What I Found in My Pocket - Page 2

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