Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

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."