BY JOHN FLEMING WILSON
If you should see bronzed men or men with soldierly bearing frequenting a certain office in a small street in San Francisco, and if you knew who the men were or what they represented, you could predict to a nicety the next Central American revolution, its leaders, and its outcome. That is because San Francisco is the place where everything commences, and many have their end in the way of troubles in the “sister republics.”
Three years ago the present government of Guatemala missed overthrow by just a hair. As the man who had been financing the insurrection said bitterly when the bottom fell out: “If it weren’t for women there’d be no revolutions, and if it weren’t for a woman every revolution would be successful.” He said this to the man who knows more about troubles political where there’s money and fighting than any other man in the world. This man nodded his head with a smile not often seen on his spare face. The financier didn’t like the look, and he growled some more: “They might at least have let me hold the government up for my expenses before calling the whole business off. I could have got everything back and interest on my venture.”
The other man kept on smiling. “That’s the way you fellows look at it. If you can’t win, sell out at a good price. But that don’t win in the long run. One woman can spoil the scheme.”
Two years before this a young woman landed from the Pacific Mail steamer City of Para, and registered at the Palace as from Mazatlan. She had a little maid who giggled and talked Mexican, some luggage with Vienna and Paris hotel labels over it, and the manner of a deposed queen. She signed herself as “Srta Maria Rivas.”
In due time Señorita Rivas left the hotel for quiet lodgings on Vallejo Street. But before she disappeared from the court, a gentle-mannered old man, with knotty hands, called and introduced a companion. “This is the young man I spoke to your excellency about. I present Señor Thomas Vincent.” Then the gray-haired man slipped away, and Thomas Vincent was left looking down into the dark face of Maria Rivas. He did not know why he was there, nor who she was, nor even the name of the man who had introduced him. But he was not sorry.
She let him stand while she glanced him over. Vincent drew himself up at her somewhat insolent manner, and was rewarded by a smile.
“Will you accept an invitation to supper to-night if I press you very hard?” she asked him in smooth English.
Vincent turned his eyes about the court. Then he looked down at her again, and nodded curtly. “Certainly, madam.” He flushed, and went on, “But I failed to catch your name. I am awfully embarrassed.”
She got to her feet, and held out a slender hand. “I am Miss Mary Rivas,” she said, quietly. “My father was formerly the president of Honduras. I went to school at Bryn Mawr, and I met your sister there. That’s why, when I found you were in San Francisco, I asked to have you brought and introduced.”
Vincent looked at her very soberly, almost pityingly. Then he offered her his arm, and they went into the supper-room, where everybody turned to watch their progress, knowing neither of them.
When she removed to the flat on Vallejo Street, Miss Mary Rivas told Vincent to come and take the first dinner with her. “We’ll christen the new place,” she said gayly, “and, besides, I hope you’ll find that I’m really American and can cook.”
That night at nine o’clock when the Mexican maid had departed giggling to the kitchen, Vincent’s hostess leaned forward over the table at which they sat, and rested her elbows on it. Her bare arms framed her face in a sudden way that took Vincent’s heart out of its regular beat. He leaped to his feet when Maria Rivas, dropping her head, burst into a torrent of sobs, her white shoulders heaving as her agony got the better of her.
As he stood there biting his lips she threw back her head and darted up and to the window. He heard her moan, as if she saw and heard something too awful to comprehend. He walked over and stood back of her till she swung round, and he saw the tear-stained face relax and the swimming eyes close. He carried her to the table, and laid her down across it, and rubbed her hands. Then the maid came in, still giggling hysterically, and together they revived her until she sat up between Vincent’s arms and slid from the big table to the floor. Vincent sent the astonished maid out by a gesture of command.
“Now, what’s the matter?” he demanded, hoarsely. “If you’re in trouble tell me.”
She panted before him. “It was what I remembered,” she replied. “How can I forget?”
“After I had been five years in the States papa sent for me to meet him in Colon. I got off the steamer, and he was waiting on the wharf. I knew he would do it just that way. He put on his glasses with both hands and looked at me as if he were very glad, and oh! I loved it, for it was just like it was when I was a little girl and ran into the big room.
“But trouble came in Panama, and papa thought we’d better come up to San Francisco. ‘I’ve been so busy down here one way and another,’ he said, ‘that I’m always suspected of conspiracy. Your mother is dead, and the fun of life is out of it. We will live peaceably as befits an old man and his daughter.’”
Vincent’s voice broke in on her story. “When was this?”
“Five years ago. And everything went all right till we got to Amapala. There a friend of papa’s came on board and showed me a paper. It said papa was not to be allowed to land in Honduras, as he was plotting an insurrection. He put on his glasses to read it. When he looked up at me, he said: ‘We shan’t see where your mother is buried, nor the place where you were born.’ He shook hands with the friend, and said nothing more.
“On the day we were at Ocos, in the afternoon, I saw the comandante come on the steamer with some soldiers. He said he wanted to arrest papa, but that if papa came along willingly he would not use force.
“‘I am under the American flag,’ papa said. ‘I know who has done this. It would mean my death if I went with you.’ Suddenly I heard a shot and then another. I hurried to papa’s room. Outside there were two soldiers aiming into it. I saw papa sitting on his camp-stool and his two revolvers were in his lap. He was hunting for his glasses, but the chain had slipped down. He could not see to shoot. One of the soldiers, after a long time, fired his gun again, and father suddenly picked up his revolvers, and I cried out again. He didn’t shoot, and I know now that he was afraid of hitting me. Then he fell. The soldiers fired again and ran away, panting and yelling to each other. I went in to papa, and he asked for his glasses, sitting up on the floor very weakly. When I found them and gave them to him, the blood was running very fast down his breast. He put on his glasses with both hands, wrinkling up his forehead in the old way, and looked at me very——He looked.... He said, ‘I am glad I could see you, little one ... before I go.’ That was all.”
She went to the window and stayed there, immobile, while Vincent walked up and down behind her. At last she turned around. “That was five years ago. No one has done anything to punish them.”
Vincent, because she was suddenly to him the woman, did what every man once in his life will do for one woman: he sacrificed his sense of humor. With all seriousness he stiffened up. “It was under my flag he was shot down. I’ve served under it. Give me another flag for Guatemala and I’ll go down there and those murderers shall die against a wall, with your flag flying over their heads, its shadow wavering at their feet on the yellow sand.”
Maria Rivas, because she was the Woman in this case, understood perfectly. “A revolution?” she said, very quietly. He bent over her hand gravely and youthfully. His manner was confident, as if he saw very clearly what was to be done and knew how to do it, not as if he had promised a girl with tear stains on her cheeks to overturn a government because of a murder one afternoon on a steamer in a foreign port.
This was the beginning of the affair. Its continuation was in a little town on the Guatemalan coast, where Vincent landed with a ton of munitions of war, marked “Manufactures of Metal,” and thirty ragged soldiers. A month later he had a thousand insurgents and twenty tons of munitions, and his blood had drunk in the fever that burns up the years in hours. The first thing Vincent did under its spell was to march on Ocos and take it. When the town was his and the comandante in irons, the young man took out of his pocketbook a little list of names, made out in Maria Rivas’s hand. He compared this list with the list of prisoners, and ordered out a firing squad. Half an hour later the shadow of the flag made by the Woman in the Vallejo Street flat wavered over the sand on which lay six men in a tangle. Generalissimo Thomas Vincent went out into the sun and looked at the last postures of the six, and then out across the brimming waters of the Pacific. A mail steamer lay out there in the midst of a cluster of canoes, the American flag drooping from her staff.
An Irishman in a major’s uniform came out of the cool of the barracks and stopped beside Vincent. “Another week ought to see us in the capital,” he said slowly. “But I don’t like this business, general. These beggars don’t amount to anything. Why did you order them shot?”
A barefoot girl of some ten years crept around the corner of the sunbaked wall. She picked her way over the sand, darting hot glances fearfully at the two officers. Suddenly she stooped over the crooked body of one of the motionless ones. She tugged at the sleeve of a shirt, and as the face turned slightly upward to her effort, she fell to beating on the ground with both hands, and sobbed in the heat, dry-eyed.
Vincent strode over to her, and gently picked her up. Her quick sobs did not cease as he carried her into the shade, his own face drawn and white. He looked over at the major, who stood gnawing on his stubby mustache. He did not reply to the question until the major repeated it angrily. “It was because ... they deserved it....” Vincent stopped, and then went on, almost inaudibly, “God knows why I did it, and then there’s ... the——” He stopped once more, for the girl’s hard sobs had ceased, and her lithe hand had darted from the folds of her scanty gown to the young general’s throat, and the major saw him set the burden softly down, and then fall forward, the blood pouring around the blade of a knife deep in his throat.
With an oath the major leaped over to him and lifted his head. Vincent’s eyes looked clearly into his. Then the wounded man looked over at the little girl, poised for flight, a dozen feet away. He nodded at her with an air of absolute comprehension, and then died.