Tremendous Trifles

What I Found in My Pocket

Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have

made the Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat,

with an astracan moustache--a tight, black, curly moustache.

Whether he put on the moustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic

will enabled him not only to grow a moustache in the usual place,

but also to grow little moustaches all over his clothes, I do not know.

I only remember that he said to me the following words: "A man can't

get on nowadays by hanging about with his hands in his pockets."

I made reply with the quite obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got

on by having his hands in other people's pockets; whereupon he began

to argue about Moral Evolution, so I suppose what I said had some

truth in it. But the incident now comes back to me, and connects

itself with another incident--if you can call it an incident--

which happened to me only the other day.

I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through

some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some

reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I

had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief;

I had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should

find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a

tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my

possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with

them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything

slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell.

I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets

are still there; the same presumption applies to the things

that I have dropped into the sea. But I regard the riches stored

in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance.

They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead;

and I suppose that on the same occasion long strings of

extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets.

But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there

is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all

surprised at finding among them.

. . . . .

Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence.

I here only wish briefly to recall the special, extraordinary,

and hitherto unprecedented circumstances which led me in

cold blood, and being of sound mind, to turn out my pockets.

I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey.

The time was towards evening, but it might have been anything,

for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade

was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting

sheet of quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers.

I had not even a pencil and a scrap of paper with which

to write a religious epic. There were no advertisements

on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could have plunged

into the study, for any collection of printed words is quite

enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity.

When I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can

exhaust all the aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer

poetry before I go on to the less congenial subject of soap.

But there was no printed word or picture anywhere; there was

nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank wet without.

Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can

be, uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats,

and began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood.

Just as I had begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ

was a carpenter, rather than a bricklayer, or a baker,

or anything else, I suddenly started upright, and remembered

my pockets. I was carrying about with me an unknown treasury.

I had a British Museum and a South Kensington collection

of unknown curios hung all over me in different places.

I began to take the things out.

. . . . .

The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of

Battersea tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase.

They shook down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course,

they touched my patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes;

also they provided me with the printed matter I required,

for I found on the back of them some short but striking

little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively

speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might be regarded

as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my railway

journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a few months

longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the controversial

aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro and con

upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic

quality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the

cross of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper

meant all that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the

greatest hope of England.

The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife,

I need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral

meditations all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most

primary of those practical origins upon which as upon low,

thick pillows all our human civilisation reposes. Metals, the

mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel,

led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream. I saw into the

intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among all the

common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent

battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered

against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man.

I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth.

I saw all the swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war.

For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife

is a secret sword. I opened it and looked at that brilliant

and terrible tongue which we call a blade; and I thought that

perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs of man.

The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing

that came next out of my pocket was a box of matches.

Then I saw fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old,

fierce female thing, the thing we all love, but dare not touch.

The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw

in it all the art and all the frescoes of the world.

The next was a coin of a very modest value; and I saw in it

not only the image and superscription of our own Caesar,

but all government and order since the world began.

But I have not space to say what were the items in the long and

splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out.

I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket.

I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket.

I allude to my railway ticket.