The bath was very refreshing; but I should have enjoyed the whole
thing much better if they had provided me with something more
suitable to wipe upon than a thin linen sheet.
The Germans hold
very curious notions as to the needs and requirements of a wet man.
I wish they would occasionally wash and bath themselves, and then
they would, perhaps, obtain more practical ideas upon the subject.
I have wiped upon a sheet in cases of emergency, and so I have upon
a pair of socks; but there is no doubt that the proper thing is a
towel. To dry oneself upon a sheet needs special training and
unusual agility. A Nautch Girl or a Dancing Dervish would, no
doubt, get through the performance with credit. They would twirl
the sheet gracefully round their head, draw it lightly across their
back, twist it in waving folds round their legs, wrap themselves for
a moment in its whirling maze, and then lightly skip away from it,
dry and smiling.
But that is not the manner in which the dripping, untaught Briton
attempts to wipe himself upon a sheet. The method he adopts is, to
clutch the sheet with both hands, lean up against the wall, and rub
himself with it. In trying to get the thing round
to the back of
him, he drops half of it into the water, and from that moment the
bathroom is not big enough to enable him to get away for an instant
from that wet half. When he is wiping the front of himself with
the
dry half, the wet half climbs round behind, and, in a spirit of
offensive familiarity, slaps him on the back. While he is stooping
down rubbing his feet, it throws itself with delirious joy around
his head, and he is black in the face before he can struggle away
from its embrace. When he is least expecting anything of
the kind,
it flies round and gives him a playful flick upon some particularly
tender part of his body that sends him springing with a yell ten
feet up into the air. The great delight of the sheet, as a whole,
is to trip him up whenever he attempts to move, so as to hear what
he says when he sits down suddenly on the stone floor; and if it can
throw him into the bath again just as he has finished wiping
himself, it feels that life is worth living after all.
Excerpt from “Diary of a Pilgrimage” by Jerome K. Jerome
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