"Funny about them," the newspaper reporter thought, eyeing the figures as he moved away; "they lie there on their backs all in the same position, all looking at the same clouds. So they must all be thinking thoughts about the same thing. Let's see; what was I thinking about? Nothing,"
An excited light came suddenly into the newspaper reporter's eyes.
"I was just waiting," he muttered to himself. "And so are they."
* * * * *
The newspaper reporter looked eagerly at the street and the people passing. That was it. He had found the word. "Waiting." Everybody was waiting. On the back porches at night, on the front steps, in the parks, in the theaters, churches, streets and stores—men and women waited. Just as the men on the grass in Grant Park were waiting. The only difference between the men lying on their backs and people elsewhere was that the men in the grass had grown tired for the moment of pretending they were doing anything else. So they had stretched themselves out in an attitude of waiting, in a deliberate posture of waiting. And with their eyes on the sky, they waited.
The newspaper reporter felt thrilled as he thought all this. He felt thrilled when he looked closely at the people in Michigan Avenue and saw that they fitted snugly into his theory. He said to himself: "I've discovered a theory about life. A theory that fits them all. That makes the background I'm looking for. Waiting. Yes, the whole pack of them are waiting all the time. That's why we all look alike. That's why one house looks like another and one man walking looks like another man walking, and why figures lying in the grass look like twins—scores of twins."
* * * * *
The newspaper man returned to his bedroom and started to write again. But he had been writing only a few minutes when he stopped. Again, as it had before, the secret had slipped out of his mind. For he had come to a paragraph that was to tell what the people were waiting for and he couldn't think of any answer to that. What were the men in the grass waiting for? In the street? On the porches and stone steps? They were images of himself—all "waiting images" of himself. Therefore the answer lay in the question: "What had he been waiting for?"
The newspaper reporter bit into his pencil. "Nothing, nothing," he muttered. "Yes, that's it. They aren't waiting for anything. That's the secret. Life is a few years of suspended animation. But there's no story in that. Better forget it."
So he looked glumly out of his bedroom window, and, being a sentimentalist, the huge inverted music notes the telephone poles made against the dark played a long, sad tune in his mind.