HYGEIA IN THE DOG-DAYS.
Hygeia, the Goddess of Health, receives many rebuffs. She has numbers of followers, who pretend to listen to her teachings, but who do not quite understand her. She is a very simple and sweet goddess, and it would do us all good to put ourselves under her gentle training for a few of the hot weeks of summer. She would be pleased with our patronage, although she is a reputed Pagan goddess. She is no worse for that, as long as she is practical and poetical and teaches us how to make ourselves comfortable. Oh, these reeking hot days of July! I fear we break the commandments of the goddess by feeding too largely upon them. I am ashamed to own that I have been regaling myself not wisely but too well upon some of the hottest foods within reach, merely because I liked them. I have dined, and am growing hotter and hotter, in consequence of the dishes which appetite and not reason selected.
Whilst ruminating over a pipe on the evening of one of the dog-days, the thermometer being above eighty degrees in the shade, I have wondered what the goddess Hygeia would have done, and what she would have recommended, under the circumstances, for purposes of health and comfort. She wouldn’t have eaten roast duck, I know; but how would she have combated the fierce heat, by way of keeping herself cool? Would she have swallowed haggis and cockaleekie in North Britain, ham and beef in Yorkshire, and tripe and onions in London? Not a bit of it. Hygeia had too much respect for herself as a goddess to indulge in such plebeian and delusive dainties in hot weather.
I can just see her in a scornful attitude, on the top of a marble column such as Alma Tadema loves to paint—she waves her hand over the smoking viands our good cooks are sending up for our delectation. She preaches abstention in a way that makes one feel creepy, as her words seem to come down from the cold marble. She is commanding her followers to keep cool with milk and water, and grapes and strawberries, and to leave all the alcohol and wine and beer for other occasions. I beg Hygeia’s pardon, and shall renounce heat-producers on hot days in future, although they are very good, and like everything else, unfortunately, what dyspeptics like best.
What a dinner for a broiling day!—hot roast ducks and fowls, hot vegetables, a pint of heating stout, hot fish and roast beef and soups and plumpuddings, hot omelets, and a dozen more hot things, all washed down with port wine and whisky toddy, as a nightcap, with hot tea at intervals between! What would Hygeia say? She would say: Abandon all hope of keeping cool, if you put such things into your receptacles. There is only one thing unmentioned—a hot poker—and probably your punch has been stirred up with it. Such is an average Englishman’s food on the sweltering days of July and August. And yet the French say we can’t cook! Only imagine the plethora-producing power of an ordinary dog-days dinner.
As I know something about Hygeia, I may state that she will always hold aloof from people who feed on hot meats and beverages such as I have described. As for herself, she has (or had) an internal Limited Liability Company, which contents itself with rice-puddings and other innocent sustenance free from fats and sugars. She is, or was, a very plain and wholesome and abstemious feeder, seldom aspiring to anything beyond the regulation cup of tea, or a drink from the pump or pail, or now and then a seltzer, potass or soda, varied with a dash of claret or sherry or champagne. There is some use in these goddesses after all. Hygeia promises (we are getting somewhat mixed with past and present) that she will befriend any one in the dog-days who follows her rôle, lives simply, eats the fruits of the season, and gives up a portion of carbonaceous food, which adds fuel to the internal fires. She will even bring Morpheus in her train, and tuck up a fellow who obeys her, and give him happy rest and sweet dreams, without a headache in the morning. In the night-watches, she will keep him cool as a frog or a cucumber, without the fires of Vesuvius to make him kick against unknown quantities, and wrestle with demons and dragons and other enemies of sleep.
But if, like humble children, we would benefit by the goddess to the full, there are other things to attend to besides food and drink to make us comfortable in the dog-days. We are nearly all astray in the kind of raiment we wear, both in weight and colour and quality and substance. We draw down the divine caloric by dark, heat-producing clothes in a way which shocks Hygeia. Why not take to nankeen and cotton, and please the dear soul, and comfort ourselves as well? She never wore funereal black in hot summers. She never had a hot chimney-pot on her head; she was never seen in ebony coloured trousers or a villainous hot mantle. She believes in white apparel, as angels ought to do—white window blinds and knickerbockers, white wide-awakes and sun-shades, white fish, white bread, white pulpy fruit, or as near that colour as possible, and white curtains and covers.
And Hygeia is right. Why should we keep such big fires and jets of lambent gas in the dog-days, consuming the life-giving oxygen, and yet complain of being overheated? He would be a plucky man who dare ride through public streets with white unmentionables, coat and vest, and white umbrella, on a white horse. He would look cool, however, and feel so; and if we could prevail upon ourselves to be a little lighter and whiter on saddle, or rail or steamboat, Hygeia says we should derive great joy thereby in July and August. At all events, we might make some approach to it in our dishabille. We need not be mere blocks for tailors and milliners to hang dresses upon, obliging us to be tight and uncomfortable because Fashion wills it. We require loose, lightly fitting garments, if we would keep cool.
Moreover, now that we are hobnobbing with goddesses and know their ways and philosophies, let us inquire why we open our windows and let in the broiling summer heat; and having let it in, why we do not allow it to go out again by the chimney or the roof. Limp, flabby girls, familiar to us all through Du Maurier’s pencil, spend much time in stuffing our grates with lilies and peacocks’ feathers and sunflowers. They fill the chimney with sacking and make the outside very pretty; thus no air makes its exit by the chimney flue. Hygeia says the young ladies are all wrong; and she doesn’t care a fig for sunflowers, if they prevent the operations of nature. Hot air should ascend, and cool air come into a house. ‘Dear girls,’ says Hygeia, ‘let these fads alone; pull out all the stuffing, and be natural. You are hot; cool yourselves. Why do you cram chimneys with flowers? It is not a festival. Make room for the king—for air, light, and comfort. Perish the peacock plumes; down with the gaudy flowers; and away with the fernery in front of them! Out with the sooty sacking. Give air, and plenty of it, in the dog-days.’
Hygeia says we don’t make ourselves comfortable by the windows. We ought to have more green and white sun-blinds. We open our morning sashes and let in the bright heat all day, to make our bedrooms unbearable at night. Nevertheless, everybody does it. Cottagers in the country open their lattices amongst honeysuckles, roses, and stocks; palaces are open amongst vines and trellises of wisteria and orange. Never mind, says our authority. Let me teach you to close all windows as closely as if they were glued, and let them remain so till the sun begins to wester in the heavens. We might do much by way of cooling our houses, if we attended to such sensible arrangements as closing in a southerly aspect, and opening in a northern one, always opening opposite the sun, and also by having free ventilation through the attics.