From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

by John Kendrick Bangs

"Cannot sleep comfortably between the sheets of William James's pragmatic philosophy, dry as they are."

And all of this was on the American plan, at the rate of two dollars for three meals and a night's lodging! I am afraid my friend of the uncertain digestive organs belonged to the same gastronomic school as a famous war correspondent I met at my club many years ago. He was an Englishman, and was delightfully enthusiastic about everything he had found in America except our hotels.

"And even they wouldn't be so bad," said he, "if it wasn't for that beastly American plan upon which they're run. Why, out in San Francisco I actually had to eat and eat and eat until I was positively ill, to get ahead of the game!"

Traveling Americans are inclined to criticize the hotels of foreign countries for their lack of bathroom facilities, and I recall an occasion in Rome some years ago when I found the act of taking a dip in the one bathroom the hotel provided almost as formal a function as a presentation at the Vatican, involving a series of escorts from my room to the dark little hole on an upper floor where the tub was kept, far greater in number than those involved in my progress from the American college to the papal presence.

Indeed, the only occasion I can recall when in a foreign country I was able to get a bath without encountering all sorts of obstacles was also in Rome, four years ago, when I endeavored to order a bottle of mineral water in my choicest Italian, and got a bath instead, the whiskered male chambermaid of whom I ordered it having little familiarity with his own tongue as "she was spoke" by an American.

But precisely similar conditions exist in this country. An eminent singer in one of his famous poems lamented the difficulty of getting the Time, the Place, and the Girl together; but if he had ever gone on the Chautauqua circuit in this land I fear he would have written also of the well nigh impossible operation of getting the Time, the Place, and the Tub together; and I may add that I wish a law might be passed requiring hotels that do provide bathing facilities to supply also at least one towel that is visible to the naked eye.

The story of the man who asked an Indiana hotel clerk to "give" him "a room and a bath," to be greeted by the instant response, "We'll give you the room; but you'll have to wash yourself," contains quite as much truth as humor. I had to forego my dip in a Southern hotel on one morning because "the last feller that took a bath here run off with the key to the door," and then on the following morning when the bathroom door had been forced open I found the tub constructed of tiles, with a lush growth of morning glory vines sprouting up between them. When in an Ohio hotel several years ago, having insisted upon a room with a bath, I found the latter in a dark cubbyhole whose doors and windows had evidently not been opened for months. Atmospherically speaking, the Black Hole of Calcutta was a thing of sweetness and light compared to it. Nearly suffocated, I struggled with the frosted-glass window at one side of the cell for several minutes, and finally with a supreme effort got it up: only to find that it opened on an inner corridor of the hotel.

And be it recorded that the heating facilities are quite on a par with these. The heating apparatus of most hotels is either missing altogether, or terrifying in character. The latter sort is especially in evidence in the natural gas regions, where that useful commodity is used with an airy carelessness that inspires dreadful forebodings.

I shall never forget my first introduction to natural gas as a heating proposition. It was in an historic edifice in Ohio, which I shall not name; for it has already been sufficiently advertised by its "loving friends." Suffice it to say that by some strange oversight of Nature it still stands. To get to my room, in the first place I was compelled to rise several flights in an elevator whose lift was as uncertain as its years, and then with the aid of a hallboy to thread an intricate maze of interlocking corridors alongside of which the Dedalian Labyrinth was simplicity itself. Arrived finally in the room assigned to me, I found it dark, damp, and cold.

"How about a little heat here, Son?" said I, appealing to the hallboy.