THE TROUBLE OF LIFE

I do not know whether this will awaken a sympathetic lassitude in, say, fifty per cent. of its readers, or whether my experience is unique and my testimony simply curious.  At anyrate, it is as true as I can make it.  Whether this is a mere mood, and a certain flagrant exhilaration my true attitude towards things, or this is my true attitude and the exuberant phase a lapse from it, I cannot say.  Probably it does not matter.  The thing is that I find life an extremely troublesome affair.  I do not want to make any railing accusations against life; it is—­to my taste—­neither very sad nor very horrible.  At times it is distinctly amusing.  Indeed, I know nothing in the same line that can quite compare with it.  But there is a difference between general appreciation and uncritical acceptance.  At times I find life a Bother.

The kind of thing that I object to is, as a good example, all the troublesome things one has to do every morning in getting up.  There is washing.  This is an age of unsolicited personal confidences, and I will frankly confess that if it were not for Euphemia I do not think I should wash at all.  There is a vast amount of humbug about washing.  Vulgar people not only profess a passion for the practice, but a physical horror of being unwashed.  It is a sort of cant.  I can understand a sponge bath being a novelty the first time and exhilarating the second and third.  But day after day, week after week, month after month, and nothing to show at the end of it all!  Then there is shaving.  I have to get shaved because Euphemia hates me with a blue jowl, and I will admit I hate myself.  Yet, if I were left alone, I do not think my personal taste would affect my decision; I will say that for myself.  Either I hack about with a blunt razor—­my razors are always blunt—­until I am a kind of Whitechapel Horror, and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the top of a Bosjesman’s head, or else I have to spend all the morning being dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands.  In either case it is a repulsive thing to have, eating into one’s time when one might be living; and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way, put end to end, would reach to Berlin.  All that vital energy thrown away!  However, “Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth to thee.”  I suppose it is part of the primal curse, and I try and stand it like a man.  But the thing is a bother all the same.

Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud.  Of all idiotic inventions the modern collar is the worst.  A man who has to write things for such readers as mine cannot think over-night of where he puts his collar-stud; he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher level.  Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard, and dropping things about:  here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a bitter harvest against the morning.  Or he sits on 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.