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By Root 14682 0

now came between him and that knowledge. In a way, he flattered human nature. He assumed that other people were as bemused by the grandeur and as blinded by the light of the post to which he aspired, and that they would only listen to argument and language that was grand and bright. So his speeches were cut to that measure. It was a weird mixture of facts and figures on one hand (his tax program, his road program) and of fine sentiments on the other hand (a faint echo, somewhat dulled by time, of the quotations copied out in the ragged, boyish hand in the big ledger).

Willie went around the country in a good secondhand automobile, which had been bought on the eighteen-payment plan, and saw his face on the posters nailed to telephone poles and corncribs and board fences. He’d got to town, and after he’d been to the post office to see if there was a letter from Lucy and after he had had a session with the local politicos and done some handshaking (he wasn’t too hot at that, too much talk about principles and not enough about promises), he would hole up in a hotel room ($2.00 without bath) and work some more on his speech. He kept on polishing and revising the damned thing. He was hell-bent on making each one a second Gettysburg Address. And maybe after he had tinkered with it awhile, he would get up and start pacing in his room. He would pace and pace, and pretty soon he would start to say his speech. If you were in the next room, you could hear him pacing and speeching, and when he stopped pacing you knew he had stopped in front of the mirror to polish up a gesture.

And sometimes I’d be in the next room, for I was supposed to cover his campaign for the Chronicle. I’d be lying there in the hole in the middle of my bed where the spring had given down with the weight of wayfaring humanity, lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. I’d be lying there letting the smoke drift up out of my mouth and not feeling anything, just watching the smoke as though I didn’t have any past or future, and suddenly Willie would start in the next room. Tramping and mumbling.

It would be a reproach, an affront, a cause for laughter and a thing for tears. Knowing what you knew, you would lie there listening to him getting ready to be Governor, and want to stuff the pillow slip in your mouth to stop the giggles. The poor half-witted bastard and his speech. But the voice would keep on going over there beyond the wall, and the feet would keep on tramping, back and forth like the feet of a heavy animal prowling and swinging back and forth with a heavy swaying of the head in a locked-up room, or a cage, hunting for the place to get out, not giving up and irreconcilably and savagely sure that there was going to be a loose board or bar or latch sometime, not now but sometime. And listening to it, you wouldn’t be so sure for a minute the bar or board would hold. Or the feet would not stop and they were like a machine, which was not human or animal either, and were tramping on you like pestles or plungers in a big vat and you were the thing in the vat, the thing that just happened to be there. The plungers didn’t care about its being you, or not being you, in the vat. But they would continue until there wasn’t any you, and afterward for a long time until the machine wore out or somebody switched off the juice.

Then, because you wanted to lie down in the late afternoon on a strange bed in a shadowy room and watch the smoke drift up and not think about anything, what you’ve been or what you’re going to be,, and because the feet, the beast, the plungers, the half-wit won’t stop, you jerk yourself up and sit on the edge of the bed and feel like swearing. But you don’t. For you are wondering,