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.
