By: G.K. Chesterton
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.