III

Solemnity, and hush, and antique menials stiff with tradition, surrounded him.  As soon as he had paid the entrance fee and deposited all his valuables in a drawer of which the key was formally delivered to him, he was motioned through a turnstile and requested to permit his boots to be removed.  He consented.  White linens were then handed to him.

“See here,” he said with singular courage to the attendant.  “I’ve never been into one of these resorts before.  Where do I go?”

The attendant, who was a bare-footed mild child dressed in the Moorish mode, reassuringly charged himself with Mr. Prohack’s well-being, and led the aspirant into a vast mosque with a roof of domes and little glowing windows of coloured glass.  In the midst of the mosque was a pale green pool.  White figures reclined in alcoves, round the walls.  A fountain played—­the only orchestra.  There was an eastern sound of hands clapped, and another attendant glided across the carpeted warm floor.  Mr. Prohack understood that, in this immense seclusion, when you desired no matter what you clapped your hands and were served.  A beautiful peace descended upon him and enveloped him; and he thought:  “This is the most wonderful place in the world.  I have been waiting for this place for twenty years.”

He yielded without reserve to its unique invitation.  But some time elapsed before he could recover from the unquestionable fact that he was still within a quarter of a mile of Piccadilly Circus.

From the explanations of the attendant and from the precise orders which he had received from Dr. Veiga regarding the right method of conduct in a Turkish bath, Mr. Prohack, being a man of quick mind, soon devised the order of the ceremonial suited to his case, and began to put it into execution.  At first he found the ceremonial exacting.  To part from all his clothes and to parade through the mosque in attire of which the principal items were a towel and the key of his valuables (adorning his wrist) was ever so slightly an ordeal to one of his temperament and upbringing.  To sit unsheltered in blinding steam was not amusing, though it was exciting.  But the steam-chapel (as it might be called) of the mosque was a delight compared to the second next chapel further on, where the woodwork of the chairs was too hot to touch and where a gigantic thermometer informed Mr. Prohack that with only another fifty degrees of heat he would have achieved boiling point.

He remembered that it was in this chamber he must drink iced tonic water in quantity.  He clapped his streaming hands clammily, and a tall, thin, old man whose whole life must have been lived near boiling point, immediately brought the draught.  Short of the melting of the key of his valuables everything possible happened in this extraordinary chamber.  But Mr. Prohack was determined to shrink from naught in the pursuit of idleness.