On Being a Landlord

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

ON my consciousness are impressed the names of fourteen married women and one (so far as I know) unmarried man: Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. LeMaire, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp, Mrs. Ranee, Mrs. Button, and Charlie Wah Loo. Their husbands I hardly know at all: indeed, if Mrs. Carrot should introduce Mr. Hopp to me by that dear title, — as, for example, ‘my husband, Mr. Hopp,’ — I should hastily readjust my ideas and decide that Mrs. Carrot was really Mrs. Hopp, and Mrs. Hopp really Mrs. Carrot. Charlie Wah Loo may be married; he devotes his days to the wash-tub and ironing-board, and his nights (I like to think) to what Mr. Sax Rohmer, author of The Yellow Claw, mysteriously mentions as ‘ancient, unnamable evils.’ In feudal times, however, I should have known them all better. Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! that brave little company —

Button Ranee

— would have marched sturdily under my banner, each in his stout leathern jerkin, manfully carrying his trusty pike, halbert, long bow, short bow, or arbalest; and with them Charlie Wah Loo would have trotted along by himself as an interesting human curiosity — or, perhaps, in a cage. Each in his time would have done me fealty, saying, ‘ Know ye this, my lord, that I will be faithful and true unto you, and faith to you will bear for the tenements which I claim to hold of you, and that I will lawfully do to you the customs and services which I ought to do at the terms assigned. So help me God and his saints.’

Those, in retrospect, were pleasant days for the landlord, when rent was paid in loyal service and a few dozen eggs, or what not. But all that now remains of the ancient custom is that they continue, vicariously, through the agency of their beloved helpmates, to pay me rent. In this sense Charlie Wah Loo, with his washtub and irons, is his own beloved helpmate.

Briefly, I am a landlord. But do not hate me, gentle reader, for I am of that mild, reticent, and reluctant kind to whom even collecting the rent, to say nothing of raising it, is more a pain than a pleasure. There are such landlords, products of evolution, inheritance, and a civilization necessarily based on barter. Our anxious desire is to exact no more than a ‘fair rent’; at our weakest, when a tenant gets in arrears and, evidently enough, cannot catch up, our line of least resistance would be to go quietly away and leave that tenement to the tenant, his heirs and assigns forever. It is unpleasant, and becomes more so every time, to remind him that he owes us money. Only the inexorable harshness of our own overlords compels us, hating ourselves the while, to be strict.

I have seen it stated as a scientific deduction that ‘in the beginning man probably dwelt in trees after the fashion of his ape-like ancestors. He lived on nuts, fruits, roots, wild honey, and perhaps even bird’s eggs, grubs from rotten wood, and insects.’ And my own experience leads me to feel that there was much to be said for this way of life, though I draw the line at birds’ eggs, grubs from rotten wood, and insects, at which items of an earlier menu even the scientific mind seems to balk. But it may well have happened that some strong fellow presently got possession of an especially desirable tree, and allowed others to share its branches only if they kept him supplied with provisions. Thus may landlordry have been established.

Millions of years have passed since then,— a mere flicker in the great movie of eternity, — and we are still, many of us, living in trees; but the trees have been cut down and made into houses, of which at present there are not enough to go round. We have outgrown our simple arboreal diet, developed and perfected the hen (no small achievement in itself), invented underwear, and in countless other cunning ways have created a complex civilization. Century by century, generation by generation, we have acquired tastes and conventions that prevent us from returning to the simple, happy, uncomplicated life of our ape-like ancestors. And in this civilization that we have made, the figure of the landlord bulks large and overshadowing, and might, indeed, be likened to Rodin’s Thinker, thinking in this instance about how much more he shall raise the rent. One must assume, of course, that he is thinking about it just before taking his morning bath.

It is not my purpose to dwell upon those disgraceful landlords who profiteer. I am concerned rather with the character of the Perfect Landlord, a just man, respected, if not loved (within reason), by fourteen married women and a Charlie Wah Loo. But this admirable ideal seems impracticable. I know a landlord who speaks with pleasure of the social aspect of collecting his rents; but his is a selected tenantry, for he lets apartments only to what he calls ‘nice people,’ whose society he feels reasonably certain he will enjoy on rent-day, and whose financial status, he also feels reasonably certain, is and will remain such that no painful embarrassment on this sordid but necessary side of their relations will ever cast a gloom over his visit. Yet even so, I gather that there are occasional breaks in the golden chain, when the nice tenant chats with a too feverish interest about life and things in general, and the sordid aspect cannot be glossed over by a casual ‘Ah, yes, the rent.’ Such breaks in the golden chain are the test of landlordry.

I am reminded of a little one-act play which I have just written entitled