There were people gathered around an automobile that had bumped into the curbing. I stopped to watch them, he says. There was a man next to me with a heavy gray face, with loose lips and with intent eyes. There was another man and another--dozens of men--all of them people who had been hurrying in the street to get somewhere. And here they were standing and looking intently at an automobile with a twisted wheel. I became aware that we were all looking with a strange intensity at this automobile; that we all stood as if waiting for something. Dozens of men hurrying somewhere suddenly stop and stand for ten, twenty, thirty minutes staring at a broken automobile. There was a reason for this. Always where there is a machine at work, digging or hammering piles, where there is a horse fallen, an auto crashed, a flapjack turner, a fountain pen demonstrator; where there is a magic clock that runs, nobody knows how, or a window puzzle that turns in a drug-store window or anything that moves behind plate glass--always where there is any one of these things there are people like us standing riveted, attentive, unwavering. People on artificial errands, hurrying like obedient automations through the streets; stern-faced people with dignified eyes, important-stepping people with grave decision stamped upon them; careless, innocuous-looking people--all these people look as if they had something in their heads, as if there were things of import driving them through the streets. But this is an error. Nothing in their heads. They are like the fish that swim beneath the water--a piece of shining tin captures their eyes and they pause and stare at it. The broken automobile holds their eyes, holds them all riveted because--because it is something unordinary to look at, to think about. And there is nothing unordinary to look at or think about in their heads. * * * * * And I too, he says, on this day when the wind played cello music across the rooftops, stood in the crowd. We were all children, I noticed, more than that--infants. Open-mouthed infantile wonder staring out of our tired, gray faces. Men, without thought, men making a curious little confession in the busy street that they were not busy, that there is nothing in life at the moment that preoccupies them--that a broken automobile is a godsend, a diversion, a drama, a great happiness. I smoked my pipe, he says, and began to wonder again. Why did they stare like this? And at what? And who were these staring ones? And what was it in them that stared? I thought of this, he says. Dead dreams, and forgotten defeats stood staring from the curb at the broken automobile. Men who had survived themselves, who had become compliant and automatic little forces in the engine of the city--these were ourselves on the curb.