U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [128]
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 tel 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.
-324-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 al ate supper at Concha's sis-ter's house. Mac furnished the cognac. They al 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 sil y 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 hil s and the kiss of a girl in love and big evenings spent swil ing beer with your friends;
on his broken back he felt the topheavy weight
-325-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 cal ed 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 Hohenzol erns.
Steinmetz had to run off to Zurich for fear of
going to jail; at Zurich his mathematics woke up al 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 fil ed 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 twelvedol ar 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