Bathing Oneself on the Other Side
My first experience with the bathing habits of the native Aryan stocks
of Europe came to pass on the morning after the night of our arrival in
London.
London disappointed me in one regard--when I opened my eyes that morning
there was no fog. There was not the slightest sign of a fog. I had
expected that my room would be full of fog of about the consistency of
Scotch stage dialect--soupy, you know, and thick and bewildering. I
had expected that servants with lighted tapers in their hands would be
groping their way through corridors like caves, and that from the
street without, would come the hoarse-voiced cries of cabmen lost in the
enshrouding gray. You remember Dickens always had them hoarse-voiced.
This was what I confidently expected. Such, however, was not to be. I
woke to a consciousness that the place was flooded with indubitable and
undoubted sunshine. To be sure, it was not the sharp, hard sunshine we
have in America, which scours and bleaches all it touches, until
the whole world has the look of having just been clear-starched and
hot-ironed. It was a softened, smoke-edged, pastel-shaded sunshine;
nevertheless it was plainly recognizable as the genuine article.
Nor was your London shadow the sharply outlined companion in black who
accompanies you when the weather is fine in America. Your shadow in
London was rather a dim and wavery gentleman who caught up with you as
you turned out of the shaded by-street; who went with you a distance
and then shyly vanished, but was good company while he stayed, being
restful, as your well-bred Englishman nearly always is, and not overly
aggressive.
There was no fog that first morning, or the next morning, or any morning
of the twenty-odd we spent in England. Often the weather was cloudy,
and occasionally it was rainy; and then London would be drenched in that
wonderful gray color which makes it, scenically speaking, one of the
most fascinating spots on earth; but it was never downright foggy and
never downright cold. English friends used to speak to me about it. They
apologized for good weather at that season of the year, just as natives
of a Florida winter resort will apologize for bad.
"You know, old dear," they would say, "this is most unusual--most
stroidinary, in fact. It ought to be raw and nasty and foggy at this
time of the year, and here the cursed weather is perfectly fine--blast
it!" You could tell they were grieved about it, and disappointed too.
Anything that is not regular upsets Englishmen frightfully. Maybe that
is why they enforce their laws so rigidly and obey them so beautifully.
Anyway I woke to find the fog absent, and I rose and prepared to take
my customary cold bath. I am much given to taking a cold bath in the
morning and speaking of it afterward. People who take a cold bath every
day always like to brag about it, whether they take it or not.
The bathroom adjoined the bedroom, but did not directly connect with it,
being reached by means of a small semi-private hallway. It was a
fine, noble bathroom, white tiled and spotless; and one side of it
was occupied by the longest, narrowest bathtub I ever saw. Apparently
English bathtubs are constructed on the principle that every Englishman
who bathes is nine feet long and about eighteen inches wide, whereas the
approximate contrary is frequently the case. Draped over a chair was the
biggest, widest, softest bathtowel ever made. Shem, Ham and Japhet could
have dried themselves on that bathtowel, and there would still have been
enough dry territory left for some of the animals--not the large, woolly
animals like the Siberian yak, but the small, slick, porous animals such
as the armadillo and the Mexican hairless dog.
So I wedged myself into the tub and had a snug-fitting but most
luxurious bath; and when I got back to my room the maid had arrived with
the shaving water. There was a knock at the door, and when I opened
it there stood a maid with a lukewarm pint of water in a long-waisted,
thin-lipped pewter pitcher. There was plenty of hot water to be had in
the bathroom, with faucets and sinks all handy and convenient, and a
person might shave himself there in absolute comfort; but long before
the days of pipes and taps an Englishman got his shaving water in a
pewter ewer, and he still gets it so. It is one of the things guaranteed
him under Magna Charta and he demands it as a right; but I, being but a
benighted foreigner, left mine in the pitcher, and that evening the maid
checked me up.
"You didn't use the shaving water I brought you to-day, sir!" she said.
"It was still in the jug when I came in to tidy up, sir."
Her tone was grieved; so, after that, to spare her feelings, I used to
pour it down the sink. But if I were doing the trip over again I would
drink it for breakfast instead of the coffee the waiter brought me--the
shaving water being warmish and containing, so far as I could tell, no
deleterious substances. And if the bathroom were occupied at the time
I would shave myself with the coffee. I judge it might work up into
a thick and durable lather. It is certainly not adapted for drinking
purposes.
The English, as a race, excel at making tea and at drinking it after it
is made; but among them coffee is still a mysterious and murky compound
full of strange by-products. By first weakening it and wearing it down
with warm milk one may imbibe it; but it is not to be reckoned among the
pleasures of life. It is a solemn and a painful duty.
On the second morning I was splashing in my tub, gratifying that
amphibious instinct which has come down to us from the dim evolutionary
time when we were paleozoic polliwogs, when I made the discovery that
there were no towels in the bathroom. I glanced about keenly, seeking
for help and guidance in such an emergency. Set in the wall directly
above the rim of the tub was a brass plate containing two pushbuttons.
One button, the uppermost one, was labeled Waiter--the other was labeled
Maid.
This was disconcerting. Even in so short a stay under the roof of
an English hotel I had learned that at this hour the waiter would
be hastening from room to room, ministering to Englishmen engaged in
gumming their vital organs into an impenetrable mass with the national
dish of marmalade; and that the maid would also be busy carrying shaving
water to people who did not need it. Besides, of all the classes I
distinctly do not require when I am bathing, one is waiters and the
other is maids. For some minutes I considered the situation, without
making any headway toward a suitable solution of it; meantime I was
getting chilled. So I dried myself--sketchily--with a toothbrush and the
edge of the window-shade; then I dressed, and in a still somewhat moist
state I went down to interview the management about it. I first visited
the information desk and told the youth in charge there I wished to
converse with some one in authority on the subject of towels. After
gazing at me a spell in a puzzled manner he directed me to go across
the lobby to the cashier's department. Here I found a gentleman of truly
regal aspect. His tie was a perfect dream of a tie, and he wore a frock
coat so slim and long and black it made him look as though he were
climbing out of a smokestack. Presenting the case as though it were a
supposititious one purely, I said to him:
"Presuming now that one of your guests is in a bathtub and finds he has
forgotten to lay in any towels beforehand--such a thing might possibly
occur, you know--how does he go about summoning the man-servant or the
valet with a view to getting some?"
"Oh, sir," he replied, "that's very simple. You noticed two pushbuttons
in your bathroom, didn't you?"
"I did," I said, "and that's just the difficulty. One of them is for the
maid and the other is for the waiter."
"Quite so, sir," he said, "quite so. Very well, then, sir: You ring for
the waiter or the maid--or, if you should charnce to be in a hurry, for
both of them; because, you see, one of them might charnce to be en--"
"One moment," I said. "Let me make my position clear in this matter:
This Lady Susanna--I do not know her last name, but you will doubtless
recall the person I mean, because I saw several pictures of her
yesterday in your national art gallery--this Lady Susanna may have
enjoyed taking a bath with a lot of snoopy old elders lurking round in
the background; but I am not so constituted. I was raised differently
from that. With me, bathing has ever been a solitary pleasure. This may
denote selfishness on my part; but such is my nature and I cannot alter
it. All my folks feel about it as I do. We are a very peculiar family
that way. When bathing we do not invite an audience. Nor do I want one.
A crowd would only embarrass me. I merely desire a little privacy and,
here and there, a towel."
"Ah, yes! Quite so, sir," he said; "but you do not understand me. As I
said before, you ring for the waiter or the maid. When one of them comes
you tell them to send you the manservant on your floor; and when he
comes you tell him you require towels, and he goes to the linen cupboard
and gets them and fetches them to you, sir. It's very simple, sir."
"But why," I persisted, "why do this thing by a relay system? I
don't want any famishing gentleman in this place to go practically
unmarmaladed at breakfast because I am using the waiter to conduct
preliminary negotiations with a third party in regard to a bathtowel."
"But it is so very simple, sir," he repeated patiently. "You ring for
the waiter or the ma--"
I checked him with a gesture. I felt that I knew what he meant to say; I
also felt that if any word of mine might serve to put this establishment
on an easy-running basis they could have it and welcome.
"Listen!" I said. "You will kindly pardon the ignorance of a poor, red,
partly damp American who has shed his eagle feathers but still has his
native curiosity with him! Why not put a third button in that bathroom
labeled Manservant or Valet or Towel Boy, or something of that general
nature? And then when a sufferer wanted towels, and wanted 'em quick, he
could get them without blocking the wheels of progress and industry.
We may still be shooting Mohawk Indians and the American bison in
the streets of Buffalo, New York; and we may still be saying: 'By
Geehosaphat, I swan to calculate!--anyway, I note that we still say
that in all your leading comic papers; but when a man in my land
goes a-toweling, he goes a-toweling--and that is all there is to it,
positively! In our secret lodges it may happen that the worshipful
master calls the august swordbearer to him and bids him communicate
with the grand outer guardian and see whether the candidate is suitably
attired for admission; but in ordinary life we cut out the middleman
wherever possible. Do you get my drift?"
"Oh, yes, sir," he said; "but I fear you do not understand me. As I
told you, it's very simple--so very simple, sir. We've never found it
necessary to make a change. You ring for the waiter or for the maid, and
you tell them to tell the manservant--"
"All right," I said, breaking in. I could see that his arguments were of
the circular variety that always came back to the starting point. "But,
as a favor to me, would you kindly ask the proprietor to request the
head cook to communicate with the carriage starter and have him inform
the waiter that when in future I ring the bathroom bell in a given
manner--to wit: one long, determined ring followed by three short,
passionate rings--it may be regarded as a signal for towels?"
So saying, I turned on my heel and went away, for I could tell he was
getting ready to begin all over again. Later on I found out for myself
that, in this particular hotel, when you ring for the waiter or the
maid the bell sounds in the service room, where those functionaries are
supposed to be stationed; but when you ring for the manservant a small
arm-shaped device like a semaphore drops down over your outer door.
But what has the manservant done that he should be thus discriminated
against? Why should he not have a bell of his own? So far as I might
judge, the poor fellow has few enough pleasures in life as it is. Why
should he battle with the intricacies of a block-signal system when
everybody else round the place has a separate bell? And why all this
mystery and mummery over so simple and elemental a thing as a towel?
To my mind, it merely helps to prove that among the English the art of
bathing is still in its infancy. The English claim to have discovered
the human bath and they resent mildly the assumption that any other
nation should become addicted to it; whereas I argue that the burden of
the proof shows we do more bathing to the square inch of surface than
the English ever did. At least, we have superior accommodations for it.
The day is gone in this country when Saturday night was the big night
for indoor aquatic sports and pastimes; and no gentleman as was a
gentleman would call on his ladylove and break up her plans for the
great weekly ceremony. There may have been a time in certain rural
districts when the bathing season for males practically ended on
September fifteenth, owing to the water in the horsepond becoming
chilled; but that time has passed. Along with every modern house that
is built to-day, in country or town, we expect bathrooms and plenty of
them. With us the presence of a few bathtubs more or less creates no
great amount of excitement--nor does the mere sight of open plumbing
particularly stir our people; whereas in England a hotelkeeper who has
bathrooms on the premises advertises the fact on his stationery.
If in addition to a few bathrooms a Continental hotelkeeper has a
decrepit elevator he makes more noise over it than we do over a Pompeian
palmroom or an Etruscan roofgarden; he hangs a sign above his front door
testifying to his magnificent enterprise in this regard. The Continental
may be a born hotelkeeper, as has been frequently claimed for him; but
the trouble is he usually has no hotel to keep. It is as though you set
an interior decorator to run a livery stable and expected him to make
it attractive. He may have the talents, but he is lacking in the raw
material.
It was in a London apartment house, out Maida Vale way, that I first
beheld the official bathtub of an English family establishment. It was
one of those bathtubs that flourished in our own land at about the time
of the Green-back craze--a coffin-shaped, boxed-in affair lined with
zinc; and the zinc was suffering from tetter or other serious skin
trouble and was peeling badly. There was a current superstition about
the place to the effect that the bathroom and the water supply might on
occasion be heated with a device known in the vernacular as a geezer.
The geezer was a sheet-iron contraption in the shape of a pocket
inkstand, and it stood on a perch in the corner, like a Russian icon,
with a small blue flame flickering beneath it. It looked as though its
sire might have been a snare-drum and its dam a dark lantern, and
that it got its looks from its father and its heating powers from the
mother's side of the family. And the plumbing fixtures were of the type
that passed out of general use on the American side of the water with
the Rutherford B. Hayes administration. I was given to understand
that this was a fair sample of the average residential London
bathroom--though the newer apartment houses that are going up have
better ones, they told me.
In English country houses the dearth of bathing appliances must be even
more dearthful. I ran through the columns of the leading English fashion
journal and read the descriptions of the large country places that were
there offered for sale or lease. In many instances the advertisements
were accompanied by photographic reproductions in half tone showing
magnificent old places, with Queen Anne fronts and Tudor towers and
Elizabethan entails and Georgian mortgages, and what not.
Seeing these views I could conjure up visions of rooks cawing in the
elms; of young curates in flat hats imbibing tea on green lawns; of
housekeepers named Meadows or Fleming, in rustling black silk; of old
Giles--fifty years, man and boy, on the place--wearing a smock frock
and leaning on a pitchfork, with a wisp of hay caught in the tines,
lamenting that the 'All 'asn't been the same, zur, since the young
marster was killed ridin' to 'ounds; and then pensively wiping his eyes
on a stray strand of the hay.
With no great stretch of the imagination I could picture a gouty, morose
old lord with a secret sorrow and a brandy breath; I could picture a
profligate heir going deeper and deeper in debt, but refusing to the
bitter end to put the ax to the roots of the ancestral oaks. I could
imagine these parties readily, because I had frequently read about both
of them in the standard English novels; and I had seen them depicted in
all the orthodox English dramas I ever patronized. But I did not
notice in the appended descriptions any extended notice of heating
arrangements; most of the advertisements seemed to slur over that point
altogether.
And, as regards bathing facilities in their relation to the capacities
of these country places, I quote at random from the figures given:
Eighteen rooms and one bath; sixteen rooms and two baths; fourteen rooms
and one bath; twenty-one rooms and two baths; eleven rooms and one bath;
thirty-four rooms and two baths. Remember that by rooms bedrooms were
meant; the reception rooms and parlors and dining halls and offices, and
the like, were listed separately.
I asked a well-informed Englishman how he could reconcile this
discrepancy between bedrooms and bathrooms with the current belief that
the English had a practical monopoly of the habit of bathing. After
considering the proposition at some length he said I should understand
there was a difference in England between taking a bath and taking a
tub--that, though an Englishman might not be particularly addicted to
a bath, he must have his tub every morning. But I submit that the facts
prove this explanation to have been but a feeble subterfuge.
Let us, for an especially conspicuous example, take the house that has
thirty-four sleeping chambers and only two baths. Let us imagine the
house to be full of guests, with every bedroom occupied; and, if it is
possible to do so without blushing, let us further imagine a couple
of pink-and-white English gentlemen in the two baths. If preferable,
members of the opposite sex may imagine two ladies. Very well, then;
this leaves the occupants of thirty-two bedrooms all to be provided
with large tin tubs at approximately the same hour of the morning. Where
would any household muster the crews to man all those portable tin tubs?
And where would the proprietor keep his battery of thirty-two tubs when
they were not in use? Not in the family picture gallery, surely!
From my readings of works of fiction describing the daily life of the
English upper classes I know full well that the picture gallery is lined
with family portraits; that each canvased countenance there shows the
haughtily aquiline but slightly catarrhal nose, which is a heritage
of this house; that each pair of dark and brooding eyes hide in their
depths the shadow of that dread Nemesis which, through all the fateful
centuries, has dogged this brave but ill-starred race until now, alas!
the place must be let, furnished, to some beastly creature in trade,
such as an American millionaire.
Here at this end we have the founder of the line, dubbed a knight on the
gory field of Hastings; and there at that end we have the present heir,
a knighted dub. We know they cannot put the tubs in the family picture
gallery; there is no room. They need an armory for that outfit, and no
armory is specified in the advertisement.
So I, for one, must decline to be misled or deceived by specious
generalities. If you are asking me my opinion I shall simply say that
the bathing habit of Merrie England is a venerable myth, and likewise
so is the fresh-air fetish. The error an Englishman makes is that he
mistakes cold air for fresh air.
In cold weather an Englishman arranges a few splintered jackstraws,
kindling fashion, in an open grate somewhat resembling in size and
shape a wallpocket for bedroom slippers. On this substructure he gently
deposits one or more carboniferous nodules the size of a pigeon egg, and
touches a match to the whole. In the more fortunate instances the result
is a small, reddish ember smoking intermittently. He stands by and
feeds the glow with a dessert-spoonful of fuel administered at half-hour
intervals, and imagines he really has a fire and that he is really being
warmed.
Why the English insist on speaking of coal in the plural when they use
it only in the singular is more than I can understand. Conceded that
we overheat our houses and our railroad trains and our hotel lobbies
in America, nevertheless we do heat them. In winter their interiors are
warmer and less damp than the outer air--which is more than can be said
for the lands across the sea, where you have to go outdoors to thaw.
If there are any outdoor sleeping porches in England I missed them when
I was there; but as regards the ventilation of an English hotel I may
speak with authority, having patronized one. To begin with, the windows
have heavy shades. Back of these in turn are folding blinds; then long,
close curtains of muslin; then, finally, thick, manifolding, shrouding
draperies of some airproof woolen stuff. At nighttime the maid enters
your room, seals the windows, pulls down the shades, locks the shutters,
closes the curtains, draws the draperies--and then, I think, calks all
the cracks with oakum. When the occupant of that chamber retires to rest
he is as hermetic as old Rameses the First, safe in his tomb, ever dared
to hope to be. That reddish aspect of the face noted in connection with
the average Englishman is not due to fresh air, as has been popularly
supposed; it is due to the lack of it. It is caused by congestion. For
years he has been going along, trying to breathe without having the
necessary ingredients at hand.
At that, England excels the rest of Europe in fresh air, just as it
excels it in the matter of bathing facilities. There is some fresh air
left in England--an abundant supply in warm weather, and a stray bit
here and there in cold. On the Continent there is none to speak of.