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