The 42nd Parallel

Mac

The rebels took Juarez and Huerta fled and the steamboats to Europe were packed with cientificos making for Paris and Venustiano Carranza was president in Mexico City. Somebody got Mac a pass on the Mexican Central down to the capital. Encarnacion cried when he left and all the anarchists came down to the station to see him off. Mac wanted to join Zapata. He’d picked up a little Spanish from Encarnacion and a vague idea of the politics of the revolution. The train took five days. Five times it was held up while the section hands repaired the track ahead. Occasionally at night bullets came through the windows. Near Caballos a bunch of men on horses rode the whole length of the train waving their big hats and firing as they went. The soldiers in the caboose woke up and returned the fire and the men rode off in a driving dustcloud. The passengers had to duck under the seats when the firing began or lie flat in the aisle. After the attack had been driven off an old woman started to shriek and it was found that a child had been hit through the head. The mother was a stout dark woman in a flowered dress. She went up and down the train with the tiny bloody body wrapped in a shawl asking for a doctor, but anybody could see that the child was dead.

Mac thought the trip would never end. He bought peppery food and lukewarm beer from old Indian women at stations, tried to drink pulque and to carry on conversations with his fellowpassengers. At last they passed Queretaro and the train began going fast down long grades in the cold bright air. Then the peaks of the great volcanos began to take shape in the blue beyond endless crisscrosspatterned fields of century-plants and suddenly the train was rattling between garden walls, through feathery trees. It came to a stop with a clang of couplings: Mexico City.

Mac felt lost wandering round the bright streets among the lowvoiced crowds, the men all dressed in white and the women all in black or dark blue. The streets were dusty and sunny and quiet. There were stores open and cabs and trolleycars and polished limousines. Mac was worried. He only had two dollars. He’d been on the train so long he’d forgotten what he intended to do when he reached his destination. He wanted clean clothes and a bath. When he’d wandered round a good deal he saw a place marked “American Bar.” His legs were tired. He sat down at a table. A waiter came over and asked him in English what he wanted. He couldn’t think of anything else so he ordered a whisky. He drank the whisky and sat there with his head in his hands. At the bar were a lot of Americans and a couple of Mexicans in tengallon hats rolling dice for drinks. Mac ordered another whisky. A beefy redeyed man in a rumpled khaki shirt was roaming uneasily about the bar. His eye lit on Mac and he sat down at his table. “Mind if I set here awhile, pardner?” he asked. “Those sonsobitches too damn noisy. Here, sombrero… wheresat damn waiter? Gimme a glassbeer. Well, I got the old woman an’ the kids off today… When are you pullin’ out?”

“Why, I just pulled in,” said Mac.

“The hell you say… This ain’t no place for a white man… These bandits’ll be on the town any day… It’ll be horrible, I tell you. There won’t be a white man left alive… I’ll get some of ’em before they croak me, though… By God, I can account for twentyfive of ’em, no, twentyfour.” He pulled a Colt out of his back pocket, emptied the chamber into his hand and started counting the cartridges, “Eight,” then he started going through his pockets and ranged the cartridges in a row on the deal table. There were only twenty. “Some sonvabitch robbed me.” A tall lanky man came over from the bar and put his hand on the redeyed man’s shoulder. “Eustace, you’d better put that away till we need it… You know what to do, don’t you?” he turned to Mac; “as soon as the shooting begins all American citizens concentrate at the embassy. There we’ll sell our lives to the last man.” Somebody yelled from the bar, “Hey, big boy, have another round,” and the tall man went back to the bar.

“You fellers seem to expect trouble,” said Mac.

“Trouble — my God! You don’t know this country. Did you just come in?”

“Blew in from Juarez just now.”

“You can’t have. Railroad’s all tore up at Queretaro.”

“Well, they musta got it fixed,” said Mac. “Say, what do they say round here about Zapata?”

“My God, he’s the bloodthirstiest villain of the lot… They roasted a feller was foreman of a sugar mill down in Morelos on a slow fire and raped his wife and daughters right before his eyes… My God, pardner, you don’t know what kind of country this is! Do you know what we ought to do… d’you know what we’d do if we had a man in the White House instead of a yellowbellied potatomouthed reformer? We’d get up an army of a hundred thousand men and clean this place up… It’s a hell of a fine country but there’s not one of these damn greasers worth the powder and shot to shoot ’em… smoke ’em out like vermin, that’s what I say… Every mother’s sonvabitch of ’em’s a Zapata under the skin.”

“What business are you in?”

“I’m an oil prospector, and I’ve been in this lousy hole fifteen years and I’m through. I’d have gotten out on the train to Vera Cruz today only I have some claims to settle up an’ my furniture to sell… You can’t tell when they’ll cut the railroad and then we won’t be able to get out and President Wilson’ll let us be shot down right here like rats in a trap… If the American public realized conditions down here… My God, we’re the laughing stock of all the other nations… What’s your line o’ work, pardner?”

“Printer… linotype operator.”

“Looking for a job?”

Mac had brought out a dollar to pay for his drinks. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said. “That’s my last dollar but one.” “Why don’t you go round to The Mexican Herald? They’re always needin’ English language printers… They can’t keep anybody down here… Ain’t fit for a white man down here no more… Look here, pardner, that drink’s on me.”

“Well, we’ll have another then, on me.”

“The fat’s in the fire in this country now, pardner… everything’s gone to hell… might as well have a drink while we can.”

That evening, after he’d eaten some supper in a little American lunchroom, Mac walked round the alameda to get the whisky out of his head before going up to The Mexican Herald to see if he could get a job. It would only be for a couple of weeks, he told himself, till he could get wise to the lay of the land. The tall trees on the alameda and the white statues and the fountains and the welldressed couples strolling round in the gloaming and the cabs clattering over the cobbles looked quiet enough, and the row of stonyeyed Indian women selling fruit and nuts and pink and yellow and green candies in booths along the curb. Mac decided that the man he’d talked to in the bar had been stringing him along because he was a tenderfoot.

He got a job all right at The Mexican Herald at thirty mex dollars a week, but round the printing plant everybody talked just like the man in the bar. That night an old Polish American who was a proofreader there took him round to a small hotel to get him a flop and lent him a couple of cartwheels till payday. “You get your wages in advance as much as you can,” said the old Pole, “one of these days there will be revolution and then goodby Mexican Herald… unless Wilson makes intervention mighty quick.” “Sounds all right to me; I want to see the social revolution,” said Mac. The old Pole laid his finger along his nose and shook his head in a peculiar way and left him.

When Mac woke up in the morning he was in a small room calsomined bright yellow. The furniture was painted blue and there were red curtains in the window. Between the curtains the long shutters were barred with vivid violet sunlight that cut a warm path across the bedclothes. A canary was singing somewhere and he could hear the flap pat flap pat of a woman making tortillas. He got up and threw open the shutters. The sky was cloudless above the redtile roofs. The street was empty and full of sunlight. He filled his lungs with cool thin air and felt the sun burning his face and arms and neck as he stood there. It must be early. He went back to bed and fell asleep again.

When Wilson ordered the Americans out of Mexico several months later Mac was settled in a little apartment in the Plaza del Carmen with a girl named Concha and two white Persian cats. Concha had been a stenographer and interpreter with an American firm and had been the mistress of an oilman for three years so she spoke pretty good English. The oilman had jumped on the train for Vera Cruz in the panic at the time of the flight of Huerta, leaving Concha high and dry. She had taken a fancy to Mac from the moment she had first seen him going into the postoffice. She made him very comfortable, and when he talked to her about going out to join Zapata, she only laughed and said peons were ignorant savages and fit only to be ruled with the whip. Her mother, an old woman with a black shawl perpetually over her head, came to cook for them and Mac began to like Mexican food, turkey with thick chocolate brown sauce and encheladas with cheese. The cats were named Porfirio and Venustiano and always slept on the foot of their bed. Concha was very thrifty and made Mac’s pay go much further than he could and never complained when he went out batting round town and came home late and with a headache from drinking tequila. Instead of trying to get on the crowded trains to Vera Cruz, Mac took a little money he had saved up and bought up the office furniture that wildeyed American businessmen were selling out for anything they could get for it. He had it piled in the courtyard back of the house where they lived. Buying it had been Concha’s idea in the first place and he used to tease her about how they’d ever get rid of it again, but she’d nod her head and say, “Wait a minute.”

Concha liked it very much when he’d have friends in to eat with him Sundays. She would wait on them very pleasantly and send her little brother Antonio round for beer and cognac and always have cakes in the house to bring out if anybody dropped in. Mac would sometimes think how much pleasanter this was than when he’d lived with Maisie in San Diego, and began to think less often about going out to join Zapata.

The Polish proofreader, whose name was Korski, turned out to be a political exile, a socialist and a wellinformed man. He would sit all afternoon over a half a glass of cognac talking about European politics; since the collapse of the European socialist parties at the beginning of the war he had taken no part in anything; from now on he’d be an onlooker. He had a theory that civilization and a mixed diet were causing the collapse of the human race.

Then there was Ben Stowell, an independent oil promotor who was trying to put through a deal with Carranza’s government to operate some oilwells according to the law. He was broke most of the time and Mac used to lend him money, but he always talked in millions. He called himself a progressive in politics and thought that Zapata and Villa were honest men. Ben Stowell would always take the opposite side of any argument from Korski and would infuriate the old man by his antisocial attitude. Mac wanted to make some money to send up to Maisie for the kids’ schooling. It made him feel good to send Rose up a box of toys now and then. He and Ben would have long talks about the chances of making money in Mexico. Ben Stowell brought round a couple of young radical politicians who enjoyed sitting through the afternoon talking about socialism and drinking and learning English. Mac usually didn’t say much but sometimes he got sore and gave them a broadside of straight I.W.W. doctrine. Concha would finish all arguments by bringing on supper and saying with a shake of her head, “Every poor man socialista… a como no? But when you get rich, quick you all very much capitalista.”

One Sunday Mac and Concha and some Mexican newspaper men and Ben Stowell and his girl, Angustias, who was a chorusgirl at the Lirico, went out on the trolley to Xochimilco. They hired a boat with a table in it and an awning and an Indian to pole them round through the poplarbordered canals among the rich flowerpatches and vegetablegardens. They drank pulque and they had a bottle of whisky with them, and they bought the girls calla lilies. One of the Mexicans played a guitar and sang.

In the afternoon the Indian brought the boat back to a landing and they strolled off in couples into the woods. Mac suddenly felt very homesick and told Concha about his children in the U. S. and about Rose particularly, and she burst into tears and told him how much she loved children, but that when she was seventeen she had been very very sick and they’d thought she was going to die and now she couldn’t have any children, only Porfirio and Venustiano. Mac kissed her and told her that he’d always look after her.

When they got back to the trolleystation, loaded down with flowers, Mac and Ben let the girls go home alone and went to a cantina to have a drink. Ben said he was pretty tired of this sort of thing and wished he could make his pile and go back to the States to marry and have a home and a family. “You see, Mac,” he said, “I’m forty years old. Christ, a man can’t bat around all his life.” “Well, I’m not far from it,” said Mac. They didn’t say much, but Ben walked up with Mac as far as the office of The Mexican Herald and then went down town to the Iturbide to see some oilmen who were staying there. “Well, it’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” he said as he waved his hand at Mac and started down the street. He was a stocky bullnecked man with a bowlegged walk.

Several days later Ben came around to the Plaza del Carmen before Mac was out of bed. “Mac, you come and eat with me this noon,” he said. “There’s a guy named G. H. Barrow here I want to kinda show the town a little bit. He might be useful to us… I want to know what he’s after anyway.” The man was writing articles on the Mexican situation and was said to have some connection with the A. F. of L. At lunch he asked anxiously if the water was safe and whether it wasn’t dangerous to walk round the streets after nightfall. Ben Stowell kidded him along a little and told him stories of generals and their friends breaking into a bar and shooting into the floor to make the customers dance and then using the place for a shooting gallery. “The shooting gallery, that’s what they call congress here,” said Mac. Barrow said he was going to a meeting of the Union Nacional de Trabajadores that afternoon and would they mind going with him to interpret for him. It was Mac’s day off so they said, “All right.” He said he’d been instructed to try to make contacts with stable labor elements in Mexico with the hope of joining them up with the Pan-American Federation of Labor. Gompers would come down himself if something could be lined up. He said he’d been a shipping clerk and a Pullman conductor and had been in the office of the Railroad Brotherhood, but now he was working for the A. F. of L. He wished American workers had more ideas about the art of life. He’d been at the Second International meetings at Amsterdam and felt the European workers understood the art of life. When Mac asked him why the hell the Second International hadn’t done something to stop the World War, he said the time wasn’t ripe yet and spoke about German atrocities.

“The German atrocities are a Sundayschool picnic to what goes on every day in Mexico,” said Ben. Then Barrow went to ask whether Mexicans were as immoral as it was made out. The beer they were drinking with their lunch was pretty strong and they all loosened up a little. Barrow wanted to know whether it wasn’t pretty risky going out with girls here on account of the high percentage of syphilis. Mac said yes, but that he and Ben could show him some places that were all right if he wanted to look ’em over. Barrow tittered and looked embarrassed and said he’d just as soon look ’em over. “A man ought to see every side of things when he’s investigating conditions.” Ben Stowell slapped his hand on the edge of the table and said that Mac was just the man to show him the backside of Mexico.

They went to the meeting that was crowded with slender dark men in blue denim. At first they couldn’t get in on account of the crowd packed in the aisles and in the back of the hall, but Mac found an official he knew who gave them seats in a box. The hall was very stuffy and the band played and there was singing and the speeches were very long. Barrow said listening to a foreign language made him sleepy, and suggested that they walk around town; he’d heard that the red light district was… he was interested in conditions.

Outside the hall they ran across Enrique Salvador, a newspaperman that Ben knew. He had a car and a chauffeur. He shook hands and laughed and said the car belonged to the chief of police who was a friend of his and wouldn’t they like to ride out to San Angel? They went out the long avenue past Chapultepec, the Champs Elysées of Mexico, Salvador called it. Near Tacubaya Salvador pointed out the spot where Carranza’s troops had had a skirmish with the Zapatistas the week before and a corner where a rich clothing merchant had been murdered by bandits, and G. H. Barrow kept asking was it quite safe to go so far out in the country, and Salvador said, “I am a newspaperman. I am everybody’s friend.”

Out at San Angel they had some drinks and when they got back to the city they drove round the Pajaritos district. G. H. Barrow got very quiet and his eyes got a watery look when he saw the little lighted cribhouses, each one with a bed and some paperflowers and a crucifix that you could see through the open door, past a red or blue curtain, and the dark quiet Indian girls in short chemises standing outside their doors or sitting on the sill.

“You see,” said Ben Stowell, “it’s easy as rolling off a log… But I don’t advise you to get too careless round here… Salvador’ll show us a good joint after supper. He ought to know because he’s a friend of the chief of police and he runs most of them.”

But Barrow wanted to go into one of the cribs so they got out and talked to one of the girls and Salvador sent the chauffeur to get a couple of bottles of beer. The girl received them very politely and Barrow tried to get Mac to ask her questions, but Mac didn’t like asking her questions so he let Salvador do it. When G. H. Barrow put his hand on her bare shoulder and tried to pull her chemise off and asked how much did she want to let him see her all naked, the girl didn’t understand and tore herself away from him and yelled and cursed at him and Salvador wouldn’t translate what she said. “Let’s get this bastard outa here,” said Ben in a low voice to Mac, “before we have to get in a fight or somethin’.”

They had a tequila each before dinner at a little bar where nothing was sold but tequila out of varnished kegs. Salvador showed G. H. Barrow how to drink it, first putting salt on the hollow between his thumb and forefinger and then gulping the little glass of tequila, licking up the salt and swallowing some chile sauce to finish up with, but he got it down the wrong way and choked.

At supper they were pretty drunk and G. H. Barrow kept saying that Mexicans understood the art of life and that was meat for Salvador who talked about the Indian genius and the Latin genius and said that Mac and Ben were the only gringos he ever met he could get along with, and insisted on their not paying for their meal. He’d charge it to his friend the chief of police. Next they went to a cantina beside a theater where there were said to be French girls, but the French girls weren’t there. There were three old men in the cantina playing a cello, a violin and a piccolo. Salvador made them play La Adelita and everybody sang it and then La Cucaracha. There was an old man in a broadbrimmed hat with a huge shiny pistolholster on his back, who drank up his drink quickly when they came in and left the bar. Salvador whispered to Mac that he was General Gonzales and had left in order not to be seen drinking with gringos.

Ben and Barrow sat with their heads together at a table in the corner talking about the oil business. Barrow was saying that there was an investigator for certain oil interests coming down; he’d be at the Regis almost any day now and Ben was saying he wanted to meet him and Barrow put his arm around his shoulder and said he was sure Ben was just the man this investigator would want to meet to get an actual working knowledge of conditions. Meanwhile Mac and Salvador were dancing the Cuban danzon with the girls. Then Barrow got to his feet a little unsteadily and said he didn’t want to wait for the French girls but why not go to that place where they’d been and try some of the dark meat, but Salvador insisted on taking them to the house of Remedios near the American embassy. “Quelquecosa de chic,” he’d say in bad French. It was a big house with a marble stairway and crystal chandeliers and salmonbrocaded draperies and lace curtains and mirrors everywhere. “Personne que les henerales vieng aqui,” he said when he’d introduced them to the madam, who was a darkeyed grayhaired woman in black with a black shawl who looked rather like a nun. There was only one girl left unoccupied so they fixed up Barrow with her and arranged about the price and left him. “Whew, that’s a relief,” said Ben when they came out. The air was cold and the sky was all stars.

Salvador had made the three old men with their instruments get into the back of the car and said he felt romantic and wanted to serenade his novia and they went out towards Guadalupe speeding like mad along the broad causeway. Mac and the chauffeur and Ben and Salvador and the three old men singing La Adelita and the instruments chirping all off key. In Guadalupe they stopped under some buttonball trees against the wall of a house with big grated windows and sang Cielito lindo and La Adelita and Cuatro milpas, and Ben and Mac sang just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew and were just starting Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie when a girl came to the window and talked a long time in low Spanish to Salvador.

Salvador said, “Ella dit que nous make escandalo and must go away. Très chic."

By that time a patrol of soldiers had come up and were about to arrest them all when the officer arrived and recognized the car and Salvador and took them to have a drink with him at his billet. When they all got home to Mac’s place they were very drunk. Concha, whose face was drawn from waiting up, made up a mattress for Ben in the diningroom and as they were all going to turn in Ben said, “By heavens, Concha, you’re a swell girl. When I make my pile I’ll buy you the handsomest pair of diamond earrings in the Federal District.” The last they saw of Salvador he was standing up in the front seat of the car as it went round the corner on two wheels conducting the three old men in La Adelita with big gestures like an orchestra leader.

Before Christmas Ben Stowell came back from a trip to Tamaulipas feeling fine. Things were looking up for him. He’d made an arrangement with a local general near Tampico to run an oil well on a fifty-fifty basis. Through Salvador he’d made friends with some members of Carranza’s cabinet and was hoping to be able to turn over a deal with some of the big claimholders up in the States. He had plenty of cash and took a room at the Regis. One day he went round to the printing plant and asked Mac to step out in the alley with him for a minute.

“Look here, Mac,” he said, “I’ve got an offer for you… You know old Worthington’s bookstore? Well, I got drunk last night and bought him out for two thousand pesos… He’s pulling up stakes and going home to blighty, he says.”

“The hell you did!”

“Well, I’m just as glad to have him out of the way.”

“Why, you old whoremaster, you’re after Lisa.”

“Well, maybe she’s just as glad to have him out of the way too.”

“She’s certainly a goodlooker.”

“I got a lot a news I’ll tell you later… Ain’t goin’ to be so healthy round The Mexican Herald maybe… I’ve got a proposition for you, Mac… Christ knows I owe you a hellova lot… You know that load of office furniture you have out back Concha made you buy that time?” Mac nodded. “Well, I’ll take it off your hands and give you a half interest in that bookstore. I’m opening an office. You know the book business… you told me yourself you did… the profits for the first year are yours and after that we split two ways, see? You certainly ought to make it pay. That old fool Worthington did, and kept Lisa into the bargain… Are you on?”

“Jez, lemme think it over, Ben… but I got to go back to the daily bunksheet.”

So Mac found himself running a bookstore on the Calle Independencia with a line of stationery and a few typewriters. It felt good to be his own boss for the first time in his life. Concha, who was a storekeeper’s daughter, was delighted. She kept the books and talked to the customers so that Mac didn’t have much to do but sit in the back and read and talk to his friends. That Christmas Ben and Lisa, who was a tall Spanish girl said to have been a dancer in Malaga, with a white skin like a camellia and ebony hair, gave all sorts of parties in an apartment with Americanstyle bath and kitchen that Ben rented out in the new quarter towards Chapultepec. The day the Asociacion de Publicistas had its annual banquet, Ben stopped into the bookstore feeling fine and told Mac he wanted him and Concha to come up after supper and wouldn’t Concha bring a couple of friends, nice wellbehaved girls not too choosy, like she knew. He was giving a party for G. H. Barrow who was back from Vera Cruz and a big contact man from New York who was wangling something, Ben didn’t know just what. He’d seen Carranza yesterday and at the banquet everybody’d kowtowed to him.

“Jez, Mac, you oughta been at that banquet; they took one of the streetcars and had a table the whole length of it and an orchestra and rode us out to San Angel and back and then all round town.”

“I saw ’em starting out,” said Mac, “looked too much like a funeral to me.”

“Jez, it was swell though. Salvador an’ everybody was there and this guy Moorehouse, the big hombre from New York, jez, he looked like he didn’t know if he was comin’ or goin’. Looked like he expected a bomb to go off under the seat any minute… hellova good thing for Mexico if one had, when you come to think of it. All the worst crooks in town were there."

The party at Ben’s didn’t come off so well. J. Ward Moorehouse didn’t make up to the girls as Ben had hoped. He brought his secretary, a tired blond girl, and they both looked scared to death. They had a dinner Mexican style and champagne and a great deal of cognac and a victrola played records by Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin and a little itinerant band attracted by the crowd played Mexican airs on the street outside. After dinner things were getting a little noisy inside so Ben and Moorehouse took chairs out on the balcony and had a long talk about the oil situation over their cigars. J. Ward Moorehouse explained that he had come down in a purely unofficial capacity you understand to make contacts, to find out what the situation was and just what there was behind Carranza’s stubborn opposition to American investors and that the big businessmen he was in touch with in the States desired only fair play and that he felt that if their point of view could be thoroughly understood through some information bureau or the friendly coöperation of Mexican newspapermen.

Ben went back in the diningroom and brought out Enrique Salvador and Mac. They all talked over the situation and J. Ward Moorehouse said that speaking as an old newspaperman himself he thoroughly understood the situation of the press, probably not so different in Mexico City from that in Chicago or Pittsburgh and that all the newspaperman wanted was to give each fresh angle of the situation its proper significance in a spirit of fair play and friendly coöperation, but that he felt that the Mexican papers had been misinformed about the aims of American business in Mexico just as the American press was misinformed about the aims of Mexican politics. If Mr. Enrique would call by the Regis he’d be delighted to talk to him more fully, or to any one of you gentlemen and if he wasn’t in, due to the great press of appointments and the very few days he had to spend in the Mexican capital, his secretary, Miss Williams, would be only too willing to give them any information they wanted and a few specially prepared strictly confidential notes on the attitude of the big American corporations with which he was purely informally in touch.

After that he said he was sorry but he had telegrams waiting for him at the Regis and Salvador took him and Miss Williams, his secretary, home in the chief of police’s automobile.

“Jez, Ben, that’s a smooth bastard,” said Mac to Ben after J. Ward Moorehouse had gone.

“Mac,” said Ben, “that baby’s got a slick cream of millions all over him. By gum, I’d like to make some of these contacts he talks about… By gorry, I may do it yet… You just watch your Uncle Dudley, Mac. I’m goin’ to associate with the big hombres after this.”

After that the party was not so refined. Ben brought out a lot more cognac and the men started taking the girls into the bedrooms and hallways and even into the pantry and kitchen. Barrow cottoned onto a blonde named Nadia who was half English and talked to her all evening about the art of life. After everybody had gone Ben found them locked up in his bedroom.

Mac got to like the life of a storekeeper. He got up when he wanted to and walked up the sunny streets past the cathedral and the façade of the national palace and up Independencia where the sidewalks had been freshly sprinkled with water and a morning wind was blowing through, sweet with the smell of flowers and roasting coffee. Concha’s little brother Antonio would have the shutters down and be sweeping out the store by the time he got there. Mac would sit in the back reading or would roam about the store chatting with people in English and Spanish. He didn’t sell many books, but he kept all the American and European papers and magazines and they sold well, especially The Police Gazette and La Vie Parisienne. He started a bank account and was planning to take on some typewriter agencies. Salvador kept telling him he’d get him a contract to supply stationery to some government department and make him a rich man.

One morning he noticed a big crowd in the square in front of the National Palace. He went into one of the cantinas under the arcade and ordered a glass of beer. The waiter told him that Carranza’s troops had lost Torreón and that Villa and Zapata were closing in on the Federal District. When he got to the bookstore news was going down the street that Carranza’s government had fled and that the revolutionists would be in the city before night. The storekeepers began to put up their shutters. Concha and her mother came in crying saying that it would be worse than the terrible week when Madero fell and that the revolutionists had sworn to burn and loot the city. Antonio ran in saying that the Zapatistas were bombarding Tacuba. Mac got a cab and went over to the Chamber of Deputies to see if he could find anybody he knew. All the doors were open to the street and there were papers littered along the corridors. There was nobody in the theater but an old Indian and his wife who were walking round hand in hand looking reverently at the gilded ceiling and the paintings and the tables covered with green plush. The old man carried his hat in his hand as if he were in church.

Mac told the cabman to drive to the paper where Salvador worked, but the janitor there told him with a wink that Salvador had gone to Vera Cruz with the chief of police. Then he went to the Embassy where he couldn’t get a word with anybody. All the anterooms were full of Americans who had come in from ranches and concessions and who were cursing out President Wilson and giving each other the horrors with stories of the revolutionists. At the consulate Mac met a Syrian who offered to buy his stock of books. “No, you don’t,” said Mac and went back down Independencia.

When he got back to the store newsboys were already running through the street crying, “Viva la revolucion revindicadora.” Concha and her mother were in a panic and said they must get on the train to Vera Cruz or they’d all be murdered. The revolutionists were sacking convents and murdering priests and nuns. The old woman dropped on her knees in the corner of the room and began chanting “Ave Marias.”

“Aw, hell!” said Mac, “let’s sell out and go back to the States. Want to go to the States, Concha?” Concha nodded vigorously and began to smile through her tears. “But what the devil can we do with your mother and Antonio?” Concha said she had a married sister in Vera Cruz. They could leave them there if they could ever get to Vera Cruz.

Mac, the sweat pouring off him, hurried back to the consulate to find the Syrian. They couldn’t decide on the price. Mac was desperate because the banks were all closed and there was no way of getting any money. The Syrian said that he was from the Lebanon and an American citizen and a Christian and that he’d lend Mac a hundred dollars if Mac would give him a sixtyday note hypothecating his share in the bookstore for two hundred dollars. He said that he was an American citizen and a Christian and was risking his life to save Mac’s wife and children. Mac was so flustered he noticed just in time that the Syrian was giving him a hundred dollars mex and that the note was made out in American dollars. The Syrian called upon God to protect them both and said it was an error and Mac went off with two hundred pesos in gold.

He found Concha all packed. She had closed up the store and was standing on the pavement outside with some bundles, the two cats in a basket, and Antonio and her mother, each wrapped in a blanket.

They found the station so packed full of people and baggage they couldn’t get in the door. Mac went round to the yards and found a man named McGrath he knew who worked for the railroad. McGrath said he could fix them up but that they must hurry. He put them into a secondclass coach out in the yards and said he’d buy their tickets but would probably have to pay double for them. Sweat was pouring from under Mac’s hatband when he finally got the two women seated and the basket of cats and the bundles and Antonio stowed away. The train was already full, although it hadn’t backed into the station yet. After several hours the train pulled out, a line of dusty soldiers fighting back the people on the platform who tried to rush the train as it left. Every seat was taken, the aisles were full of priests and nuns, there were welldressed people hanging onto the platforms.

Mac didn’t have much to say sitting next to Concha in the dense heat of the slowmoving train. Concha sighed a great deal and her mother sighed, “Ay de mi dios,” and they gnawed on chickenwings and ate almond paste. The train was often stopped by groups of soldiers patrolling the line. On sidings were many boxcars loaded with troops, but nobody seemed to know what side they were on. Mac looked out at the endless crisscross ranks of centuryplants and the crumbling churches and watched the two huge snowy volcanos, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihatl, change places on the horizon; then there was another goldenbrown cone of an extinct volcano slowly turning before the train; then it was the bluewhite peak of Orizaba in the distance growing up taller and taller into the cloudless sky.

After Huamantla they ran down through clouds. The rails rang under the merry clatter of the wheels curving down steep grades in the misty winding valley through moist forestgrowth. They began to feel easier. With every loop of the train the air became warmer and damper. They began to see orange and lemontrees. The windows were all open. At stations women came through selling beer and pulque and chicken and tortillas.

At Orizaba it was sunny again. The train stopped a long time. Mac sat drinking beer by himself in the station restaurant. The other passengers were laughing and talking but Mac felt sore.

When the bell rang he didn’t want to go back to Concha and her mother and their sighs and their greasy fingers and their chickenwings.

He got on another car. Night was coming on full of the smells of flowers and warm earth.

It was late the next day when they got into Vera Cruz. The town was full of flags and big red banners stretched from wall to wall of the orange and lemon and bananacolored streets with their green shutters and the palms waving in the seawind. The banners read: “Viva Obregon,” “Viva La Revolucion Revindicadora,” “Viva El Partido Laborista.”

In the main square a band was playing and people were dancing. Scared daws flew cawing among the dark umbrella-shaped trees.

Mac left Concha and her bundles and the old woman and Antonio on a bench and went to the Ward Line office to see about passage to the States. There everybody was talking about submarine warfare and America entering the Great War and German atrocities and Mac found that there was no boat for a week and that he didn’t have enough cash even for two steerage passages. He bought himself a single steerage passage. He’d begun to suspect that he was making a damn fool of himself and decided to go without Concha.

When he got back to where she was sitting she’d bought custard-apples and mangos. The old woman and Antonio had gone off with the bundles to find her sister’s house. The white cats were out of their basket and were curled up on the bench beside her. She looked up at Mac with a quick confident blackeyed smile and said that Porfirio and Venustiano were happy because they smelt fish. He gave her both hands to help her to her feet. At that moment he couldn’t tell her he’d decided to go back to the States without her. Antonio came running up and said that they’d found his aunt and that she’d put them up and that everybody in Vera Cruz was for the revolution.

Going through the main square again Concha said she was thirsty and wanted a drink. They were looking around for an empty table outside of one of the cafés when they caught sight of Salvador. He jumped to his feet and embraced Mac and cried, “Viva Obregon,” and they had a mint julep American style. Salvador said that Carranza had been murdered in the mountains by his own staffofficers and that onearmed Obregon had ridden into Mexico City dressed in white cotton like a peon wearing a big peon hat at the head of his Yaqui Indians and that there’d been no disorder and that the principles of Madero and Juarez were to be reëstablished and that a new era was to dawn.

They drank several mint juleps and Mac didn’t say anything about going back to America.

He asked Salvador where his friend, the chief of police, was but Salvador didn’t hear him. Then Mac said to Concha suppose he went back to America without her, but she said he was only joking. She said she liked Vera Cruz and would like to live there. Salvador said that great days for Mexico were coming, that he was going back up the next day. That night they all ate supper at Concha’s sister’s house. Mac furnished the cognac. They all drank to the workers, to the trade-unions, to the partido laborista, to the social revolution and the agraristas.

Next morning Mac woke up early with a slight headache. He slipped out of the house alone and walked out along the breakwater. He was beginning to think it was silly to give up his bookstore like that. He went to the Ward Line office and took his ticket back. The clerk refunded him the money and he got back to Concha’s sister’s house in time to have chocolate and pastry with them for breakfast.