Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

You fee Buttons. Lapse of time.

Boots (as Dickens calls him) arrives—what probably here is a porter—for shoes. Then you have an excellent opportunity (which may not occur again during the day) for a slight period of philosophical meditation, or to whistle a tune, before the valet appears.

In such places as I am describing it is not etiquette at all (though it may seem to you the simplest way of doing the thing) to call a bellboy to get down your bag. The porter does that—and through the correct channel, that is by way of the freight elevator. And, say, something goes wrong with your ice-water pipe. You are not to outrage hotel decency here. What is necessary for you to procure is a waiter. Waiters attend to your inner wants.

I like best the character of valet when he is English (either so by birth, or this by self-cultivation); wears a skirt coat, immaculately pressed, and a "buttonhole"; advances into the room in the attitude of a bow, and comes to a pause in the pose of one listening with deep and profoundly respectful attention to the haughty utterance of a stage earl. Though, indeed, there is an element of disquiet in your being thus elevated to the Peerage if, as with me, the suit you turn over to this unexceptionable servitor is of Hirt, Snuffler and Muss manufacture, and growing a trifle frail in the seat.

The same thing is true of bath-rooms. I don't, of course, mean that bath-rooms perform the valet act. But that the more aristocratic in hotels you get the more likely you are, so to say, to get into hot water in bath-rooms. Like this:

If you get into a bathtub which is not quite the last word in bathtubs, that is a bathtub which has legs and spigots to turn on the water, you know where you are at all the while. You turn on the hot water in the amount desired. It comes out of the hot water spout. As desired you turn on the cold water. Out of the cold water spout comes it.

But, as you know, the last word in bathtubs is not simple and democratic like that. It is built onto the floor and has a clock-like dial on the wall. Dial marked at different points: "Cold," "Medium," "Hot," "Off." Turn little handle to regulate temperature and flow of water. All out of same pipe. Yes—but—dial untruthful—very. "Off" scalds you; "Medium" freezes you. Bad time trying to take last word in baths.

"Tub or shower?" Maybe you say "shower." And draw one of those police-court cells. Except the door, no opening in the little, square, completely cement room but the small hole in the center of the floor through which the water runs away. But that's not the way to look at it. These little catacomb-like chambers are æsthetic in their ascetic character. You may entertain yourself by fancying that you are St. Jerome, or somebody like that. In here nothing that it will hurt can get wet, and you can have a fine time making the whole room a merry-go-round of splashes. One disturbing thought may occur to you. If the door should stick you might not be found until the hotel got worried about your bill, when perhaps it would be too late.

Still, I think the chummiest bath-rooms are those with a bay-window; very reprehensible those which have no hooks on which to hang your pajamas and razor strop.

Then there are those hotels so far-seeing into the possibilities of evil chance and so solicitous of your equanimity that they provide your pin cushion with one suspender button. I suppose the thought is to impress you with the idea that nothing for your comfort, even down to the smallest detail, is forgotten. Still, though I do not know that such an untoward incident ever happened, it is within the range of human possibility that a man might be shorn of two suspender buttons at once. If, further, the hotel management were co-ordinated with the gentlemen's underwear business a safety pin would be served along with the suspender button—in view of the singular fact that, until your wife has taken a reef in them, all nether garments are much too great in girth for any figure at all approximating normal.