And this is a weary thing to remember about the city. When I am tired, he says, and the plot of which I am hero, villain and Greek chorus suddenly vanish from my mind, I pause and look at something behind plate glass. A bauble catches my eye. Long minutes, half hours pass. There is a marvelous plentitude of baubles to look at. Machines digging, excavations, scaffoldings, advertisements, never are lacking. And at such times I begin to notice how many of us there are. The hurry of the streets is an illusion. The noises that rise in clouds, and the too-many suits of clothes and hats that sweep by--all these things are part of an illusion. The fact drifts through my tired senses that there is an amazing silence in the street--the silence inside of people's heads. Everywhere I look I find these busy ones, these energetic ones stopped and standing like myself before a bauble in a window, before a broken automobile. * * * * * Of people, authors always make great plots. Authors always write of adventures and intrigues, of emotions and troubles and ideas which occupy people. People fall in love, people suffer defeats, people experience tragedies, happinesses, and there is no end to the action of people in books. But here is a curious plot, he says, on a day like this. Here is a crowd around a broken automobile. The broken automobile has trapped them, betrayed them. They realize the broken automobile as a "practical" excuse to stop walking, to stop moving, to stop going anywhere or being anybody. Their serious concentration on the broken wheel enables them to pretend that they are logically interested in practical matters. Without which pretense it would be impossible for them to exist. Without which pretense they would become consciously dead. They must always seem, to themselves as well as to others, logically interested in something. Yes, always something. But the plot is--and do not misunderstand this, he cautions--that the pretense here around the broken automobile grows shallow enough to plumb. There is nothing here. Two dozen men standing dead on a curbing, tricked into confessional by a little accident. So I will begin a book tomorrow, he says, and empties his pipe as he talks, which will have to do with the make-believe of people in streets--the make-believe of being alive and being somebody and going somewhere. And saying this, this garrulous one walks off with a high whistle on his lips and a grave triumph sitting on his shoulders. JAZZ BAND IMPRESSIONS