"
* * * * *
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.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A THOUSAND AND ONE AFTERNOONS IN CHICAGO ***
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