It is a grave responsibility—this power to dispossess other human beings of their little home—to say nothing of the recurrent task of making them behave themselves in it. Perhaps, on some other and happier plane of being, all landlords will be just and all tenants reasonable of disposition and stable of income. Then, indeed, the landlord need have nothing in common with a well-known walrus, of whom it is told that, in dealing with certain oysters, “with sobs and tears he sorted out those of the largest size.” But something might even now be done by compulsory psychopathic—I had nearly said psychopathetic—treatment; for thus the effort to solve the rent problem would go to the soil in which it is rooted, and no complicated laws would be needed. Landlords and tenants, in fact everybody, would have to take the treatment,—including, of course, the psychopathic practitioners, who would treat each other,—but it would be a fine thing for the world if it worked.
One sees in imagination the profiteering landlord, after looking long and intently at a bright object, say a five-dollar gold-piece, dropping peacefully asleep; one hears the voice of the scientist repeating, firmly and monotonously, “When you wake up you will never want anything more than a just rent—a just rent—a just rent—a just rent.”
One sees this profiteering landlord, once more wide awake, busy at his desk with pencil and paper, scowling conscientiously as he endeavors to figure out exactly what a just rent will be. Investment, so much; taxes; insurance; repairs; laths and plaster here, wall-paper there; water, light, putty, paint, janitor, Policeman’s Annual Ball, postman at Christmas, wear and tear on landlord’s shoes, etc., etc., etc., etc.—now, if ever, there is a tired business man.
Or,—to take another aspect of this great reform,—there is the sad case of Mrs. Murphy, who can no longer endure the children of Mrs. Trolley, who lives in the flat above her. They run and play, run and play; they produce in Mrs. Murphy a conviction that presently the floor will give way, and the children, still running and playing, will come right through on her poor head. Yet it is the nature of children to run and play, run and play: the landlord cannot, try as he may, persuade Mrs. Trolley to chain her offspring. So away, away to the Public Psychopathic Ward with poor Mrs. Murphy. “Madam, when you awake, the sound of running feet over your poor head will suggest the joys of innocent childhood, and you will be very happy when they run and play, run and play—happy all day—run and play—run and play—happy all day—run and play.”
But alas, so far even psychopathic treatment cannot promise to stabilize incomes. There must still be times when the just landlord must say to his tenant, “All is over between us; we must part forever—and at once.” To which, judging by the tenor of some of the laws that have lately been suggested, the tenant may presently answer, “All right, you Old Devil. This is the tenth of the month, and I’ll shake the dust of your disgraceful premises off my feet two years and six months from to-morrow.”
It’s a puzzling time for us landlords. Not long ago I felt compelled to raise the rent of fourteen married women and one (so far as I know) unmarried Chinaman. And then, overcome by conscience, I sat down and figured out a just rent. And when I had finished I came upon a distressing discovery. I had raised the rent of neither Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. Le Maire, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp, Mrs. Ranee, Mrs. Button, nor Charlie Wah Loo, anything like enough.
VI
OLD FLIES AND OLD MEN
To-day, my dear, I greatly astonished my grandson by standing on my head, and by entering the kitchen by turning a back-somersault through the door—exercises which I frequently practise for the benefit of my digestion, but not often in public. His bewilderment at seeing a man of my years perform such acrobatics was most comical. But there, there, one must amuse one’s self with the young sometimes. I have thought more or less seriously of advising these exercises for general use; but few men have had the advantage of being brought up in a circus, and what seems easy to me would no doubt present insuperable obstacles to most. The main thing, after all, is not to grow old before your time, because the silly younger generation likes to flatter itself by thinking you antediluvian.—Letters of Father William.
FEW men read Shakespeare, and so, fortunately enough, few think of themselves as being some day a pantaloon—lean and slippered (as Shakespeare described this sixth age of man), with spectacles on nose, his youthful hose, well-saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice, turning again to childish treble, operating like a penny whistle when he tries to converse. But the Bard made a bogey: at any rate, there are fewer pantaloons visible than there probably were in Elizabethan England; and the sixth age of man appears more logically to offer a kind of Indian summer that is well worth living for. Shakespeare, it seems to me, slipped a cog in his sequence; and I prefer to think of Cornaro, the Italian centenarian, who began at forty to restrict his diet (though this I care less for), and wrote of himself at eighty-three: “I enjoy a happy state of body and mind. I can mount my horse without assistance; I climb steep hills; and I have lately written a play abounding in innocent wit and humor. And I am a stranger to those peevish and morose humors which fall so often to the lot of old age.”
Granting some other choice of mental employment,—for writing that kind of a play seems nowadays too useless an occupation even for an old man’s leisure,—this is the kind of an old man I should like to be.