The Bath

An episode from Bates's trip to Germany, in the company of Charles Lahr and others; a trip also captured in A German Idyll and possibly 'A German Incident'.

The story relates a party of six who are invited to use a rich farmer's bath-tub and then link 'arms with the peasants...and we all sang at the tops of our voices, not knowing quite what we were singing, in the common language of joy.'

The episode is recounted almost identically by a fellow traveller, the Welsh author Rhys Davies, in his book Print of a Hare's Foot (London: Heinemann, 1969).

In Lovat Dickson's Magazine (March 1934), Modern Short Stories (London: Lovat Dickson and Thompson, 1935), Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Love in a Wych Elm and Other Stories (2009). Reprinted in Modern Short Stories (second series, London: Macmillan, 1951).