Tomato Juice and Blood

With the Stars and Stripes unfurled on a short staff at the left side of his desk and the Union Jack on a similar staff at the right, handsome and inimitable old H. Gordon Selfridge Sr. steers London's outstanding department store with the gusto of a Yankee captain commanding a trim British ship. His son H. Gordon Selfridge Jr. is also keen on the British dry goods business but the air is his special hobby. The better to keep his nerved in perfect trim to pilot his private piane, he sticks to tomato juice cocktails and to mild Virginia cigarets ("Selfridge Specials") made still milder by nicotine-absorbing cotton filters. Last week in London, Mr. Selfridge Jr., his sister Vicomtesse de Sibour and the Vicomte decided that they wanted the exciting, tonic stimulus of Spain, all bloody and savage as she was.

Piling into Mr. Selfridge's new $45,000 plane with himself at the controls, they swooped to Burgos in Spanish rebel territory, had swank fun which daring Sportsman Selfridge vividly described after flying his party safe home to Mayfair.

"We got, in about five hours, just about every experience Spain has to offer except being captured and shot," said he. "We passed through San Rafael just at the time the Government was making a surprise attack and being defeated. We saw about 150 dead on the hillside. Sixty-two prisoners, who were being herded down the street as we passed, were gibbering with fright because they knew what happened to prisoners in the civil war.

"We went to the top of the pass, where the Vicomte de Sibour proved much more experienced in handling a gun than the nationalist volunteers. Machine-gun bullets were pinging through the trees, and a spent bullet plopped on the ground six feet behind me. After an hour or so of watching the battle--it was not of the Great War kind but more, I imagine, the kind of thing that took place in the American Civil War--we decided to go back.

''When a Red airplane investigated us we had to scatter. The airplane seemed frightened by the necessarily ineffectual rifle fire from the ground. We went back to San Rafael, which had been ineffectively bombed in the meantime.

"Three miles further back our convoy of three autos was machine-gunned by a government airplane, which flew low along the road aiming at us. That was the only time I felt a sense of danger to myself.

"They seemed filled with a personal animosity that I did not much like. I surprised myself by the rapidity with which I developed a keen animosity. A minute later, when we were still seeking cover in the fields, a bomb dropped on soft ground within a hundred feet of us. I saw it leave the airplane, but it did not go off.

"I am terrifically impressed by the importance of this affair to Europe. England does not seem to grasp the real significance of it yet. It is civil war with a savagery that comes only after a long international war."

Next day the Vicomte de Sibour, having discovered that international restrictions have thus far prevented commercial aircraft companies from making rescue flights to take out tourists marooned in Spain, decided to start doing this non-commercially himself. Borrowing Mr. Selfridge's plane, he secured Standard Oil Co. co-operation in notifying Spaniards of all factions of his mission. Hoping this would reduce the number of shots Spaniards were sure to take at him anyway, the Vicomte took off to rescue 30 U. S. citizens who have been stranded in Granada since mid-July. These he planned to take in batches of four at a time to the International Zone in the city of Tangier, opposite Gibraltar.

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