"But he knew he was going to leave the country and perhaps never come back again. So he was making the rounds. "'I've been to almost every show in town,' he went on talking, 'all the musical comedies, all the dramas, all the west side melodramas. I've been to almost all the cafés, the swell ones with the monkey-suit waiters and the old ones I've known myself for years. I drew up a list of all these places in town about a month ago and I've been following a schedule ever since.' * * * * * "I asked him," said the newspaper man, "if he liked the plays he'd seen. Bill grinned at that. "'It ain't that,' said Bill. 'No, it ain't that. It's only seeing them. You know, there's nothing like these kind of things anywhere else in the world.' "And then the theater got dark and we said good-bye casually and went to our different seats. I didn't see Haywood again. About a week or so later I read the headline that he had fled the country. Nobody knew where he was, but people suspected. And then two weeks after that there was the story that he had reached Russia and was in Moscow. "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. * * * * *