Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/304

252 the same time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the walls were constantly being built higher and stronger.

The notion gives you the willies a little, doesn't it? Anyway it does me.

And then there was that notion about deep wells, men everywhere constantly digging and digging themselves down deeper and deeper into deep wells. They not wanting to do it, you under-stand, and none wanting them to do it, but all the time the thing going on just the same, that is to say the wells getting constantly deeper and deeper and the voices growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance—and again the light and the warmth of life going away and going away, because of a kind of blind refusal of people to try to understand each other, I suppose.

It was all very strange to me—Wilson's poetry, I mean—when I came to it. Here is one of his things. It is not directly concerned with the walls, the bowl, or the deep well theme, as you will see; but it is one we ran in the paper during the trial and a lot of folks rather liked it as I'll admit I do myself. Maybe putting it in here will give a kind of point to my story by giving you some sense of the strangeness of the man who is the story's hero. In the book it was called merely number ninety-seven and it went as follows:

"The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette is a sign that I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not so. When I am unquiet I am weak, but when I am quiet, as I am now, I am very strong.

"Just now I went along one of the streets of my city and in at a door and came up here, where I am now, lying on a bed and looking out at a window. Very suddenly and completely the knowledge has come to me that I could grip the sides of tall buildings as freely and as easily as I now grip this cigarette. I could hold the building between my fingers, put it to my lips, and blow smoke through it. I could blow confusion away. I could blow a thousand people out through the roof of one tall building into the sky, into the unknown. Building after building I could consume as I consume the cigarettes in this box. I could throw the burning ends of cities over my shoulder and out through a window.

"It is not often I get in the state I am now in—so quiet and sure of myself. When the feeling comes over me there is a directness