ties; but after a certain age a merciful negligence dominates a man's relations with his face. His features were among the cards dealt him, years ago, at the beginning of a long, slow, absorbing game. As the game goes on he realises both that they are not trumps and that he cannot discard them; and unless he is an unusually vain man he examines them in an increasingly perfunctory way.
In the distant past, when he was troubled with pimples, was first in love, or had to decide for or against growing a mous- tache, he subjected his face to a searching and semi-continuous scrutiny. However unpleasing or even (to others) repellent its appearance, he acquired a staunch, irrational loyalty to his face. He may have envied other youths their height or their carriage or their muscles; he may even have admitted that they were better-looking than he was. But he would not— however mistaken, in the eyes of an impartial observer or even of his closest friends, this attitude may have appeared— he would not have exchanged his face for anyone else's. * * * In a barber's mirror one's face acquires a certain novelty, a quality almost of surprise. It has a disembodied look. The sort of surplice beneath which the rest of one's person is con- cealed heightens the impression that one's face has been temporarily detached, has ceased wholly to belong to one; and this impression is reinforced when, after the shampoo, the barber waggles it about as he dries one's scalp, brushes hair down over the upper part of it, and subjects it to various other minor indignities which one's face is not used to under- going at the hands of a comparative stranger.
On me, anyhow, the effect of this spectacle is to stimulate interest in the thing; and today, as I peered meditatively at this curious exhibit, this roundish, reddish, turnip-type object vibrating impotently under the barber's vigorous towelling, it suddenly struck me that it was forty years since, as a boy of nine, I had first had my hair cut at Monger's and that I had then quite possibly stared into the very same mirror at a much earlier version of the very same face.
Monger's was not Monger's in those days, but Mee's; and the words `Mee's in Mandrake Street,' spoken by my mother to the chauffeur at Victoria Station, lay across the threshold of the holidays with a sort of pointless inevitability, like SALVE on a Victorian doormat. I cannot remember who cut our hair at our private school, but my mother had the lowest pos- sible opinion of his craftsmanship and her first concern was to repair the ravages caused by this vandal's clippers. So we were hustled along to Mee's in Mandrake Street as though for some life-saving inoculation, and deposited there with the injunction, 'Don't let them put any of that horrible hair- oil on.' Mee's unguents were then in regular demand among the crowned heads of Europe (a market which, though. unhappily contracted since those days, Monger still supplies), and I cannot believe that any of his hair-oil could truly be described as horrible; but my mother thought its application unbecoming to her small sons, and in this matter they were at one with her.
Once we forsook Mee's and went to another place. I cannot remember why this was—perhaps we failed to deter the devoted barbers from completing their ministrations and came out smelling like crowned heads—but the other place was not a success. The man who was cutting my brother's hair reproached my man with not having gone to the war. My man said he was over age, and to me he seemed incredibly senile—thirty or forty at the very least; but he began to tremble with indignation and soon buried his reeking scissors in the lobe of my ear, causing a copious flow of blood. After that we went back to Mee's where, even after whatever coup d'etat converted it to Monger's, I cannot recall any comparable incident occurring during the last few decades.
*
Remembering these things, I wondered what agency or influence—apart from it merely getting older and older— had done most to turn the face which first looked into that mirror forty years ago into the object which it reflected this morning. I do not know the answer, nor would it be of general interest if I did; but I do think that a fascinating study could be made of the manifold ways in which professions and hobbies, as well as virtues and vices, help to mould people's features.
Horses and the sea are perhaps the two external influences which leave the clearest marks on faces. Horses do not do this in some mystical manner, but because when a human being imposes his or her will on a horse the effort automatically contracts the facial muscles, and particularly those round the jaw, in a certain way. You see this process at work in small children as they ride their ponies over jumps in a gymkhana; and you see the same sort of thing at a lower level if you look at the men employed in a cattle market to herd the beasts into the auctioneer's ring. Their faces are lined by the effort of continuously imposing their will on animals; but, because the effort calls for no tolerance or finesse and involves no serious risk of defeat, the lines produce a crude, heavy, impersonal impression, and the total effect is coarse and often brutal. In the horseman's fate (at its best) the lines sketch judgement of dangers as well as audacity, understanding as well as determination.
The 'typical' naval officer's face looks as if it had been weathered into its final form by watch-keeping under exposed conditions; and perhaps in a generation or two this face will disappear, as less and less time is spent scanning the sea from a wind-swept or a sun-scorched bridge, and more and more is spent scrutinising instruments in the equivalent of an office. I hope this will prove an inaccurate forecast.
You have only got to go to a dog show to see that dogs have their influence on the human face, though it is less marked and less standardised than that of horses. At the beginning of the last war I met two senior officers who were in charge of the carrier pigeons belonging respectively to the Army and the RAF; both spoke in gentle, cooing voices, raising and lowering their heads on their necks as they did so. For all I know there may be a tropical-fish-face.
But we have wandered a long way from Monger's (formerly Mee's), and perhaps you have had enough—as I had by the time the barber had finished his work—of my reflections.
STRIX
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