Few forms of amusement are more amusing and few forms of amusement cost
less than to walk slowly along the crowded central thoroughfares of
a great capital--London, Paris, or Timbuctoo--with ears open to catch
fragments of conversation not specially intended for your personal
consumption. It, perhaps, resembles slightly the justly blamed habit
of listening at keyholes and the universally practised habit of reading
other people’s postcards; it is possibly not quite “nice.” But, like
both these habits, it is within the law, and the chances of it doing
any one any harm are exceedingly remote. Moreover, it has in an amazing
degree the excellent quality of taking you out of yourself--and putting
you into some one else. Detectives employ it, and if it were forbidden
where would novelists be? Where, for example, would Mr. Pett Ridge be?
Once yielded to, it grows on you; it takes hold of you in its fell,
insidious clutch, as does the habit of whisky, and becomes incurable.
You then treat it seriously; you make of it a passkey to the seventy and
seven riddles of the universe, with wards for each department of life.
You judge national characteristics by it; by it alone you compare rival
civilisations. And, incidentally, you somewhat increase your social
value as a diner-out.
*****
For a long time I practised it in the streets of Paris, the city of
efficient chatter, the city in which wayfarers talk with more exuberance
and more grammar than anywhere else. Here are a few phrases, fair
samples from lists of hundreds, which I have gathered and stored, on
the boulevards and in quieter streets, such as the Rue Blanche, where
conversation grows intimate on mild nights:--
She is mad.
She lived on the fourth floor last year.
Yes, she is not bad, after all.
Thou knowest, my old one, that my wife is a little bizarre.
He has left her.
They say she is very jealous.
Anything except oysters.
Thou annoyest me terribly, my dear.
It is a question solely of the cache-corset.
With those feet!