On Shower-Baths

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THERE is no reason to doubt that the shower-bath in its natural and original condition was the first method of ablution practised by prehistoric man. The first rainstorm that overtook him on the way back from his earliest dinosaur-hunting trip did that. He was favorably clothed, he was assuredly warm, and the shower was undoubtedly pleasant. After that we feel sure he told his wife, and at the next wet spell they had a shower party with the man in the cave above and his family, and the system of fun and sanitation received its impetus toward popularity. There was nothing fearsome about it. Compared with it, the first plunge into a pool was as terrifying as the first broiled lobster or shrimp salad.

There is something rudimentary and fundamental about having the water splashed down upon one, and getting completely and deliciously wet. Not damp, not moist, but wet, wringing wet. You yourself when a child never enjoyed anything so much as your first drenching in an unforeseen and unavoidable rainstorm, — the thrill of being wet, the cool drive of the water on your nose, into your sleeves, and down your neck; and the joyous shush of soaked, waterlogged boots. Even the tedium of being rubbed with alcohol, bundled up, and warned you would catch your death, did not diminish the event. You voted it better than the time you fell off the boat-dock; it lasted longer.

Since then the jolly feeling of wet clothes has been atrophied, owing largely to the clothes themselves. The thought of one’s watch, of stamps all sticking together, of shoes stuffed with newspapers, of the absence of favorite trousers and coat while undergoing pressing, take away the insouciance of it. But on the rare occasions when you have no excuse, and when it is pardonably unavoidable and extenuated, it is fun.

And has mankind taken the hint of nature in splashing water upon itself? Not in the least. In the intended way water was impelled against the body with no effort on the part of the body except its presence. Now we get the water and impel the body into it. It is a lengthy and lazy process that gives one the feeling of having done something worth while, which is quite out of keeping with the purely routine spirit of the thing.

Take the Roman bath, — about as exciting a pastime as playing in a fountain with the spray out of order. Take the English system, now happily on the wane, of striking postures, peculiarly Chabas in character, in an enlarged shirred-egg dish, and praying that there is not a plastered ceiling in the room below. Take that extravagant Americanism, the porcelain tub. In its maximum splendor its architecture resembles most the marble sarcophaguses of the Early Christians, seen strewn about the basilicas of Rome, and greatly admired by archæologists, but purely as tombs.

Here and there a shower-bath has crept wistfully into a private house, but usually as a minor accessory to the sarcophagus. A tall white-clothed thing startles you in the dark from its semblance to a wraith emerging from the porcelain tomb. And a bath in it gives one the cheering and sticky sensation of having taken a shower in a shroud. It presents a possibility, but not a pleasure.

No, the home of the true shower-bath is the country club. Reduced to its lowest terms, a country club is a golf course, a tennis court, a bar, and a shower-bath. And you can omit the tennis court before eliminating the shower-bath. After that deuce set of tennis, those extra three holes of golf to decide the drinks, it is late; dinner is waiting, perhaps the wife, and a long way into town. Cleanliness, coolness, and celerity are needed, and we find them in the tubulous personality of the shower.

We who have made the rounds of country clubs, including those with Indian names, have learned to distinguish the different models, — the kind that droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, the kind that pelts you at variable angles from the front, and the kind that attacks with vehemence from all sides. But to get the best results one must know the idiosyncrasies of one’s particular machine. A transient operator at a dozen clubs during the summer finds that success in showers is not uniform. At a country club it is quite as necessary to be a good mixer in a shower, as it is on the golf course, or in the bar.

To know by instinct the hot-water throttle is the study of a lifetime; we have never been able to sense it ourselves when not marked, and sometimes even if marked. And once in a modern bath in eternal if torrid Rome, we would have given much to know that ‘ calda’ did not mean cold as we phonetically decided it should. We have often wondered, in this connection, notwithstanding the expense, if a shower-chauffeur would not prove a popular installment at country clubs. For not once in a hundred times can one experience a well-spaced gamut from cleansing hot to invigorating cold that leaves nothing to be desired.

Besides the individual influence there is a broader sociological importance to a shower-bath. It develops many things in the average man. First of all, self-confidence. It takes much personal reliance to step nonchalantly into a shower with your roll-top-desk and one-day-a-week-tennis development, just as a last year’s football player emerges in muscular radiance from it. And what restraint and verbal repression it fosters as you yourself come out and find that the same young athlete has ensnared the last towel!

But, of all things, voice-culture is what it assuredly stimulates best. He sings in a shower-bath who never sang before. Some are more melodious in warm water than in cold, but all are universally vocal. Mute inglorious SCottis are not mute in shower-baths, and many a noiseless tenor under the persuasive influence of a stream of water out-phonographs a graphophone. And in this way we often arrive at the true inner man. The professor of Greek in the high school ecstatically sings the latest ragtime success; the golf champion of last year warbles, from memory, a leitmotiv from Tristan und Isolde. Repertoires are endless as the water splashes — and as diverse as the men themselves.

And thus we have the shower-bath. In it sparkles the light of the century, efficiency; the maximum of results, the minimum of effort. It approaches the acme of speed and effect. And the day will come when the porcelain tub will be relegated to companionship with the other archæological curiosities, including its archetype, the Roman sarcophagus. ‘A cleanly race,’ will comment the historian-to-come in considering this phase of our life, ‘ but considered in our light of universal showers, we wonder at the unnecessary work they made of it.’