"Well, when I read that," said the newspaper man, "I remembered all of a sudden how he had stood leaning against the railing at the Columbia theater saying good-bye to something. Making the rounds for a month saying good-bye in his own way to all the places he would never see again. Kind of odd, I thought, for Bill Haywood to do that. That isn't the way Nietzsche would have written a radical. But Dickens might have written it that way, like Bill.
"That's why whenever I see his name in print now," pursued the newspaper man, "I always think of the burlesque chorus on the stage kicking their legs and yodeling jazzily and Big Bill Haywood staring with his one eye, saying good-bye with his one eye.
"Tell me he's not an exile!" laughed the newspaper man suddenly.
ON A DAY LIKE THIS
On a day like this, he says, on a day like this, when the wind plays cello music across the rooftops…. I think about things. The town is like a fireless, dimly lighted room. Yesterday the windows sparkled with sunlight. To-day they stare like little coffin tops.
On a day like this, he says, on this sort of a day I walk along smoking a pipe and wonder what I was excited about yesterday. Then I remember, he says, that once it rained yesterday and I waited under the awning till it ended. I remember, he says, that once I walked swiftly down this street toward a building on the corner. It was vastly important that I reach this building. I remember, he says, that there were days I hurried down Clark Street and days I ran down Monroe Street. Now it is windy again. There is long silence over the noises of the street. The sky looks empty and old.
* * * * *
There were people gathered around an automobile that had bumped into the curbing. I stopped to watch them, he says. There was a man next to me with a heavy gray face, with loose lips and with intent eyes. There was another man and another—dozens of men—all of them people who had been hurrying in the street to get somewhere. And here they were standing and looking intently at an automobile with a twisted wheel.
I became aware that we were all looking with a strange intensity at this automobile; that we all stood as if waiting for something. Dozens of men hurrying somewhere suddenly stop and stand for ten, twenty, thirty minutes staring at a broken automobile. There was a reason for this. Always where there is a machine at work, digging or hammering piles, where there is a horse fallen, an auto crashed, a flapjack turner, a fountain pen demonstrator; where there is a magic clock that runs, nobody knows how, or a window puzzle that turns in a drug-store window or anything that moves behind plate glass—always where there is any one of these things there are people like us standing riveted, attentive, unwavering.
People on artificial errands, hurrying like obedient automations through the streets; stern-faced people with dignified eyes, important-stepping people with grave decision stamped upon them; careless, innocuous-looking people—all these people look as if they had something in their heads, as if there were things of import driving them through the streets. But this is an error. Nothing in their heads. They are like the fish that swim beneath the water—a piece of shining tin captures their eyes and they pause and stare at it.