Back Aa

Cobb's Anatomy

<h2> HANDS AND FEET </h2> Nearly every boy has a period in his life when he is filled with an envious admiration for the East India god with the extra set of arms—Vishnu, I think this party's name is. To a small boy it seems a grand thing to have a really adequate assortment of hands. He considers the advantage of such an arrangement in school—two hands in plain view above the desk holding McGuffy's Fourth Reader at the proper angle for study and the other two out of sight, down underneath the desk engaged in manufacturing paper wads or playing crack-a-loo or some other really worth while employment. Or for robbing birds' nests. There would be two hands for use in skinning up the tree, and one hand for scaring off the mother bird and one hand for stealing the eggs. And for hanging on behind wagons the combination positively could not be beaten. Then there would be the gaudy conspicuousness of going around with four arms weaving in and out in a kind of spidery effect while less favored boys were forced to content themselves with just an ordinary and insufficient pair. Really, there was only one drawback to the contemplation of this scheme—there'd be twice as many hands to wash when company was coming to dinner. Generally speaking a boy's hands give him no serious concern during the first few years of his life except at such times as his mother grows officious and fussy and insists that they ought to be washed up as far as the regular place for washing a boy's hands, to wit, about midway between the knuckles and the wrist. The fact that one finger is usually in a state of mashedness is no drawback, but a benefit. The presence of a soiled rag around a finger gives to a boy's hand a touch of distinctiveness—singles it out from ordinary unmaimed hands. Its presence has been known to excuse its happy possessor from such chores as bringing in wood for the kitchen stove or pulling dock weeds out of the grass in a front yard where it would be much easier and quicker to pull the grass out of the dock weeds. It may even be made a source of profit by removing the wrappings and charging two china marbles a look. I seem to recall that in the case of a specially attractive injury, such as a thumb nail knocked off or a deep cut which has refused to heal by first intention or an imbedded splinter in process of being drawn out by a scrap of fat meat, that as much as four china marbles could be charged. On the Fourth of July you occasionally burned your hands and in cold winters they chapped extensively across the knuckles but these were but the marks and scars of honorable endeavor and a hardy endurance. In our set the boy whose knuckles had the deepest cracks in them was a prominent and admired figure, crowned, as you might say, with an imaginary chaplet by reason of his chaps. With girls, of course, it was different. Girls were superfluous and unnecessary creatures with a false and inflated idea of the value of soap and water. Their hands weren't good for much anyway. Later on we discovered that a girl's hands were excellent for holding purposes in a hammock or while coming back from a straw ride, but I am speaking now of the earlier stages of our development, before the presence of the ostensibly weaker sex began to awaken responsive throbs in our several bosoms—in short when girls were merely nuisances and things to be ignored whenever possible. In that early stage of his existence hands have no altruistic or sentimental or ornamental value for a boy—they are for useful purposes altogether and are regarded as such. It is only when he has reached the age of tail coats and spike-fence collars that he discovers two hands are frequently too many and often not enough. They are too many at your first church wedding when wearing your first pair of white kids and they are not enough at a five o'clock tea. There is a type of male who can go to a five o'clock tea and not fall over a lot of Louie Kahn's furniture or get himself hopelessly tangled up in a hanging drapery and who can seem perfectly at ease while holding in his hands a walking stick, a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel in it, a tea spoon, a lump of sugar, a seed cookie, an olive, and the hand of a lady with whom he is discussing the true meaning of the message of the late Ibsen but these gifted mortals are not common. They are rare and exotic. There are also some few who can do ushing at a church wedding with a pair of white kids on and not appear overly self-conscious. These are also the exceptions. The great majority of us suffer visibly under such circumstances. You have the feeling that each hand weighs fully twenty-four pounds and that it is hanging out of the sleeve for a distance of about one and three-quarters yards and you don't know what to do with your hands and on the whole would feel much more comfortable and decorative if they were both sawed off at the wrists and hidden some place where you couldn't find 'em. You have that feeling and you look it. You look as though you were working in a plaster of paris factory and were carrying home a couple of large sacks of samples. It would be grand to be a Vishnu at a five o'clock tea, but awful to be one at a church wedding. About the time you find yourself embarking on a career of teas and weddings you also begin to find yourself worrying about the appearance of your hands. Up until now the hands have given you no great concern one way or the other, but some day you wake to the realization that you need to be manicured. Once you catch that disease there is no hope for you. There are ways of curing you of almost any habit except manicuring. You get so that you aren't satisfied unless your nails run down about a quarter of an inch further than nails were originally intended to run, and unless they glitter freely you feel strangely distraught in company. Inasmuch as no male creature's finger nails will glitter with the desired degree of brilliancy for more than twenty-four short and fleeting hours after a treatment you find yourself constantly in the act of either just getting a manicure or just getting over one. It is an expensive habit, too; it takes time and it takes money. There's the fixed charge for manicuring in the first place and then there's the tip. Once there was a manicure lady who wouldn't take a tip, but she is now no more. Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death with hat pins and nail-files. Manicuring as a public profession is a comparatively recent development of our civilization. The fathers of the republic and the founders of the constitution, which was founded first and has been foundering ever since if you can believe what a lot of people in Congress say—they knew nothing of manicuring. Speaking by and large, they only got their thumbs wet when doing one of three things—taking a bath, going in swimming or turning a page in a book. Washington probably was never manicured nor Jefferson nor Franklin; it's a cinch that Daniel Boone and Israel Putnam and George Rogers Clark weren't and yet it is generally conceded that they got along fairly well without it. But as the campaign orators are forever pointing out from the hustlers and the forum, this is an age calling for change and advancement. And manicuring is one of the advancements that likewise calls for the change—for fifty cents in change anyhow and more if you are inclined to be generous with the tip. Shall you ever forget your first manicure? The shan'ts are unanimously in the majority. It seems an easy thing to walk into a manicure parlor or a barber shop and shove your hands across a little table to a strange young woman and tell her to go ahead and shine 'em up a bit—the way you hear old veteran manicurees saying it. It seems easy, I say, and looks easy; but it isn't as easy as it seems. Until you get hardened, it requires courage of a very high order. You, the abashed novice, see other men sitting in the front window of the manicure shop just as debonair and cozy as though they'd been born and raised there, swapping the ready repartee of the day with dashing creatures of a frequently blonde aspect, and you imagine they have always done so. You little know that these persons who are now appearing so much at home and who can snap out those bright, witty things like "I gotcher Steve," and "Well, see who's here?" without a moment's hesitation and without having to stop and think for the right word or the right phrase but have it right there on the tip of the tongue—you little reck that they too passed through the same initiation which you now contemplate. Yet such is the case. You have dress rehearsals—private ones—in your room. In the seclusion of your bed chamber you picture yourself opening the door of the marble manicure hall and stepping in with a brisk yet graceful tread—like James K. Hackett making an entrance in the first act—and glancing about you casually—like John Drew counting up the house—and saying "Hello girlies, how're all the little Heart's Delights this afternoon?" just like that, and picking out the most sumptuous and attractive of the flattered young ladies in waiting; and sinking easily into the chair opposite her—see photos of William Faversham and throwing the coat lapels back, at the same time resting the left hand clenched upon the upper thigh with the elbow well out—Donald Brian asking a lady to waltz—and offering the right hand to the favored female and telling her to go as far as she likes with it. It sounds simple when you figuring it out alone, but it rarely works out that way in practice. It is my belief that every woman longs for the novelty of a Turkish bath and every man for the novelty of a manicure long before either dares to tackle it. I may be wrong but this is my belief. And in the case of the man he usually makes a number of false starts. 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. Well, as I was saying, she gets out her tool kit and goes to work on you. You didn't dream that there were so many things—mainly of a painful nature—that could be done to a single finger nail and you flinch as you suddenly remember that you have ten of them in all, counting thumbs in with fingers. She takes a finger nail in hand and she files it and she trims it and she softens it with hot water and hardens it with chemicals and parboils it a little while and then she cuts off the hang nails—if there aren't any hang nails there already she'll make a few—and she shears away enough extra cuticle to cover quite a good-sized little boy. She goes over you with a bristle brush, and warms up your nerve ends until you tingle clear back to your dorsal fin and then she takes one of those orange wood stobbers previously referred to, and goes on an exploring expedition down under the nail, looking for the quick. She always finds it. There is no record of a failure to find the quick. Having found it she proceeds to wake it up and teach it some parlor tricks. I may not have set forth all these various details in the exact order in which they take place, but I know she does them all. And somewhere along about the time when she is half way through with the first hand she makes you put the other hand in the suds. Later on when you have had more practice at this thing you learn to wait for the signal before plunging the second hand into the suds, but being green on this occasion, you are apt to mistake the moving of the crock of suds over from the right hand side to the left hand side as a notice and to poke your untouched hand right in without further orders, hoping to get it softened up well so as to save her trouble in trimming it down to a size which will suit her. But this is wrong—this is very wrong, as she tells you promptly, with a pitying smile for your ignorance. Manicure girls are as careful about boiling a hand as some particular people are about bailing their eggs for breakfast of a morning. A two minute hand is no pleasure to her absolutely if she has diagnosed your hand as one calling for six minutes, or vice versa. So, should you err in this regard she will snatch the offending hand out and wipe it off and give it back to you and tell you to keep it in a dry place until she calls for it. Manicure girls are very funny that way. Thus time passes on and on and by degrees you begin to feel more and more at home. Your bashfulness is wearing off. The coherent power of speech has returned to you and you have exchanged views with her on the relative merits of the better known brands of chewing gum and which kind holds the flavor longest, and you have swapped ideas on the issue of whether ladies should or should not smoke cigarettes in public and she knows how much your stick pin cost you and you know what her favorite flower is. You are getting along fine, when all of a sudden she dabs your nails with a red paste and then snatches up a kind of a polishing tool and ferociously rubs your fingers until they catch on fire. Just when the conflagration threatens to become general she stops using the polisher and proceeds to cool down the ruins by gently burnishing your nails against the soft, pink palm of her hand. You like this better than the other way. You could ignite yourself by friction almost any time, if you got hold of the right kind of a chamois skin rubber, but this is quite different and highly soothing. You are beginning to really enjoy the sensation when she roguishly pats the back of your hand—pitty pat—as a signal that the operation is now over. You pay the check and tip the lady—tip her fifty cents if you wish to be regarded as a lovely jumpman or only twenty-five cents if you are satisfied with being a vurry nice fella—and you secure your hat and step forth into the open with the feeling of one who has taken a trip into a distant domain and on the whole has rather enjoyed it. You stand in the sunlight and waggle your fingers and you are struck with the desirable glitter that flits from finger tip to finger tip like a heleograph winking on a mountain top. It is indeed a pleasing spectacle. You decide that hereafter you will always glitter so. It is cheaper than wearing diamonds and much more refined, and so you take good care of your fingers all that day and carefully refrain from dipping them in the brine while engaged in the well known indoor sport of spearing for dill pickles at the business men's lunch. But the next morning when you wake up the desirable glitter is gone. You only glimmer dully—your fingers do not sparkle and dazzle and scintillate as they did. As Francois Villon, the French poet would undoubtedly have said had manicures been known at the time he was writing his poems, "Where are the manicures of yesterday?" instead of making it, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" there being no answer ready for either question, except that the manicures of yesterday like the snows of yesteryear are never there when you start looking for them. They have just naturally got up and gone away, leaving no forwarding address. You have now been launched upon your career as a manicuree. You never get over it. You either get married and your wife does your nails for you, thus saving you large sums of money, but failing to impart the high degree of polish and the spice of romance noticed in connection with the same job when done away from home, or you continue to patronize the regular establishments and become known in time as Polished Percival, the Pet of the Manicure Parlor. But in either event your hands which once were hands and nothing more, have become a source of added trouble and expense to you. Speaking of hands naturally brings one to the subject of feet, which was intended originally to be the theme for the last half of this chapter, but unfortunately I find I have devoted so much space to your hands that there is but little room left for your feet and so far as your feet are concerned, we must content ourselves on this occasion with a few general statements. Feet, I take it, speaking both from experience and observation, are even more trouble to us than hands are. There are still a good many of us left who go through life without doing anything much for our hands but with our feet it is different. They thrust themselves upon us so to speak, demanding care and attention. This goes for all sizes and all ages of feet. From the time you are a small boy and suffer from stone bruises in the summer and chilblains in the winter, on through life you're beset with corns and callouses and falling of the instep and all the other ills that feet are heir to. The rich limp with the gout, the moderately well to do content themselves with an active ingrown nail or so, and the poor man goes out and drops an iron casting on his toe. Nearly every male who lives to reach the voting age has a period of mental weakness in his youth when he wears those pointed shoes that turn up at the ends, like sleigh runners; and spends the rest of his life regretting it. Feet are certainly ungrateful things. I might say that they are proverbially ungrateful. You do for them and they do you. You get one corn, hard or soft, cured up or removed bodily and a whole crowd of its relatives come to take its place. I imagine that Nature intended we should go barefooted and is now getting even with us because we didn't. Our poor, painful feet go with us through all the years and every step in life is marked by a pang of some sort. And right on up to the end of our days, our feet are getting more infirm and more troublesome and more crotchety and harder to bear with all the time. How many are there right now who have one foot in the grave and the other at the chiropodist's? Thousands, I reckon. Napoleon said an army traveled on its stomach. I don't blame the army, far from it; I've often wished I could travel that way myself, and I've no doubt so has every other man who ever crowded a number nine and three-quarters foot into a number eight patent-leather shoe, and then went to call on friends residing in a steam-heated apartment. As what man has not? Once the green-corn dance was an exclusive thing with the Sioux Indians, but it may now be witnessed when one man steps on another man's toes in a crowd. We are accustomed to make fun of the humble worm of the dust but in one respect the humble worm certainly has it on us. He goes through existence without any hands and any feet to bother him. Indeed in this regard I can think of but one creature in all creation who is worse off than we poor humans are. That is the lowly ear wig. Think of being an ear wig, that suffers from fallen arches himself and has a wife that suffers from cold feet! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.