Page:H.G. Wells - The Dream (US Edition).pdf/210

 was all a-quiver with the roar and thudding of the printing machinery. I remember very vividly to this day how I went there first, down a narrow road-way out of the main thoroughfare, past a dingy public-house and the stage door of a theatre.”

“What were you going to do—pack up books? Or run errands?” asked Radiant.

“I was to do what I could. Very soon I was on the general editorial staff.”

“Editing popular knowledge?"

“Yes.”

“But why did they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at Thunderstone House ?” asked Radiant. “I can understand that this work of instructing and answering the first crude questions of the new reading classes was necessarily a wholesale improvised affair, but surely there were enough learned men at the ancient universities to do all the editing and instructing that was needed!”

Sarnac shook his head. “The amazing thing is that there weren't,” he said. “They produced men enough of a sort but they weren't the right sort.”

His auditors looked puzzled.

“The rank-and-file of the men they sent out labelled M.A. and so forth from Oxford and Cambridge were exactly like those gilt-lettered jars in Mr. Humberg's shop, that had nothing in them but stale water. The pseudo-educated man of the older order couldn't teach, couldn't write, couldn't explain. He was pompous and patronising and prosy; timid and indistinct in statement, with no sense of the common need or the common quality. The promoted office-boy, these new magazine and newspaper