O‘Kane shrugged. “Well, sure, I suppose. But Mr. McCormick is very adamant about his shower bath, it’s one of his pet obsessions, and it may be very difficult to—”
“Ach,” the doctor waved a hand in his face, “leave that to me — obsessions are my stock in trade.”
And so, the following morning, once O‘Kane and Mart had ushered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath, Dr. Brush appeared, barefooted and mountainous in a long trailing rain slicker the size of a two-man tent. “Good morning, good morning!” he boomed, the raw shout of his voice reverberating in the small cubicle of the shower bath till it was like a hundred voices. “Don’t mind me, Mr. McCormick,” he called, his pale fleshy toes gripping the wet tiles, water already streaming from the hem of the rain slicker, “I’m just here to observe your bathing in the interest of efficiency, for the main and simple — but just think of me as one of your efficiency experts you manufacturing men are forever introducing into your operations to cut corners and increase production…. Go ahead, now, don’t let me interfere—”
Mr. McCormick was seated naked on the floor beneath one of the three showerheads, rubbing furiously at his chest with a fresh bar of Palm Olive soap. He looked alarmed at first, and even made as if to cover his privates, but then seemed to think better of it, and turning away from the doctor, he continued lathering his chest.
“Now I thought,” the doctor went on, steam rising, the water splashing against the walls and leaping up to spatter his legs, “that we might begin today by limiting our bathing to perhaps, oh, how does fifteen minutes sound to you, Mr. McCormick? You see, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a more than reasonable length of time to thoroughly cleanse ourselves, for the main and simple reason that the human body can only hold so much dirt, especially when one bathes daily, don’t you think?”
O‘Kane stood in the bathroom doorway, his usual station, where he could observe Mr. McCormick at his bath and yet not intrude too much on him, and Mart was in the parlor, preparing the table for Mr. McCormick’s breakfast. While the shower stall was quite large — there was room enough for three people at least — O’Kane couldn’t help feeling the doctor was taking an unnecessary risk. There was no telling how Mr. McCormick might construe this invasion of his privacy, efficiency or no, and if he were to get violent, there was always the possibility of a nasty fall, what with the slick tiles and steady flow of water. He didn’t like the situation, not one bit, and he gloomily envisioned himself charging into the fray and ruining yet another suit.
But Mr. McCormick surprised him. He didn’t seem particularly agitated — or not that O‘Kane could see. He merely kept the white slope of his back to the intruder and soaped himself all the more vigorously as the doctor went on jabbering away and the water fell in a cascade of steely bright pins. This went on for some time, until at a signal from Brush, O’Kane called to Mart and Mart went below to cut off the water supply.
A moment later, the shower ran dry. Mr. McCormick darted a wild glance over his shoulder at the doctor and then at O‘Kane — Here it comes, O’Kane thought, tensing himself — but Mr. McCormick did nothing more than shift his haunches on the wet tiles so that he could reach up and try the controls. He twisted the knobs several times and then, in a sort of crabwalk, moved first to his left and then to his right to try the controls of the other two spigots. He was a long time about it, and when he was finally satisfied that the water had been cut off, he found the exact spot where he’d been situated before the interruption and continued soaping himself as if nothing were the matter.
Dr. Brush, for his part, was saying things like “All right, now, Mr. McCormick, very good, and I suppose we’ll just have to move on, won’t we?” and “Now, isn’t that an improvement? Honestly now?” He stood there optimistically over the slumped form of their employer, his toes grasping the floor like fingers, the yellow slicker dripping, the short hairs at his nape curling up like duck’s feathers with the moisture. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t heeding him. In fact, Mr. McCormick was expressing his displeasure with the whole business by applying the dwindling bar of Palm Olive as if it were a cat o’ nine tails, and when it was gone, he reached for another.
“Well, then,” Dr. Brush confided to O‘Kane later that day, “it’s a contest of wills, and we’ll just see how far the patient is prepared to go before he sees the wisdom of employing himself more efficiently.”
The next morning, the doctor was back, only this time there was but one bar of soap in the dish and the shower was curtailed after ten minutes. Again, Dr. Brush made all sorts of optimistic assertions about time and energy saving and the value of discipline, but Mr. McCormick never wavered from his routine. He soaped himself for a full hour after the shower was stopped and appeared for breakfast with greenish white streaks of Palm Olive decorating his cheeks and brow, as if he were an Indian chieftain painted for war. And then the next day after that, the shower was cut to five minutes and only powdered soap was provided, but still Mr. McCormick persisted, as O‘Kane knew he would. When the water was stopped, Mr. McCormick rubbed himself all over with the powdered soap till it dissolved in a yellowish scum and hardened like varnish all over his body.
The climax came on the fourth day.
Dr. Brush ordered that no soap be provided, and he appeared as usual, jocular and energetic, reasoning with Mr. McCormick as if he were a child — or at the very least one of the aments at the Lunatic Hospital. “Now can’t you see,” he said, his voice flattened and distorted by the pounding of the water till the water was cut off by signal five minutes later, “that you’re being unreasonable, Mr. McCormick — or no, not unreasonable, but inefficient? Think if we were running the Reaper Works on this sort of schedule, eh? Now, of course, your soap will be restored to you as soon as you, well, begin to, that is, for the main and simple—”
Mr. McCormick bathed without soap and he didn’t seem to miss it, not on the surface anyway, but he sat there under the dry shower for a good hour and a half, and when he got up he reached for his towel, though he was long since dry himself. No matter. He took up that towel like a penitent’s scourge and whipped it back and forth across his body till the skin was so chafed it began to bleed and he had to be dissuaded by force. The next morning he never even bothered to turn the shower on, but simply took up the towel as if he were already wet and rubbed himself furiously in all the chafed places till they began to bleed again, and it was only after a struggle that took the combined force of O‘Kane, Mart and Dr. Brush to overcome him, that he desisted.
And so it went for a week, till Mr. McCormick was a walking scab from head to toe and Dr. Brush finally gave up his vision of efficiency. In fact, he gave up any notion of interfering with Mr. McCormick at all, either through adjusting his schedule or drawing him into therapeutic conversation, and after that, for the year or so before he was called away to military duty among the shell-shocked veterans of the Western Front, he really seemed content to just — float along.