"Reckon they're going to, soon."

They worked on in silence for a long time. Andrews stared at the
upper right-hand corner and smeared with soap each pane of the
window in turn. Then he climbed down, moved his ladder, and
started on the next window. At times he would start in the middle
of the window for variety. As he worked a rhythm began pushing its
way through the hard core of his mind, leavening it, making it
fluid. It expressed the vast dusty dullness, the men waiting in
rows on drill fields, standing at attention, the monotony of feet
tramping in unison, of the dust rising from the battalions going
back and forth over the dusty drill fields. He felt the rhythm
filling his whole body, from his sore hands to his legs, tired
from marching back and forth from making themselves the same
length as millions of other legs. His mind began unconsciously,
from habit, working on it, orchestrating it. He could imagine a
vast orchestra swaying with it. His heart was beating faster. He
must make it into music; he must fix it in himself, so that he
could make it into music and write it down, so that orchestras
could play it and make the ears of multitudes feel it, make their
flesh tingle with it.

He went on working through the endless afternoon, climbing up and
down his ladder, smearing the barrack windows with a soapy rag. A
silly phrase took the place of the welling of music in his mind:
"Arbeit und Rhythmus." He kept saying it over and over to himself:
"Arbeit und Rhythmus." He tried to drive the phrase out of his
mind, to bury his mind in the music of the rhythm that had come to
him, that expressed the dusty boredom, the harsh constriction of