WAITING FOR THE SPARK.
(With thanks to the London Telephone Directory.)
I doubt if you have ever taken the book seriously, dear reader (if any). You dip into it for a moment, choose a suitable quotation and scribble it down with a blunt pencil on your blotting-pad; then you wind the lanyard of the listening-box round your neck and start talking to the germ-collector in that quiet self-assured voice which you believe spells business success. Then you find you have got on to the Institute of Umbrella-Fanciers instead of the Incorporated Association of Fly-Swatters, which you wanted, and have to begin all over again. But that is not the way to treat literature.
In calm hours of reflection, rather, when the mellow sunlight streams into the room and, instead of the dull gray buildings opposite, you catch a mental glimpse of green tree-tops waving in the wind, and hear, above the rumbling of the busy 'buses, the buzzes ... the bumbling ... what I mean to say is you ought to sit down calmly and read the book from cover to cover, as I am doing now.
For it isn't like a mere Street Directory, which puts all the plot into watertight compartments, and where possibly all the people in Azalea Terrace know each other by sight, even across the gap where it says:—
Here begins Aspidistra Avenue, like the lessons in church.
Nor, again, is it like Who's What, where your imagination is hampered and interfered with by other people butting in to tell you that their recreations are dodging O.B.E.'s and the Income Tax Commission. Publications: Hanwell Men as I knew Them. Club: The Philanderers, and so forth. This cramps your style.
But the book before us now is pregnant with half-hidden romances, which you can weave into any shape that you will, and, what is more, it is written in a noble beautiful English which you have probably never had time to master. I want you to do that now. Suppose, for instance, that in private life your hostess introduced you to Museum 88901 Wilkinson Arthur Jas.—let us say at a Jazz tea. And suppose you were to ask him what his business was, and he told you that he was an Actnr and Srvyr or a Pprhngr. Probably you would be surprised; possibly even you wouldn't believe him. But it's all there in the book.
The type too is diversified by sudden changes which intrigue me greatly. All over London I like to fancy little conversations of this sort are going on:—