Jonathan was in the cellar at the moment. When he came up, he said, “Did I hear any one laughing?”
“I don’t know. Did you?”
“I thought maybe it was you.”
“It might have been. Something amused me—I forget what.”
I accused Jonathan of having written it himself, but he denied it. Some other Jonathan, then; for, as I said, this is not a personal matter, it is a world matter. Let us grant, then, a certain allowance for those who hunt in woman-made haystacks. But what about pockets? Is not a man lord over his own pockets? And are they not nevertheless as so many haystacks piled high for his confusion? Certain it is that Jonathan has nearly as much trouble with his pockets as he does with the corners and cupboards and shelves and drawers of his house. It usually happens over our late supper, after his day in town. He sets down his teacup, struck with a sudden memory. He feels in his vest pockets—first the right, then the left. He proceeds to search himself, murmuring, “I thought something came to-day that I wanted to show you—oh, here! no, that isn’t it. I thought I put it—no, those are to be—what’s this? No, that’s a memorandum. Now, where in—” [pg 015] He runs through the papers in his pockets twice over, and in the second round I watch him narrowly, and perhaps see a corner of an envelope that does not look like office work. “There, Jonathan! What’s that? No, not that—that!”
He pulls it out with an air of immense relief. “There! I knew I had something. That’s it.”
When we travel, the same thing happens with the tickets, especially if they chance to be costly and complicated ones, with all the shifts and changes of our journey printed thick upon their faces. The conductor appears at the other end of the car. Jonathan begins vaguely to fumble without lowering his paper. Pocket after pocket is browsed through in this way. Then the paper slides to his knee and he begins a more thorough investigation, with all the characteristic clapping and diving motions that seem to be necessary. Some pockets must always be clapped and others dived into to discover their contents.
No tickets. The conductor is halfway up the car. Jonathan’s face begins to grow serious. [pg 016] He rises and looks on the seat and under it. He sits down and takes out packet after packet of papers and goes over them with scrupulous care. At this point I used to become really anxious—to make hasty calculations as to our financial resources, immediate and ultimate—to wonder if conductors ever really put nice people like us off trains. But that was long ago. I know now that Jonathan has never lost a ticket in his life. So I glance through the paper that he has dropped or watch the landscape until he reaches a certain stage of calm and definite pessimism, when he says, “I must have pulled them out when I took out those postcards in the other car. Yes, that’s just what has happened.” Then, the conductor being only a few seats away, I beg Jonathan to look once more in his vest pocket, where he always puts them. To oblige me he looks, though without faith, and lo! this time the tickets fairly fling themselves upon him, with smiles almost curling up their corners. Does the brownie travel with us, then?
I begin to suspect that some of the good men who have been blamed for forgetting to [pg 017] mail letters in their pockets have been, not indeed blameless, but at least misunderstood. Probably they do not forget. Probably they hunt for the letters and cannot find them, and conclude that they have already mailed them.
In the matter of the home haystacks Jonathan’s confidence in himself has at last been shaken. For a long time, when he returned to me after some futile search, he used to say, “Of course you can look for it if you like, but it is not there.” But man is a reasoning, if not altogether a reasonable, being, and with a sufficient accumulation of evidence, especially when there is some one constantly at hand to interpret its teachings, almost any set of opinions, however fixed, may be shaken. So here.