NEWSREEL XXX 6 страница. tered along the corridors

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tered 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 Sal-
vador 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 chant-
ing "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

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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 hypothecat-
ing 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

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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 grow-
ing 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 res-
taurant. 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 banana-
colored streets with their green shutters and the palms
waving in the seawind. The banners read: "Viva Obre-
gon," "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
umbrellashaped trees.

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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
custardapples 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 every-
body 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 em-
braced 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 staff-
officers and that onearmed Obregon had ridden into Mex-
ico 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.

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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 sis-
ter's house. Mac furnished the cognac. They all drank to
the workers, to the tradeunions, to the partido laborista,
to the social revolution and the agraristas.

Next morning Mac woke up early with a slight head-
ache. 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 re-
funded him the money and he got back to Concha's sis-
ter's house in time to have chocolate and pastry with them
for breakfast.

PROTEUS

Steinmetz was a hunchback,
son of a hunchback lithographer.

He was born in Breslau in eighteen sixtyfive,
graduated with highest honors at seventeen from the
Breslau Gymnasium, went to the University of Breslau
to study mathematics;
mathematics to Steinmetz was muscular strength
and long walks over the hills and the kiss of a girl in
love and big evenings spent swilling beer with your
friends;

on his broken back he felt the topheavy weight

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of society the way workingmen felt it on their straight
backs, the way poor students felt it, was a member of
a socialist club, editor of a paper called The People's
Voice.

Bismarck was sitting in Berlin like a big paper-
weight to keep the new Germany feudal, to hold down
the empire for his bosses the Hohenzollerns.

Steinmetz had to run off to Zurich for fear of
going to jail; at Zurich his mathematics woke up all
the professors at the Polytechnic;

but Europe in the eighties was no place for a pen-
niless German student with a broken back and a big
head filled with symbolic calculus and wonder about
electricity that is mathematics made power

and a socialist at that.

With a Danish friend he sailed for America steer-
age on an old French line boat La Champagne,

lived in Brooklyn at first and commuted to Yon-
kers where he had a twelvedollar a week job with
Rudolph Eichemeyer who was a German exile from
fortyeight an inventor and electrician and owner of a
factory where he made hatmaking Machinery and elec-
trical generators.

In Yonkers he worked out the theory of the Third
Harmonics

and the law of hysteresis which states in a formula
the hundredfold relations between the metallic heat,
density, frequency when the poles change places in the
core of a magnet under an alternating current.

It is Steinmetz's law of hysteresis that makes pos-
sible all the transformers that crouch in little boxes and
gableroofed houses in all the hightension lines all over

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everywhere. The mathematical symbols of Stein-
metz's law are the patterns of all transformers every-
where.

In eighteen ninetytwo when Eichemeyer sold out
to the corporation that was to form General Electric
Steinmetz was entered in the contract along with other
valuable apparatus. All his life Steinmetz was a piece
of apparatus belonging to General Electric.

First his laboratory was at Lynn, then it was
moved and the little hunchback with it to Schenectady,
the electric city.

General Electric humored him, let him be a so-
cialist, let him keep a greenhouseful of cactuses lit up
by mercury lights, let him have alligators, talking
crows and a gila monster for pets and the publicity
department talked up the wizard, the medicine man
who knew the symbols that opened up the doors of Ali
Baba's cave.

Steinmetz jotted a formula on his cuff and next
morning a thousand new powerplants had sprung up
and the dynamos sang dollars and the silence of the
transformers was all dollars,

and the publicity department poured oily stories
into the ears of the American public every Sunday and
Steinmetz became the little parlor magician,

who made a toy thunderstorm in his laboratory
and made all the toy trains run on time and the meat
stay cold in the icebox and the lamp in the parlor and
the great lighthouses and the searchlights and the re-
volving beams of light that guide airplanes at night

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towards Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles,

and they let him be a socialist and believe that
human society could be improved the way you can
improve a dynamo and they let him be pro-German
and write a letter offering his services to Lenin because
mathematicians are so impractical who make up for-
mulas by which you can build powerplants, factories,
subway systems, light, heat, air, sunshine but not
human relations that affect the stockholders' money
and the directors' salaries.

Steinmetz was a famous magician and he talked to
Edison tapping with the Morse code on Edison's knee
because Edison was so very deaf
and he went out West
to make speeches that nobody understood
and he talked to Bryan about God on a railroad
train

and all the reporters stood round while he and
Einstein
met face to face,
but they couldn't catch what they said
and Steinmetz was the most valuable piece of ap-
paratus General Electric had
until he wore out and died.

JANEY

The trip to Mexico and the private car the Mexican
government put at the disposal of J. Ward Moorehouse
to go back north in was lovely but a little tiresome, and it
was so dusty going across the desert. Janey bought some

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very pretty things so cheap, some turquoise jewelry and
pink onyx to take home to Alice and her mother and
sisters as presents. Going up in the private car J. Ward
kept her busy dictating and there was a big bunch of men
always drinking and smoking cigars and laughing at
smutty stories in the smokingroom or on the observation
platform. One of them was that man c she'd done
some work for in Washington. He always stopped to talk
to her now and she didn't like the way his eyes were when
he stood over her table talking to her, still he was an
interesting man and quite different from what she'd imag-
ined a laborleader would be like, and it amused her to
think that she knew about Queenie and how startled he'd
be if he knew she knew. She kidded him a good deal and
she thought maybe he was getting a crush on her, but he
was the sort of man who'd be like that with any woman.

They didn't have a private car after Laredo and the
trip wasn't so nice. They went straight through to New
York. She had a lower in a different car from J. Ward
and his friends, and in the upper berth there was a young
fellow she took quite a fancy to. His name was Buck
Saunders and he was from the panhandle of Texas and
talked with the funniest drawl. He'd punched cows and
worked in the Oklahoma oilfields and had saved up some
money and was going to see Washington City. He was
tickled to death when she said she was from Washington
and she told him all about what he ought to see, the
Capitol and the White House and the Lincoln Memorial
and the Washington Monument and the Old Soldiers'
Home and Mount Vernon. She said to be sure to go out
to Great Falls and told him about canoeing on the canal
and how she'd been caught in a terrible thunderstorm
once near Cabin John's Bridge. They ate several meals
together in the dining car and he told her she was a dandy
girl and awful easy to talk to and how he had a girl in
Tulsa, Ok., and how he was going to get a job in Vene-

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zuela, down at Maracaibo in the oilfields because she'd
thrown him over to marry a rich dirtfarmer who struck
oil in his cowpasture. G. H. Barrow kidded Janey about
her fine handsome pickup and she said what about him
and the redheaded lady who got off in St. Louis, and they
laughed and she felt quite devilish and that G. H. Barrow
wasn't so bad after all. When Buck got off the train in
Washington he gave her a snapshot of himself taken be-
side an oilderrick and said he'd write her every day and
would come to New York to see her if she'd let him, but
she never heard from him.

She liked Morton, the cockney valet, too, because he
always spoke to her so respectfully. Every morning he'd
come and report on how J. Ward was feeling, " 'E looks
pretty black this mornin', Miss Williams," or, " 'E was
whistlin' while 'e was shavin'. Is 'e feelin' good? Rath-er."

When they got to the Pennsylvania Station, New York,
she had to stay with Morton to see that the box of files
was sent to the office at 100 Fifth Avenue and not out to
Long Island where J. Ward's home was. She saw Morton
off in a Pierce Arrow that had come all the way in from
Great Neck to get the baggage, and went alone to the
office in a taxicab with her typewriter and the papers and
files. She felt scared and excited looking out of the taxicab
window at the tall white buildings and the round water-
tanks against the sky and the puffs of steam way up and
the sidewalks crowded with people and all the taxicabs and
trucks and the shine and jostle and clatter. She wondered
where she'd get a room to live, and how she'd find friends
and where she'd eat. It seemed terribly scary being all
alone in the big city like that and she wondered that she'd
had the nerve to come. She decided she'd try to find Alice
a job and that they'd take an apartment together, but
where would she go tonight?

When she got to the office, everything seemed natural
and reassuring and so handsomely furnished and polished

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so bright and typewriters going so fast and much more stir
and bustle than there'd been in the offices of Dreyfus and
Carroll; but everybody looked Jewish and she was afraid
they wouldn't like her and afraid she wouldn't be able to
hold down the job.

A girl named Gladys Compton showed her her desk,
that she said had been Miss Rosenthal's desk. It was in
a little passage just outside J. Ward's private office oppo-
site the door to Mr. Robbins' office. Gladys Compton was
Jewish and was Mr. Robbins' stenographer and said what
a lovely girl Miss Rosenthal had been and how sorry they
all were in the office about her accident and Janey felt
that she was stepping into a dead man's shoes and would
have a stiff row to hoe. Gladys Compton stared at her with
resentful brown eyes that had a slight squint in them
when she looked hard at anything and said she hoped
she'd be able to get through the work, that sometimes the
work was simply killing, and left her.

When things were closing up at five, J. Ward came out
of his private office. Janey was so pleased to see him stand-
ing by her desk. He said he'd talked to Miss Compton
and asked her to look out for Janey a little at first and
that he knew it was hard for a young girl finding her way
around a new city, finding a suitable place to live and that
sort of thing, but that Miss Compton was a very nice girl
and would help her out and he was sure everything would
work out fine. He gave her a blue-eyed smile and handed
her a closely written packet of notes and said would she
mind coming in the office a little early in the morning and
having them all copied and on his desk by nine o'clock.
He wouldn't usually ask her to do work like that but all
the typists were so stupid and everything was in confusion
owing to his absence. Janey felt only too happy to do it
and warm all over from his smile.

She and Gladys Compton left the office together.
Gladys Compton suggested that seeing as she didn't know

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the city hadn't she better come home with her. She lived
in Flatbush with her father and mother and of course it
wouldn't be what Miss Williams was accustomed to but
they had a spare room that they could let her have until
she could find her way around and that it was clean at
least and that was more than you could say about many
places. They went by the station to get her bag. Janey felt
relieved not to have to find her way alone in all that
crowd. Then they went down into the subway and got on
an expresstrain that was packed to the doors and Janey
didn't think she could stand it being packed in close with
so many people. She thought she'd never get there and
the trains made so much noise in the tunnel she couldn't
hear what the other girl was saying.

At last they got out into a wide street with an elevated
running down it where the buildings were all one or two
stories and the stores were groceries and vegetable and
fruit stores. Gladys Compton said, "We eat kosher, Miss
Williams, on account of the old people. I hope you don't
mind; of course Benny -- Benny's my brudder -- and I
haven't any prejudices." Janey didn't know what kosher
was but she said of course she didn't mind and told the
other girl about how funny the food was down in Mexico,
so peppery you couldn't hardly eat it.

When they got to the house Gladys Compton began to
pronounce her words less precisely and was very kind and
thoughtful. Her father was a little old man with glasses
on the end of his nose and her mother was a fat pear-
shaped woman in a wig. They talked Yiddish among
themselves. They did everything they could to make
Janey comfortable and gave her a nice room and said
they'd give her board and lodging for ten dollars a week
as long as she wanted to stay and when she wanted to
move she could go away and no hard feelings. The house
was a yellow twofamily frame house on a long block of
houses all exactly alike, but it was well heated and the bed

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was comfortable. The old man was a watchmaker and
worked at a Fifth Avenue jeweler's. In the old country
their name had been Kompshchski but they said that in
New York nobody could pronounce it. The old man had
wanted to take the name of Freedman but his wife thought
Campton sounded more refined. They had a good supper
with tea in glasses and soup with dumplings and red caviar
and gefültefisch and Janey thought it was very nice know-
ing people like that. The boy Benny was still in high-
school, a gangling youth with heavy glasses who ate with
his head hung over his plate and had a rude way of con-
tradicting anything anybody said. Gladys said not to mind
him, that he was very good in his studies and was going
to study law. When the strangeness had worn off a little
Janey got to like the s, particularly old Mr.
Compton, who was very kind and treated everything that
happened with gentle heartbroken humor.

The work at the office was so interesting. J. Ward was
beginning to rely on her for things. Janey felt it was going
to be a good year for her.

The worst thing was the threequarters of an hour ride
in the subway to Union Square mornings. Janey would
try to read the paper and to keep herself in a corner away
from the press of bodies. She liked to get to the office
feeling bright and crisp with her dress feeling neat and
her hair in nice order, but the long jolting ride fagged
her out, made her feel as if she wanted to get dressed and
take a bath all over again. She liked walking along Four-
teenth Street all garish and shimmery in the sunny early
morning dust and up Fifth Avenue to the office. She and
Gladys were always among the first to get in. Janey kept
flowers on her desk and would sometimes slip in and put
a couple of roses in a silver vase on J. Ward's broad ma-
hogany desk. Then she'd sort the mail, lay his personal
letters in a neat pile on the corner of the blotter-pad that
was in a sort of frame of red illuminated Italian leather,

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read the other letters, look over his engagement book and
make up a small typewritten list of engagements, inter-
views, copy to be got out, statements to the press. She laid
the list in the middle of the blotter under a rawcopper
paperweight from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
checking off with a neat W. the items she could attend to
without consulting him.

By the time she was back at her desk correcting the
spelling in the copy that had emanated from Mr. Rob-
bins' office the day before she began to feel a funny tingle
inside her; soon J. Ward would be coming in. She told
herself it was all nonsense but every time the outer office
door opened she looked up expectantly. She began to
worry a little; he might have had an accident driving in
from Great Neck. Then when she'd given up expecting
him he'd walk hurriedly through with a quick smile all
around and the groundglass door of his private office
would close behind him. Janey would notice whether he
wore a dark or a light suit, what color his necktie was,
whether he had a fresh haircut or not. One day he had a
splatter of mud on the trouserleg of his blue serge suit
and she couldn't keep her mind off it all morning trying
to think of a pretext to go in and tell him about it. Rarely
he'd look at her directly with a flash of blue eyes as he
passed, or stop and ask her a question. Then she'd feel
fine.

The work at the office was so interesting. It put her
right in the midst of headlines like when she used to talk
to Jerry Burnham back at Dreyfus and Carroll's. There
was the Onondaga Salt Products account and literature
about bathsalts and chemicals and the employees' baseball
team and cafeteria and old age pensions, and Marigold
Copper and combating subversive tendencies among the
miners who were mostly foreigners who had to be edu-
cated in the principles of Americanism, and the Citrus
Center Chamber of Commerce's campaign to educate the

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small investors in the North in the stable building quali-
ties of the Florida fruit industry, and the slogan to be
launched, "Put an Alligator Pear on Every Breakfast
Table" for the Avocado Producers Coöperative. That con-
cern occasionally sent up a case so that everybody in the
office had an alligator pear to take home, except Mr. Rob-
bins who wouldn't take his, but said they tasted like soap.
Now the biggest account of all was Southwestern Oil
campaign to counter the insidious anti-American propa-
ganda of the British oilcompanies in Mexico and to op-
pose the intervention lobby of the Hearst interests in
Washington.

In June Janey went to her sister Ellen's wedding. It
was funny being in Washington again. Going on the train
Janey looked forward a whole lot to seeing Alice, but
when she saw her they couldn't seem to find much to talk
about. She felt out of place at her mother's. Ellen was
marrying a law student at Georgetown University who
had been a lodger and the house was full of college boys
and young girls after the wedding. They all laughed and
giggled around and Mrs. Williams and Francie seemed
to enjoy it all right, but Janey was glad when it was time
for her to go down to the station and take the train to
New York again. When she said goodby to Alice she
didn't say anything about her coming down to New York
to get an apartment.