Standard Household-Effect Company | Page 5

have to be all gone over when I came back in the

autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself double trouble?' I asked
her if she didn't even roll anything up and put it away in closets, and
she said: 'Oh, you mean that old American horror of getting ready to go
away. I used to go through all that at home, too, but I shouldn't dream
of it here. In the first place, there are no closets in the house, and I
couldn't put anything away if I wanted to. And really nothing happens.
I scatter some Persian powder along the edges of things, and under the
lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and I pull down the shades.
When I come back in the fall I have the powder swept out, and the
shades pulled up, and begin living again. Suppose a little dust has got
in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and there? The whole
damage would not amount to half the cost of putting everything away
and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of discomfort, and
the wear and tear of spirit. No, thank goodness--I left American
housekeeping in America.' I asked her: 'But if you went back?' and she
gave a sigh, and said:
"'I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest. Everybody
does it there.' So you see," my friend concluded, "it's in the air, rather
than the blood."
"Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and
live in Paris?"
"Oh, dear, not" said my friend. "Nothing so drastic as all that. Merely
the extinction of household property."
"I see what you mean," I said. "But--what do you mean?"
"Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all be
furnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them,
and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel. There
must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his own
linen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by the
expropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean. It
must be in the lease, with severe penalties against the tenant in case of
violation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect order
when the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order
when the tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to
clean it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests.
All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlord that
it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts to close the

house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usual way that
houses are now closed and opened. Otherwise my scheme would be
measurably vitiated."
"I see what you mean," I murmured. "Well?"
"Some years ago," my friend went on, "when we came home from
Europe, we left our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather
drifted about, and did not settle anywhere in particular. During that
interval my wife opened and closed five furnished houses in two
years."
"And she has lived to tell the tale?"
"She has lived to tell it a great many times. She can hardly be kept from
telling it yet. But it is my belief that, although she brought to the work
all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influence of the
American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less in her
encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does
with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, and
opens it for the winter. But if there had been a clause in the lease, as
there should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order
when she left them, life would have been simply a rapture. Why, in
Europe custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and
you come and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do
not mind taking them for a month, or a few weeks. We are very far
behind in this matter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it
on any extended scale we should do it, as we do everything else we
attempt, more perfectly than any other people in the world. You see
what I mean?"
"I am not sure that I do. But go on."
"I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would tax
personal property of the household kind so heavily that it would
necessarily pass out of private