Certain Personal Matters | Page 4

the edge of the bed
jerking his garments this way and that. "I shot a slipper in the air," as
the poet sings, and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible
quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of going to bed,
before Euphemia took the responsibility over, I was always forgetting
to wind my watch. But now that is one of the things she neglects.
Then, after getting up, there is breakfast. Autolycus of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ may find heaven there, but I am differently constituted. There
is, to begin with the essence of the offence--the stuff that has to be
eaten somehow. Then there is the paper. Unless it is the face of a
fashionable beauty, I know of nothing more absolutely uninteresting
than a morning paper. You always expect to find something in it, and
never do. It wastes half my morning sometimes, going over and over
the thing, and trying to find out why they publish it. If I edited a daily I
think I should do like my father does when he writes to me. "Things
much the same," he writes; "the usual fussing about the curate's red
socks"--a long letter for him. The rest margin. And, by the bye, there
are letters every morning at breakfast, too!
Now I do not grumble at letters. You can read them instead of getting
on with your breakfast. They are entertaining in a way, and you can tear
them up at the end, and in that respect at least they are better than
people who come to see you. Usually, too, you need not make a reply.
But sometimes Euphemia gets hold of some still untorn, and says in her
dictatorial way that they have to be answered--insists--says I must. Yet

she knows that nothing fills me with a livelier horror than having to
answer letters. It paralyses me. I waste whole days sometimes
mourning over the time that I shall have to throw away presently,
answering some needless impertinence--requests for me to return books
lent to me; reminders from the London Library that my subscription is
overdue; proposals for me to renew my ticket at the stores--Euphemia's
business really; invitations for me to go and be abashed before
impertinent distinguished people: all kinds of bothering things.
And speaking of letters and invitations brings me round to friends. I
dislike most people; in London they get in one's way in the street and
fill up railway carriages, and in the country they stare at you--but I hate
my friends. Yet Euphemia says I must "keep up" my friends. They
would be all very well if they were really true friends and respected my
feelings and left me alone, just to sit quiet. But they come wearing
shiny clothes, and mop and mow at me and expect me to answer their
gibberings. Polite conversation always appears to me to be a wicked
perversion of the blessed gift of speech, which, I take it, was given us
to season our lives rather than to make them insipid. New friends are
the worst in this respect. With old friends one is more at home; you
give them something to eat or drink, or look at, or something--whatever
they seem to want--and just turn round and go on smoking quietly. But
every now and then Euphemia or Destiny inflicts a new human being
upon me. I do not mean a baby, though the sentence has got that turn
somehow, but an introduction; and the wretched thing, all angles and
offence, keeps bobbing about me and discovering new ways of
worrying me, trying, I believe, to find out what topics interest me,
though the fact is no topics interest me. Once or twice, of course, I have
met human beings I think I could have got on with very well, after a
time; but in this mood, at least, I doubt if any human being is quite
worth the bother of a new acquaintance.
These are just sample bothers--shaving, washing, answering letters,
talking to people. I could specify hundreds more. Indeed, in my sadder
moments, it seems to me life is all compact of bothers. There are the
details of business--knowing the date approximately (an incessant
anxiety) and the time of day. Then, having to buy things. Euphemia

does most of this, it is true, but she draws the line at my boots and
gloves and hosiery and tailoring. Then, doing up parcels and finding
pieces of string or envelopes or stamps--which Euphemia might very
well manage for me. Then, finding your way back after a quiet,
thoughtful walk. Then, having to get matches for your pipe. I
sometimes dream of a better world, where pipe, pouch, and matches all
keep together instead of being mutually negatory. But