The first manifestation had taken place at the Grand Pump Room Hotel. The King of Bath, if he could have come to his realm again, would have encountered not a few surprises, and would have found the famous Hotel transformed beyond all recognition. The examples of London, Paris, and New York had been diligently followed. There was a stately Palm Court, with marble columns and gilded cornices. Oriental rugs and luxurious fauteuils had been lavishly provided. On a raised marble terrace, during the dinner hour, a stringed band furnished an undercurrent for the banal remarks of the diners. There were rooms in the Adams style, rooms in the Louis the Sixteenth style, a Charles II. Smaller dining Room, and a Smoking Room in the Elizabethan style—with ingle-nook and heavy ceiling beams in oak. But the people who dined and chattered and smoked amid these surroundings were not Elizabethan, Stuart, or Georgian in style. They were the product of the twentieth century, and were of no style at all; they lacked repose and dignity; they were self-conscious, self-assertive; believers, and encouraged to believe, in the powers of the almighty dollar, hustlers and bustlers, who rushed hither and thither, and did this or that without knowledge and without appreciation, and solely for the purpose of being able to say that they had done it. Everything inanimate in this twentieth-century Bath Hotel was very beautiful. There were skilful imitations of Adams, Sheraton, and Chippendale; there were coloured marbles, trophies, garlands, ornamentation of all sorts in gilt and bronze; decorative panels, with consoles and mirrors everywhere,—everything being in elaborate imitation of something else and something older.
But in one corner of the Grand Dining Hall was one thing real and old—a fountain of Sulis water, which had been brought into a decorative niche and enshrined amid elaborate allegorical figures which nobody understood.
It was typical of England. She had gained in some ways, she had lost in many more. She had acquired electric appliances, telephones, and air-ships, but lost in grace and picturesqueness. Frequenters of Bath no longer wore wigs, laced coats, and buckled shoes. They no longer settled their little difficulties with the rapier. The ladies had discarded powder in any appreciable quantities, and patches altogether; but people of quality had vanished from the once familiar scene. Quantity had taken the place of quality everywhere. Money had proved the great key and the great leveller. There was a dead level in style and tone and appearance. Society had to be taken in the mass, instead of in the class, and notabilities were far to seek.
Such were the people upon whom the panic seized, amid the clatter of knives and forks, the rattle of plates, and the popping of corks—inseparable accompaniments of the table d'hôte dinner hour.
The visitors started to their feet with cries of dismay. An astonishing thing had occurred. The fountain of Sulis water in the grotto at the end of the great dining hall had suddenly burst its bounds! The pipes were forced from their position. Great volumes of orange-tinted, steaming water began to flood the room. The members of the string band, whose seats and music stands were placed among the ferns and palms, in immediate proximity to the fountain, grasped their instruments, and beat a precipitate retreat. Ladies, uttering shrill cries, jumped upon chairs. There was a scene of uncontrolled confusion. In a few moments, water, almost boiling, covered the floor to the depth of several inches, and male guests and waiters, carrying the ladies on chairs or in their arms, made all haste to escape into the vestibule.
At the same time the springs in the Roman baths displayed extraordinary activity. Everywhere the water rose in enormous and unprecedented volume. All the baths were hastily cleared of occupants and closed to the public, and the most astounding reports spread like wildfire through the city. The corporation officials speedily came upon the scene, and trenches were hastily cut for the purpose of carrying the overflow of water direct into the river. To the intense relief of everybody, in the course of a few hours the flood slackened.
Two days later, when people had begun to think there had been no sufficient reason for their fears, came other sounds and signs of abnormal activity in the earth itself. Faint tremors shook the surrounding hills, more especially Lansdown, and these signs were succeeded by sundry landslips, which sent many of the hillside residents flying in terror from their houses. A huge crack presently opened in the high plateau of the hill, and from this fissure arose at intervals strong puffs of curious, reddish-tinted vapour.