Of all the beautiful things which are to be seen in shop windows
perhaps the most beautiful are those luxurious baths in white enamel,
hedged around with attachments and conveniences in burnished metal.
Whenever I see one of them I stand and covet it for a long time. Yet
even these super-baths fall far short of what a bath should be; and as
for the perfect bathroom I question if anyone has even imagined it.
The whole attitude of modern civilization to the bathroom is wrong.
Why, for one thing, is it always the smallest and barest room in the
house? The Romans understood these things; we don’t. I have never yet
been in a bathroom which was big enough to do my exercises in without
either breaking the light or barking my knuckles against a wall. It
ought to be a _big_ room and opulently furnished. There ought to be
pictures in it, so that one could lie back and contemplate them--a
picture of troops going up to the trenches, and another picture of a
bus-queue standing in the rain, and another picture of a windy day
with some snow in it. Then one would really enjoy one’s baths.
And there ought to be rich rugs in it and profound chairs; one would
walk about in bare feet on the rich rugs while the bath was running;
and one would sit in the profound chairs while drying the ears.
The fact is, a bathroom ought to be equipped for comfort, like a
drawing-room, a good, full, velvety room; and as things are it is
solely equipped for singing. In the drawing-room, where we want to
sing, we put so many curtains and carpets and things that most of
us can’t sing at all; and then we wonder that there is no music in
England. Nothing is more maddening than to hear several men refusing
to join in a simple chorus after dinner, when you know perfectly well
that every one of them has been singing in a high tenor in his bath
before dinner. We all know the reason, but we don’t take the obvious
remedy. The only thing to do is to take all the furniture out of the
drawing-room and put it in the bathroom--all except the piano and a few
cane chairs. Then we shouldn’t have those terrible noises in the early
morning, and in the evening everybody would be a singer. I suppose that
is what they do in Wales.
But if we cannot make the bathroom what it ought to be, the supreme
and perfect shrine of the supreme moment of the day, the one spot in
the house on which no expense or trouble is spared, we can at least
bring the bath itself up to date. I don’t now, as I did, lay much
stress on having a bath with fifteen different taps. I once stayed in
a house with a bath like that. There was a hot tap and a cold tap, and
hot sea-water and cold sea-water, and PLUNGE and SPRAY and SHOWER and
WAVE and FLOOD, and one or two more. To turn on the top tap you had to
stand on a step-ladder, and they were all very highly polished. I was
naturally excited by this, and an hour before it was time to dress for
dinner I slunk upstairs and hurried into the bathroom and locked myself
in and turned on all the taps at once. It was strangely disappointing.
The sea-water was mythical. Many of the taps refused to function at the
same time as any other, and the only two which were really effective
were WAVE and FLOOD. WAVE shot out a thin jet of boiling water which
caught me in the chest, and FLOOD filled the bath with cold water long
before it could be identified and turned off.
No, taps are not of the first importance, though, properly polished,
they look well. But no bath is complete without one of those attractive
bridges or trays where one puts the sponges and the soap. Conveniences
like that are a direct stimulus to washing. The first time I met one I
washed myself all over two or three times simply to make the most of
knowing where the soap was. Now and then, in fact, in a sort of bravado
I deliberately lost it, so as to be able to catch it again and put it
back in full view on the tray. You can also rest your feet on the tray
when you are washing them, and so avoid cramp.
Again I like a bathroom where there is an electric bell just above the
bath, which you can ring with the big toe. This is for use when one
has gone to sleep in the bath and the water is frozen, or when one has
begun to commit suicide and thought better of it. Apart from these two
occasions it can be used for Morsing instructions about breakfast to
the cook--supposing you have a cook. And if you haven’t a cook a little
bell-ringing in the basement does no harm.
But the most extraordinary thing about the modern bath is that there
is no provision for shaving in it. Shaving in the bath I regard as the
last word in systematic luxury. But in the ordinary bath it is very
difficult. There is nowhere to put anything. There ought to be a kind
of shaving tray attached to every bath, which you could swing in on
a flexible arm, complete with mirror and soap and strop, new blades
and shaving-papers and all the other confounded paraphernalia. Then, I
think, shaving would be almost tolerable, and there wouldn’t be so many
of these horrible beards about.
The same applies to smoking. It is incredible that to-day in the
twentieth century there should be no recognised way of disposing of
cigarette-ends in the bath. Personally I only smoke pipes in the bath,
but it is impossible to find a place in which to deposit even a pipe so
that it will not roll off into the water. But I have a brother-in-law
who smokes cigars in the bath, a disgusting habit. I have often
wondered where he hid the ends, and I find now that he has made a
_cache_ of them in the gas-ring of the geyser. One day the ash will get
into the burners and then the geyser will explode.
Next door to the shaving and smoking tray should be the book-rest.
I don’t myself do much reading in the bath, but I have several
sisters-in-law who keep on coming to stay, and they all do it. Few
things make the leaves of a book stick together so easily as being
dropped in a hot bath, so they had better have a book-rest; and if they
go to sleep I shall set in motion my emergency waste mechanism, by
which the bath can be emptied in malice from outside.
Another of my inventions is the Progress Indicator. It works like the
indicators outside lifts, which show where the lift is and what it is
doing. My machine shows what stage the man inside has reached--the
washing stage or the merely wallowing stage, or the drying stage, or
the exercises stage. It shows you at a glance whether it is worth while
to go back to bed or whether it is time to dig yourself in on the mat.
The machine is specially suitable for hotels and large country houses
where you can’t find out by hammering on the door and asking, because
nobody takes any notice.
When you have properly fitted out the bathroom on these lines all that
remains is to put the telephone in and have your meals there; or rather
to have your meals there and not put the telephone in. It must still
remain the one room where a man is safe from that.