Notes on the Working Day
WALLACE MARKFIELD
HE
SAT
carefully now in the Mall, unwrapping his sandwiches,
chewing casually. Clenching the paper into a greasy ball he smiled
and threw it at a pigeon that fiat-hopped a few feet from
his
bench.
The pigeon lurched into the air, came down to arch its breast. He
looked up at the clock and saw that ten minutes were gone already.
Fifty minutes he could count now to establish himself as an indivi–
dual, to realize once again that a year ago he had been in college.
Even on the campus, in the clear, precise words of his instructors,
over the packed drawers of the library catalogues the dead whale-mass
of the working day had threatened him.
Deep in his consciousness was the memory of all the proletarian
novels and stories he had read, where little shop girls come to spend
their lunch hours in the Square, tired and pale under the sun that
ignores them, where war and death pass unnoticed over its cold face.
He remembered the heroes who died here, with their smashed bodies
crying bloody messages for the last chapter.
Once he had sat in the Square, in the years of hate, swelling
powerfully and righteously, but now he faced the sun over the city.
One day its rays would come too clearly for him, and there would be
the sound of each building gasping its brick hoarseness and collapsing
into the street, where all those who had forgotten the sun waited for
the warmth, for the period when each pavement and each brick would
enclose them with hot atom-fire.
Grasping the back of the bench he stiffened, breathed quickly.
It was too easy. Someday the -crowds here would be silent. It would
be the day when no sun came down, when in the center of the Mall
the great flesh-mass would be placed. Like the ending of
jews Without
Money
would they stand, listening to the speaker who promised them.
. . . What? No great march on the City Hall for them, or a red dawn,
or a new saVIor.
The crowd that warmed their muscles, that thrust their loins
into one another would be promised death. All around them, from the
