If I May | Page 7

there can be no individual taste. We furnish a house
according to our own private fancy; the "fixtures" are the furnishings in
regard to which we are prepared to accept the general fancy. The other
man's curtain-rod, though easily detachable and able to fit a hundred
other windows, is a fixture; his carpet-as-planned (to use the delightful
language of the house-agent), though securely nailed down and the
wrong size for any other room but this, is not a fixture. Upon some
such reasoning the first authorized schedule of fixtures and fittings
must have been made out.
It seems a pity that it has not been extended. There are other things than
curtain-rods and electric-light bulbs which might be left behind in the
old house and picked up again in the new. The silver cigarette-box,
which we have all had as a birthday or wedding present, might safely
be handed over to the incoming tenant, in the certainty that another just
like it will be waiting for us in our next house. True, it will have
different initials on it, but that will only make it the more interesting,
our own having become fatiguing to us by this time. Possibly this sort
of thing has already been done in an unofficial way among neighbors.
By mutual agreement they leave their aspidistras and their "Maiden's
Prayer" behind them. It saves trouble and expense in the moving, which
is an important thing in these days, and there would always be the hope
that the next aspidistra might be on the eve of flowering or laying eggs,
or whatever it is that its owner expects from it.

Experts

The man in front of the fire was telling us a story about his wife and a
bottle of claret. He had taken her to the best restaurant in Paris and had
introduced her to a bottle of the famous Chateau Whatsitsname, 1320
(or thereabouts), a wine absolutely priceless--although the management,

with its customary courtesy, had allowed him to pay a certain amount
for it. Not realizing that it was actually the famous Whatsitsname, she
had drunk it in the ordinary way, neither holding it up to the light and
saying, "Ah, there's a wine!" nor rolling it round the palate before
swallowing. On the next day they went to a commonplace restaurant
and drank a local and contemporary vintage at five francs the bottle, of
similar colour but very different temperament. When she had finished
her glass, she said hesitatingly, "Of course, I don't know anything about
wine, and I dare say I'm quite wrong, but I can't help feeling that the
claret we had last night was better than this."
The man in front of the fire was rather amused by this, as were most of
his audience. For myself, I felt that the lady demanded my admiration
rather than my amusement. Without the assistance of the labels, many
of us might have decided that it was the five-franc vintage which was
the better wine. She didn't. Indeed, I am inclined to read more into the
story than is perhaps there; I believe that she had misunderstood her
husband, and had thought that the second bottle was the famous, aged,
and priceless Chateau Whatsitsname, and that, in spite of this, she gave
it as her opinion that the first wine, cheap and modern though it might
be, was the better. Hats off, then, to a brave woman! How many of us
would have her courage and her honesty?
But perhaps you who read this are an expert on wine. If so, you are
lucky. I am an expert on nothing--nothing, anyhow, that matters. I envy
all you experts tremendously. When I see a cigar-expert listening to his
cigar before putting it in his mouth I wish that I were as great a man as
he. Privately sometimes I have listened to a cigar, but it has told me
nothing. The only way I can tell whether it is good or bad is by
smoking it. Even then I could not tell you (without the assistance of the
band) whether it was a Sancho Panza or a Guoco Piano. I could only
tell you whether I liked it or not, a question of no importance whatever.
Lately I have been trying to become a furniture-expert, but it is a
disheartening business. I have a book called Chats on Old Furniture--a
terrible title to have to ask for in a shop, but I asked boldly. Perhaps the
word "chat" does not make other people feel as unhappy as it makes me.

But even after reading this book I am not really an expert. I know now
that it is no good listening to a Chippendale chair to see if it is really
Chippendale; one must stroke