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.
