The phone rattled in his heat-trap and not even a ghost took it up to
listen.
Lint on the divan--lint and threads--and I began to pick compulsively.
Nothing much in the papers.
The airlift.
(How could we, the American people, take pride in our freight
flights when we had permitted ourselves to be euchered into the
extravagance--only to meet force again in sillier forms? The effort
was without dignity, without principle, without understanding, without
sense.)
The pennant race.
(I remembered Babe Ruth.)
A call girl had been arrested, after the cops had tapped her telephone
and listened. I viewed her attractive face in the tabloids and read the
elaborate report of her dialogue with her clients.
(Since when had freedom stooped to tap the phones of prostitutes?
What excellence of police was this, in a world community where hardly
an honest man or woman remained, where half a billion people slowly
starved, where thieves and cheats were commoner than spots of oil or
horse-dung in streets? And how the cops enwhored Lady Liberty when they
invaded the life of that busy lass! Truly dirty deeds bought their own
big privacies: corporations burned their books and politicians lost
their records. Mere tarts, however, had their phones tapped and their
words recorded. What a splendid free nation I had come to live in! With
what marvels of detective science!)
Well--not for long.
My weary effort would soon peter out.
Maybe then I could go and watch Kipling splash on his big-league canvas
with brushes of comet's hair.