II.
There are people in the world called owners. I think nothing of them; Celia thinks nothing of them; jointly we do not think anything of them. However, as I said before, this is not a grammar.
For the last two years we have been renting cottages. Naturally Celia has had to do most of the work; the cut and thrust of a soldier's life has prevented me from taking my share of it. I have been so busy, off and on, seeing that my fellow-soldiers have baths, getting them shaved and entreating them to send their socks to the wash that I have had no time for domestic trifles. Celia has taken the cottage; I have merely allotted the praise or blame afterwards. I have also, of course, paid the money.
Our landlords have varied, but they are all alike in this. They think much more of their own comfort as landlords than of our happiness as tenants. They are always wanting things done for them. When they want things done for them, then I am firm. Indeed I am granite.
Take the case of Mr. Perkins, who owns our present cottage. Celia borrowed the cottage from Mr. Perkins at a rental of several thousands a week. I said it was too much when I heard of it; but it was then too late—she had already been referred to hereinafter as the tenant. As soon as we got in we began to make it look more like a cottage; that is to say, we accidentally dropped the aspidistra out of the window, lost the chiffonier, removed most of the obstacles and entanglements from the drawing-room to the box-room, and replaced the lace curtains with chintzes. In the same spirit of altruism we improved the bedrooms. At the end of a week we had given Mr. Perkins a cottage of which any man might be proud.
But there is no pleasing some people. A closer examination of the lease, in the hope that we had over-counted the noughts in the rental, revealed to us the following:—
"At the expiration of the said tenancy, all furniture and effects will be delivered up by the tenant in the same rooms and positions in which they were found."
Not a word of thanks, you notice, for the new avenues of beauty which we had opened out for him; no gratitude for the great revelation that art was not bounded by aspidistras nor comfort by chiffoniers; nothing but that old reactionary spirit to which, if I may speak of lesser things, the Russian Revolution was due. Like Mr. Perkins, the Bourbons learned nothing and forgot nothing.
Naturally I wrote to Mr. Perkins:—
"Dear Sir,—I regret to inform you that the aspidistra has perished. It never took kindly to us and started wilting on the second day. As regards other objets d'art once in the drawing-room, but now seeking the seclusion of the box-room, we are in a little difficulty. Before letting it go my wife took the bearing of the marble how-now from the bamboo what-not and made it 28° 20', quite forgetting, unfortunately, that the what-not had also decided to lie fallow for a season. Consequently, while the direction of the what-not-how-now line is definitely fixed, their actual positions remain unestablished. Is it too much to hope that when the time comes for them to seek again the purer air of the drawing-room they will be able to rely upon the guidance of an old friend like yourself rather than upon that of two comparative strangers?
Yours anxiously."