[_Korban_--"It is a gift"--Hebrew (or some such language).]
With some reluctance I return to the subject of baths. I went into
the matter of bathrooms pretty carefully a few months ago, but since
I have been in this hotel I see that there are one or two aspects of
hotel bathing which still require attention.
To begin with, there is the question of the Korban or free bath.
It is, of course, a scandal that a bath should be an extra, and an
eighteen-penny one at that. After all, what is the bathroom for? We
are not charged extra for smoking in the smoking-room or drawing in
the drawing-room; why should we be bled for bathing in the bathroom?
At the same time this practice does provide the visitor with the
wholesome sport of Korban bathing. The object of the game is, of
course, to have as many baths as possible which are not put down in
your bill; and many are the stratagems which are employed.
The true sportsman attempts the feat just before dinner, because at
that time there are sentries posted in every corridor. Ostensibly they
are maids waiting to assist any lady who has a crisis while dressing,
but no real pretence is made that they are there for any other purpose
than to charge you for as many baths as possible. On my corridor
there is a post of no fewer than three sentries, and it is extremely
difficult to evade them. The only thing to do is to get to know three
nice ladies on the same floor and arrange for them to have a
dressing crisis simultaneously and go on having it for about a
quarter-of-an-hour.
This needs a good deal of organisation. However smoothly the operation
begins, one of the dressing crises nearly always collapses too soon,
and the sentry catches you on your return journey.
For the lady visitor the problem is comparatively simple. I should
mention that it is a perfectly legitimate manoeuvre to get your bath
put down to somebody else if you can do it; and the crack lady-player
usually wraps herself in an unobtrusive bath-wrap, shrouds her head,
modestly conceals her face, slips into a friend's room to borrow some
Crème-Limon and, after an interval, rushes noisily out of the friend's
room to her bath, which, with any luck, is charged to her friend's
account.
The beginner at the game contents himself with less complicated ruses.
Sometimes he has his bath late at night, when the sentries have been
taken off; but, as the lights go out _en masse_ at eleven, even this
operation has to be carefully timed. There is nothing much gloomier
than a bath by candle-light, except perhaps a bath in the dark.
Hundreds, however, of both sorts are endured in this hotel.
The more brazen or the more timid simply walk into the bathroom fully
dressed during the day, carrying a number of dirty golf-balls in their
hands, and towels in their pockets and sponges up their sleeves, and
issue later fully dressed with clean white golf-balls in their
hands. It is generally thought, however, that this device is _just_ a
little--I mean it's not exactly--_you_ know what I mean.
The Korban Bath Rules will probably remain unwritten for many a
day, but I earnestly hope that before next summer the traditions and
etiquette of bath-warfare as between individual hotel-visitors will
be codified and issued in an intelligible form. At the moment the
most extraordinary confusion prevails, and no one can tell whether
any particular stratagem will be hailed with applause as a bold and
legitimate operation of war or universally condemned as a barefaced
piece of bath-hoggery. Recently, for example, an extremely courteous,
not to say gallant, old gentleman was severely lectured by a lady for
digging himself in on the mat and maintaining his position there till
she emerged. She stated with, I think, considerable force that she had
passed the age when a lady likes to be seen coming out of a bathroom
with disordered locks; she also said that he was ruining her chance of
a Korban bath by drawing attention to the fact that there was somebody
inside.
He replied with equal force that, whenever he considerately withdrew
from the mat in order to let a lady escape unseen, some less
scrupulous combatant (usually one of his own daughters) immediately
rushed the position, and he was not going to be had in that way again,
though as a matter of fact, while they were arguing the matter out,
somebody actually did this, so he was.
Now what is the way out of this dilemma? The only solution I see is
the Sponge System, by which every competitor puts down a sponge, as
one puts down a ball at the first tee. In this way definite claims
can be staked out in rotation without congestion of the avenues of
approach. I hope this system will be generally adopted next summer
and, if it is used in conjunction with my Progress Indicator (which
shows by a moving needle what stage the person bathing has reached),
it ought to work very smoothly. But there must be no hanky-panky, no
sharp practice with caddies; every sponge must be put down by one
of the players in person. And there must be none of that regrettable
collusion between husband and wife which has brought such discredit on
the present system.
There was a very bad case of this the other day. A certain wife used
to entrench herself in the bathroom early and remain in it till her
husband--a heavy and persistent sleeper--arrived. When you rattled
angrily at the door-knob she said very sharply, "Who is that?"--in
itself a sufficiently disturbing thing. Even in the present days of
shamelessness and crime there are few men who care to confess openly
that they have angrily rattled at the bathroom door. If you said
sheepishly, "It is Smith" or "Thompson" or "Lord Bumble," a heavy
silence fell, broken only by those gentle watery sounds which it is so
maddening to hear from without. When her husband arrived and answered
the challenge with "It is I, Arthur," sounds of feverish activity were
heard within, and a new bath was immediately turned on.
Casting all scruples to the winds, seven desperate men rehearsed the
password, "It is I, Arthur;" seven desperate men presented themselves
in a single morning and murmured lovingly, "It is I, Arthur." None of
them had a bath. Seven times the good lady opened the door and beheld
Smith or Thompson or Lord Rumble or nobody. And seven times she bolted
back into the burrow again. She remained undefeated. Her husband got
his bath.