Münsterberg was enraptured. He was looking almost directly upward. Chaplin rocked from foot to foot, his fingers in a death grip around his bullhorn, and his shoulders tight and as narrow as chicken wings. This was nothing like the self-possessed character who had winked at him in the alley. Münsterberg could feel the mood of the crowd shifting along with his own. “You tell ’em, Charlie,” and “That’s the spirit, Charlie,” interrupted his comments at odd moments.

“For it is in our nature to be generous,” Chaplin was saying. He felt abandoned. He hated the war. He hated that the country was in it, that there was no place to go but forward, that more atrocities were to come. He felt people were never intentionally beastly or malicious, but they were pompous and foolish; awful decisions were made by men divorced from their own humanity. He thought that universal peace was within reach if only people ceased to be stupid.

When he had pretended to be Trotsky, he had spoken well. But now that he was trying to be both himself and a servant of the world, he was failing. He persevered, believing that the simple act of faith, the spirit of talking with the audience, would lead to a kind of communion.

“Do the walk, Charlie.”

A voice from the crowd said this helpfully. It was like suggesting he duck an oncoming pie, or turn around when Eric Campbell was about to squeeze him to death. Chaplin didn’t hear it at first—his own voice was droning on and on—but then someone else yelled it—“Do the walk”— and then several people—“Do the walk, do the walk.” There was nothing unkind in it.

Chaplin’s eyes swept across the hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of upturned faces. His gaze fell toward the stage platform, and, for the briefest electric shock of a moment, he and Münsterberg locked eyes, and Münsterberg saw, in slow motion, a human heart breaking.

Chaplin turned his toes out. He stiffened his quadriceps. He shot out his knees, and ambled as if on a Sunday promenade, twirling the empty air as if he had a cane. He went to all four corners of the stage, each time bouncing on one leg, three times, and when he was finished, he had a brilliant smile on his face that came, Münsterberg knew, from elsewhere.

As Chaplin bounded in place, his thoughts weighed more than he did. He realized he should have charged the crowd: “For every step of the walk, you need to pay a thousand dollars.”