Tremendous Trifles | Page 5

and positive thing like the sun, which
one has either seen or not seen.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means
something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many

colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so
gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this
fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true
that white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and
non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for
the funeral dress of this pessimistic period. We should see city
gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver linen, with top hats as white
as wonderful arum lilies. Which is not the case.
Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.
. . . . .
I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than
Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be
such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my
absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if
there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my
brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter,
again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee.
Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his
hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had
brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was
sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was
made entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles
until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it
did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I
stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England
is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is
something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.
III
The Secret of a Train
All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a loose
memory. I will not merely say that this story is true: because, as you
will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and no
conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a
fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were
not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from there
being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly
in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends of

numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten
thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My
experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not
fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents (what there were
of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere of the landscape,
which were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly,
and they were as I shall now describe.
. . . . .
About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing
outside the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. And
for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or the
emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon
me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the
road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not know if
other people are made like me in this matter; but to me it is always
dreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings into life
a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not want
anything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful, a thing for
contemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome
than I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man's
life is a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail man
refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in letters of
lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then the
immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that