XI. STRANDED IN RIO…

XI. STRANDED IN RIO

I had long expected far-famed Rio to be the climax and end of my South American wanderings. Portuguese civilization had never aroused any great interest within me; a glimpse of Brazil, with possibly a glance at Venezuela on my way home, to complete my acquaintance with the former Spanish colonies, seemed a fitting conclusion of a journey that had already stretched out into almost three years. When I had “fiscalized” the “Botanical Garden” street-car line for nearly a fortnight, therefore, and seen the chief sights of the Brazilian capital, I began to think of looking into the question of getting back to the United States.

Contrary to my earlier expectations, it would not be necessary to sign on as a sailor or stoke my way across the equator. With my unanticipated salary of six thousand a day and by dint of long experience in sidestepping high prices, I had succeeded in clinging to the equivalent of a hundred dollars from my consular earnings, as a reserve fund for this last emergency. With that munificent sum on hand, I might even scorn the long-familiar steerage and treat myself to a second-class passage on any of the steamers sailing frequently from Rio to New York.

Unfortunately I had not been keeping my ear to the ground. Years of care-free wandering in those sections of the earth where life is simple and in which man learns to depend chiefly on himself had caused me to overlook certain characteristics of the more complicated world I was rejoining. There even a vagabond is only to a limited degree a free agent. The reserve fund I had unexpectedly saved from the maw of Brazilian profiteers was in paper milreis and as one had been able for more than a decade to turn 300$000 into twenty English gold sovereigns at will, I had neglected to do so at once. On the bright “winter” morning of Saturday, the first of August, I strolled out of my modest hotel and along the Avenida Central with my habitual air of a care-free man of unlimited leisure—almost instantly to recognize that there was something strange in the wind. Before the offices of the Jornal do Commercio and the Jornal do Brazil were gathered seething crowds, eagerly spelling out the voluminous bulletins in their windows. I paused to read with them. Some one, it seemed, had kicked over the balance of power in Europe and France and Russia had decided to try to give Germany the trouncing for which she had so long been spoiling.

The news came to me out of a tropically clear sky. I did recall having glanced at a brief newspaper paragraph somewhere during my journey northward from Uruguay, to the effect that some prince of Austria and his consort had been killed at a Serbian town of which I had never heard; but I had known other assassinations of Europeans of high degree to blow over without a war resulting. Squabbling was always going on in the Balkans anyway. Pessimists had it that there was going to be a long and a real war; in common with all other wise men of the period I smiled condescendingly at the silly notion.

Yet here were very decided rumors of war. Maps were already appearing in the windows of newspaper offices, with scores of black and red-headed pins on them to show the advance of the various armies. The flurry might not amount to much, but it was high time I turned my paper milreis into real money, bought my ticket, and got out of this temperamental country before something serious really did happen. I strolled on and dropped into one of the countless “exchange” booths that flourish in and about the Avenida Central. Handing out my three hundred thousand reis I requested the man inside to hand me back twenty gold sovereigns. He looked at me scornfully, pointed to a small paragraph in the newspaper under my elbow, and went on painting a sign on a piece of cardboard. Perusing these I learned the astounding news that the milreis, which had been rated fifteen to the English sovereign as far back as men with average memories could recall, had dropped overnight to twenty-three to the pound! In other words of the same profane nature, my hundred dollars had dwindled in a few hours, merely on the strength of a bit of news from squabbling Europe, to about seventy. I refused to be “done” in that fashion. It was merely the old familiar trick of bankers who were taking advantage of a temporary scare to rob the garden variety of mankind of our hard-won earnings. In a day or so honesty, or at least competition, would prevail, and my three hundred milreis would be worth more nearly their honest value again. I re-pocketed them and decided to wait until the exchange moderated—and two days later my seventy dollars was worth less than sixty!

It may seem ridiculous that a man with three hundred thousand in his pocket should worry—at least to those who do not know Brazil, her currency, her prices, and her profiteers. But I began to feel uneasy. Not merely was the money I had by superhuman efforts saved to carry me home calmly melting away in my pocket without even being touched, but before long touching became unavoidable. In less time than would have seemed possible a third of my miserable bills had disappeared. Even if I got away at once, I should have to go straight home without stopping at Venezuela, and if I did not hurry I should not get home at all. I raced to the steamship offices—only to get a new shock. Not only had the value of my money been cut in two, and a third of it used up, but the price of steamship tickets had suddenly and mysteriously doubled, and only English gold was accepted. If I could have jumped upon a steamer that day, I could still have paid for a third-class passage. But there was no boat due for three days, and there were good chances that this would be several days late!

The air was full of war-bred excitement. Before it was announced that England had declared war, the British cruiser that had been lying in the harbor for nearly a week with her fires up was out stopping and searching all traffic along the coast. Several ships flying the German flag were anxiously awaiting orders in the bay, little realizing that their last voyage under that banner was over. Another German vessel forcibly put ashore fifty Russian steerage passengers who had embarked in Buenos Aires with all their savings, generously giving them back one-third the money they had paid for passage to Europe. Detachments of rifle-bearing Brazilian policemen patrolled the wharves to preserve order between the various nationalities. The German consul general had ordered all Germans on the reserve list in Brazil to report to the nearest consulate prepared to sail for home. German reservists poured into the capital from the southern states until it was only by climbing over a score or so of them that I could reach my room, into which two of them had been thrust. A standing client of the hotel, a business man of some standing and education, presumed upon our slight acquaintance to insist one evening that I walk out with him. As we stood before the bulletin-blinded window of the Jornal do Brazil with its pin-spotted map of Europe, my companion gloated loudly over each piece of news:

“In two veeks ve are in Parees! I go mineself to-morrow morning to offer me to der gonsul. Oh, py Gott, ven only Eng-lant stop noytral, ven only Eng-lant stop noytral!”

Unfortunately, from the German point of view, England did not “stop noytral,” and a few days later the German reservists began drifting back to the fazendas and chacaras from which they had been called.

A twelve-day holiday was declared by the government, so that even those who had money in the banks were as badly off as I, and as the value of the milreis went steadily downward, prices went skyrocketing. Day after day I invaded every steamship office in Rio, without distinction as to race, color, or customary rascality. I took captive every ship’s captain who ventured ashore, offering to do anything for my passage from shoveling coal to parading the poop with his wife’s pet poodle. Nothing doing! Even if a ship did now and then lift anchor and sneak away in the general direction of the United States, there were crowds of would-be passengers with vastly more influence, and far more mesmerism over the root of evil, than I, who were quite as willing to do anything within the pale of respectability to reach “God’s country.” I might, of course, have cabled home for passage money. There were one or two persons in my native land who probably had both the wealth and the confidence required to answer properly to such an appeal. But I had long since made it a point of honor that when I got myself in a hole I should get out again without screaming for a rope.

Psychologists as well as mere world roustabouts will probably admit that the more nearly penniless a man is the more ready is he to “take a chance.” His condition cannot be worse, and it may suddenly become much better. A vagabond evidently is subject to the same laws as more respectable members of society. At any rate, with only a few milreis left, I grew bold and instead of squeezing the last loaf of bread out of them, I squandered them for lottery tickets. On the following Saturday there was to be a “drawing extraordinary,” with the first prize nothing less than a hundred million reis! With that amount I might even buy a steamer for the trip home; besides, I had long wished to know how it feels to be a multimillionaire. Even in real money and at normal exchange a hundred million reis reached the respectable sum of $325,000, and though Brazilian shin-plasters had dropped to half their pre-war value, though every “piece” of ticket must pay a commission to the vendor and must bear the ubiquitous “consumption” tax in the form of a stamp, though the government takes five per cent. of all winnings and loads down the lucky ticket-holder with so many other stamps, taxes, and grafts that it requires a lawyer to dig him from under them, there would still remain the price of the bridal suite on any steamer plying the east coast of South America.

A crowd of mainly collarless and rather vacant-faced men and women, who for many years had been chasing that will o’ the wisp called the winning number by buying a “piece” of ticket whenever possible, were already gathered in and about the frontless shop down behind the main post-office of Rio when I reached it. No small number of them were plainly so carried away by visions of what they were going to do with their winnings that they had played hooky and jeopardized their real source of income. Even I felt the subtle breath of hope, fed mainly on ardent desire, that swept through the sour-scented throng as the formalities began. Five little girls in spotless white, but of several shades of color—as if the officials in charge had sought to have every complexion of their clients represented—stood behind as many whirligigs fitted with the figures from 0 to 9. Every twenty seconds the girls gave these a simultaneous whirl, and when they stopped the number indicated by the five figures visible to the audience was called out by an official in the front row. Then another girl thrust a hand into a globe-shaped urn and, with averted face, drew out a wooden marble on which was engraved the conventional signs for a sum of money. That represented the amount of the prize for the number just whirled, and, like it, was called out and then written down three times on as many printed slips by dozens of men and boys seated around the walls of the room, some of them government officials, some representatives of the various lottery agencies.

There are at least fifty prizes at each drawing, ranging all the way from about the price of a ticket, the occasional winning of which keeps the disgruntled clients from abandoning the game, up to the capital prize. The deadly sameness of the process made the formality a soporific which, combined with the tropical heat and the fetid breath of the multitude, soon left me drowsily leaning against my compact neighbors. Time and again some insignificant prize was announced and set down by the scribes around the walls, until I began sleepily to wonder if the hundred million ball had inadvertently been left out of the urn. When the “cem contos de reis” was at last droned out by the wooden-voiced announcer in the same bored, monotonous tone with which he had so often mentioned the equivalent of a dollar, my thoughts were wool-gathering and it was not until a flutter went through the crowd that I recognized the significance of the announcement. I glanced at the ticket in my hand, then at the number on the whirligigs. Protector of the Penniless! They were the same—at least the first three numbers on them were! An African-pated blockhead of unusual height blotted the last two of those on the platform out of my field of vision. I shouldered him aside, treading under foot a few immediate by-standers. The surge of pleasure that was mounting my spine turned to angry disgust. The last two figures were not even near enough my own to give me the “approximation” prize. With my usual carelessness and stupidity I had bought the wrong ticket, and the glamor of being a multimillionaire faded to the real but familiar experience of being “dead broke” in a foreign land. My disappointment was evidently widespread, for the tightly packed throng began instantly to melt away like molasses from a broken jug, so that by the time I reached the street there were hundreds of other glum-faced individuals shuffling off in both directions. Only then did I realize that the cambio in which I had spent my last milreis was quite fittingly named “Sonho do Ouro”—the “Golden Dream.”

But at least, if one must be stranded, there were few finer spots than Rio to be stranded in. I returned to my sight-seeing duties on the street-cars, and, by dint of outwitting the German proprietor of my hotel that evening, managed to save enough of that day’s six thousand to run an appeal next morning in the two principal newspapers of the capital. In all frankness it should have been lachrymose, but I had long since learned that a bold and boastful manner, with a facetious tinge, is more likely to bring real results:

American Writer and Explorer, university graduate, widely traveled but still young, knowing fluently Spanish, French, and German, and understanding Portuguese and Italian, being marooned here by the present situation, will accept temporarily any reasonable employment, in Rio or the interior, of sufficient interest to pass the time.

With no available means of moving on, I had time for anything—except to be bored.

That very evening I came within an ace of getting employment without even waiting for replies to my printed appeal—or at least I came as near it as did the suitor who would have been accepted but for the slight matter of the answer being “no” instead of “yes.” The first Brazilian singer ever heard in grand opera in Brazil was announced to appear at the Municipal Theater, and with that splendid sense of propriety for which the Latin-American is noted he had chosen, or been chosen, to make his début before his admiring fellow-countrymen as the hero of Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West.” The ticket speculators were out in full force when I scuffed my way down the mosaic-paved Avenida, but their machinations were naturally of little interest to a man who could not rub two coppers together. What had won my attention was rather a rumor that a group of stage cowboys was needed, and as my worst enemy could not have failed to admit that I came more nearly looking that part than anyone else wandering the streets of Rio, here was my opportunity to behold at close range the Brazilian misconception of the American wild west and its bloodthirsty denizens; besides, the two milreis paid to “supers” looked good to me. A veritable mob of loafers, rowdies, and gatunos surged back and forth in the narrow street behind the theater, sweeping down upon the fist-less old “master of supers” as often as he ventured outside the stage door. Several times he fled in dismay, but at length, when the opera was about to begin and the marshaling of cowboys was imperative, he ventured forth with the air of a man who is taking his life in his hands and began letting his selections be thrust upon him. I footballed my way through the crowd that was swinging to and fro with his every footstep and offered my services. My wide-brimmed felt hat alone should have won me a place. The harried functionary glanced at me, mumbled something to the effect that I did not in the least fit the part, and finally retreated within the stage door, followed by a motley collection of spindle-shanked Carioca street loafers who would have made an ideal background to a melodrama set in a tar-brushed Whitechapel.

Hardly was my last milreis gone when exchange improved and Brazilian money came halfway back to normal. The inevitable profiteer had already grasped his opportunity, scattered groups of populares took to mobbing the shops that had most flagrantly boosted food prices, and though even the courts did not function, because of the twelve-day holiday, the government was finally compelled to take advantage of the state of siege to punish a few of the most heartless offenders and publish a list of prices which could not be exceeded without loss of license and possible imprisonment. But the ways of the Brazilian are devious, and no great improvement was accomplished. The semi-military police, their rifles loaded with ball cartridges, patrolled not only those parts of town in which the various European nationalities might meet, but wherever disgruntled bands of the povo were likely to gather. It would probably not have been difficult to start a revolution in Brazil during those eventful days.

Meanwhile, not an answer did I get to my stirring call for employment, except an offer to become a combination door-keeper and office-boy, which I did not consider interesting enough even to pass the time. It was after three of a blazing afternoon that I rode out in my official capacity to Ipanema, where I had found behind a mass of rocks a little cove in which no bathing-suit was needed. There was a marvelous private beach, and a rock-walled dressing-room where only a stray negro wench might see me if she chose to look, but from which I could see the tips of the Corcovado and the “Sugar Loaf,” and, across the turquoise bay, silhouetted at this hour against the sun side of the sky, box-shaped Gavea, hazy blue with distance.

I had ridden halfway back to town when I looked up from reading one of Brazil’s epics and caught sight of the back of a head that looked familiar. The hat above it and the coat below I had certainly never seen before, and I could make out little of the face, but that little merely increased my conviction. By the time we had passed the tunnel I decided to make sure and, moving up close behind the man, I pronounced a name in a mild voice that would probably not have attracted attention if it were not the right one. The man turned around quickly, then thrust out a hand. As I had suspected, he was Raymond Linton, not only a fellow-countryman but a fellow-statesman, whom I had last seen in Buenos Aires.

A year before, Linton had acquired the Spanish-American concession for Edison’s recently invented “Kinetophone,” or “talking moving-pictures,” and, having played before all the uncrowned heads of Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and the Argentine, was still operating two separate outfits of this theatrical novelty in the last two of those countries. The entertainment had taken so well in Spanish-America that he had purchased the rights for Brazil also, and, having left Buenos Aires on the last day of July, little suspecting what the world had in store for itself, he was planning to start a third outfit in Rio de Janeiro.

“But I’m in tough luck,” said Linton, after our preliminary greetings and immediate personal history had ended.

“How come?” I asked, rather idly, to tell the truth, for my thoughts were still chiefly on my own predicament.

“You remember my B. A. manager?” he replied. “Splendid fellow and just the man I needed to handle the proposition up here in Brazil as soon as I get it started. But he is a Frenchman, and the day after I sailed he was called home to join the army. So now I’ve got to rush back to B. A. to keep that end going, and I have a brand new outfit, with special films in Portuguese and a man fresh from the Edison plant, landing to-day from the States. This man knows all the mechanical and electrical part of the job to perfection, but he probably never heard of the Portuguese language and couldn’t tell a Brazilian from an honest man. So I am mighty hard up for someone to take charge up here, and I don’t know where on earth I’ll find another fellow like the Frenchman.

“By Jove!” he went on a moment later, as the street-car swung out upon the Beira Mar, “I wish you felt like staying down here six months or so longer. I’d make you a proposition.”

“For instance?” I asked, merely out of idle curiosity. “I will not spend another month in South America under any circumstances, but I may have to in spite of myself.”

“If I could get a man who knows the South American from spats to hair-oil as well as you should after three years down here,” went on Linton with great earnestness, “I’d offer him a salary and a percentage, guaranteeing that he would not get less than——” naming a considerably larger sum than I had ever been paid as a respectable member of society—“a month, with all his actual traveling expenses, first class, all arrangements to be in U. S. currency, to take charge of the Brazilian end of this business and play in every city of over fifteen thousand population in the country—there are about fifty of them—and cover the whole republic, coast and interior, from the Uruguayan border clear up to where the Amazon begins to run down off the Andes. It would mean about six months’ playing the principal towns, and after that the man could take the thing around for another half year to the smaller places, and by the time he got through he’d know Brazil better than Edison knows electricity.”

“Mighty interesting proposition,” I remarked, as the street-car drew up at its destination beside the Largo da Carioca, “and I hope you find the man you need. I have a serious problem on my hands, too, and that is how to get back to the U. S. A. early enough this fall to join in an important coon hunt.”

For I did not for a moment seriously consider the offer as made to me, or at least as acceptable. I had already been three times as long in South America as I had expected to be when I first set out to explore the traces of the old Inca highway between Quito and Cuzco. I was decidedly “fed up” with “Spigs” and all their ways; too long a time outside the United States atmosphere is not good for the mind one wishes to keep American, just as too long a time in the tropics is injurious to the body one would keep robust. Moreover, never having seriously tested it, I was not at all certain I had the charlatanism indispensable to any success in the realms of “practical business”—and there was still a possibility that I might get aboard something or other northward bound.

Next day I took to pursuing ships and skippers with renewed energy. But the town was swarming with stranded Americans willing and able to pay any sum that could be mentioned in one breath for the privilege of sleeping in a stokehole of anything bound for the United States. That afternoon I dropped in on Linton at his hotel and entertained him with a hypothetical question.

“Suppose,” I said in my most casual tone, “suppose such a man as you are looking for would sign a contract for only six months, that he wanted his salary to start at once, instead of the first of September, and that on the day he signed he would need an advance of about five hundred thousand—er—reis to get a proper movie-magnate silk hat and diamond solitaire, what would be your private remarks when you reached the bathroom?”

“If he had your experience with South Americans, for instance,” came the prompt reply, “I’d have the contract ready within half an hour.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I replied. “I just wanted to know, from a sociological point of view.”

Whereupon I set out once more and went over all the steamship offices and captains’ favorite bar-rooms with a fine-toothed comb, only to be more than ever convinced that my native land had lost all desire ever to see me again. So, late that evening, having paused at the edge of the impassable sea to shake a fist at the northern horizon, I stopped at Linton’s hotel to sign the contract he had just drawn up. By its terms I was to take full charge of the tour of the Kinetophone in Brazil, playing the entire country, except the states south of São Paulo that I had already seen, ending up on the Amazon six months later, and receiving my first month’s salary at once—as soon as the banks opened. Early next morning a messenger from the steamship-office I had most often pestered brought me word that if I would report at once I could sign on a ship sailing that evening for Pensacola, Florida; and later in the day I was offered a chance to go to New Orleans as a deck-hand. But then, it would have been a long walk from either of those ports to the place I called home.

During the remaining half of August I did little but spend my first month’s salary, chiefly among the tailors of Rio, at prices which made the advertisements in the New York papers look enticing. Linton had arranged his Buenos Aires business to run on without him until we could give the customary special performance before the president of the republic. This he hoped would be within a week, but he had reckoned without Brazilian red tape. The “outfit” arrived the day after I signed the contract,—eight large pieces of what looked like the baggage of a barn-storming company, and Wayne Tuthill of Long Island and the Edison factory. “Tut,” as it was natural he should be quickly dubbed, was a tall, handsome, ingenuous lad of twenty-four, of that clean-cut, clean-minded type of American youth which makes the libertine juventud of South America stand out in such striking contrast. He had never before been outside the United States—which I rated an asset—but had been the unhesitating choice of the company when Linton wired for their best practical electrician and operator who would accept a year’s contract.

On the following day I bade farewell to my little inside room in the German hotel down in the raw-coffee scented heart of Rio, and moved into a new home with what their “want ad” in the Jornal do Brasil described as a “family of all respectability.” There were hundreds of private families only too glad to patch out their income by taking in a “serious cavalheiro” as a paying guest. My new quarters were on the Praia de Botafogo, in the district out beyond the tiny praça and statue of José de Alencar. From my easy-chair I could look out across the bay at one end of the harbor and, though a headland cut off the “Sugar Loaf,” I had a splendid view of all the long, fantastic sky-line of Rio, now silhouetted against the sun-lighted clouds, now standing out in the brilliant sunshine as if barely a stone’s throw away. The room had a southern exposure, too, which is important in Rio, especially toward the end of August with summer coming on. True, there were a few drawbacks. I had to take board as well as lodging, though I was by no means sure that a glimpse into Brazilian family life would offset the heaviness of Brazilian family food. There were good electric lights, but no carpets or rugs, virtually unknown in Brazil, and not a suggestion either of bookshelf or wastebasket, while the table was a tiny thing implying that at most the occupant might have now and then to write a perfumed lover’s note.

Though it was some time before we got our show started, or even got the outfit ashore, we were a busy trio. First and foremost there was the Herculean problem of getting the thing through the customs. This was no such simple matter as going down to the ugly little green Alfandega building on the water front, opening the boxes, paying our duty, and taking them away. Things are not done in that breathless manner in Brazil. Knowing that it costs more to get a moving-picture film into Brazil than to buy it in Europe or the United States, we were prepared to be held up by the mulatto footpads masquerading as a government, if only they would have it over with at once and let us go our way with whatever we might have left. What we needed first of all, it seemed, was a despachante, a native customs broker, familiar with all the ins and outs of the laws on import duties—and an expert in circumventing them. But could we not attend to this matter ourselves, seeing there were three of us in the prime of life, two speaking Spanish and one more or less Portuguese, and with nothing else whatever to do? We could not. We must have the services of a regular despachante—just why, we learned all in due season. The broker, however, did not rob us of occupation; in fact, we were still permitted to do almost all the work. We spent several hours one day hunting out our boxes amid an orderless jumble of many ship-loads of warehoused merchandise and wrestling them out into plain sight. The rest of the afternoon we wasted in coaxing the swarm of supercilious officials who lolled about the place to examine them. They paid us not the slightest attention, until our despachante came to vouch for our existence. Then one of them “examined” the eight boxes by gingerly lifting half of the wooden cover of one of them, glancing at the unopened inner tin casing, and ordering the covers nailed down again. This, however, was only a preliminary formality, and while our broker prepared for the next moves in their regular, deliberate order, we contained ourselves in such patience as we possessed.

Meanwhile we learned many interesting details about Brazilian customs laws and those who enforce them. Portland cement, we found, pays duty on gross weight. More than half the barrels of such a shipment had been broken in transit, or by the wharf stevedores who landed it, and all vestige of cement had been lost. The customs men carefully gathered the scattered barrel-staves together, weighed them, and charged the assignee duty on them as cement! Regular merchants in Rio have a despachante, we learned, who does all the customs business of his client at a fixed rate of twelve milreis a box, large or small. If he succeeds in avoiding any part of the duty due, the merchant pays him half that amount as a reward. Thus there arrives a box of twenty pairs of shoes, on which the duty would be sixty dollars. The despachante arranges with some of his friends in the customhouse to let the box in for twenty dollars, and the assignee pays that amount in duty and gives the broker, in addition to his customary twelve milreis, one half of the forty dollars saved. The Brazilians have no word for bribery; they use the expression comer (to eat). A merchant who has been forced to pay full legal duty on a bill of goods asks his despachante anxiously, referring to the strict new customs official who passed on it, “Elle já come?” To which, perhaps, comes the sad answer, “Não, ainda não come” (He doesn’t eat—yet). A few weeks later the merchant sends the honest man a few bottles of perfumery or some equally welcome present. If he sends them back, he is not yet “ripe.” But at length word goes round, “Já come” (Now he eats), and the merchants whose goods pass through his hands heave a sigh of relief.

“When your shipment arrives,” a foreigner long engaged in business in Rio explained, “and the duty is large, say twenty or thirty contos, you go to the customhouse yourself and say to the conferente, ‘I shall be in my office from three to four to-morrow.’ Then you go away. The conferente is the official examiner; his assistant, who opens and closes the boxes and does the other manual labor, is called his “fiel” (faithful one). You cannot be a successful merchant in Rio without being on friendly terms with your conferente and his “fiel.” When his work ends, at three, he drops in to see you before he goes home, and the matter is fixed up to the satisfaction of both parties. If you try to fight the system you are up against it. Only half the articles that come into Brazil are on the tariff schedule, and if a conferente has it in for you he will decide that your declaration is made out wrong, no matter how you make it out, and will fine you for trying to flimflam the government—and a certain percentage of all fines go to the man who discovers the ‘irregularity.’ Then before goods leave the customhouse they must have the government consumption-tax stamps on them, and there is another fine chance to ‘eat.’ The man who was at the head of the stamp-selling down there for thirty-two years was recently retired on a pension and written up in the papers as ‘a life-long and faithful servant of the Republic’; yet ever since I have lived here he could be ‘fixed’ at from one fourth to one half the legal price of the stamps. The young fellow who now has his job doesn’t ‘eat’ yet, so all the merchants are cursing him, and his fellow-officials accuse him of fazendo fita—of showing off. But word is going round now that he is beginning to ‘eat’.”

Beautiful scenery evidently does not beautify character. The dishonest officials cannot plead the excuse of necessity, for their legal income is high. Inspectors get three contos, conferentes eight hundred to a thousand milreis a month, which surely is generous to men who work only from eleven to three, with much “tolerance” as to absences during that time and at least sixty-five legal holidays a year. “Tariff legislation,” says an outspoken Brazilian publicist, “more than any other one thing, has been the source of the corruption that has rotted public service, and in the growth of the sinister privileges fostered by the ‘protective’ system there is almost sole responsibility for the widespread perversion of ideals.”

It took a full week to get our outfit through the customs, and it would have taken longer had nature not gifted me with an impatience capable of developing into profanity. Both our despachante and the endless gantlet of scornful officials which our case was forced to run were firm believers in the efficacy of “amanhã”—which is our old friend “mañana” of Spanish-America. How many sheets there were of laboriously hand-written documents, signed every which way by scores of insufferable loafers in the crowded Alfandega, in the intervals between smoking cigarettes, gossiping with friends, scowling with a haughty air upon whoever dared insist on attracting their attention, I have no means of computing. Typewriting is illegal in government business in Brazil, as in most of Latin-America; too many old fogies who know only how to scratch with a pen would have to be dispensed with to make way for such an innovation, and they are the backbone of political parties. In the end Linton had to deposit $700, which it was solemnly promised would be returned to him when the outfit was taken out of the country. Officially, the American dollar is worth 3$120 in Brazil. I immediately reduced the $700 to milreis at that rate, and Linton prepared to pay it. But, we were informed, the government accepts its own money only at 4$120 to the dollar! More figuring resulted in the discovery that we must entrust the Brazilian government with nearly three contos. Thirty-five per cent. of this deposit must be in gold. I began to compute this percentage by dividing by 4$120. The broker smiled at me as at an amusing child. When the milreis is figured back into gold, he explained, the dollar must be taken at 2$120. In other words, a Brazilian government official can demonstrate before your very eyes that thirty-five per cent. of seven hundred dollars is $480!

On the day after our outfit had at last been admitted to practice in Brazil, and the despachante’s seemingly exorbitant demands had been satisfied, one of us happened to be in his office when in dropped the bewhiskered old fossil who had “examined” our stuff. He was cheery and gay now, all dressed up, his sour and haughty official manner wholly gone, and he greeted everyone in the office like old and esteemed friends. After the first embrace or two he and the despachante sat down on opposite sides of the latter’s work table, their hands met once under it, then the fossil rose and went away with a satisfied smile scattered among his untrimmed whiskers and a hand lingering affectionately about one pocket.

Our next task was to hire a lawyer to get the trademark “Kinetophone” registered in Brazil in the name of the Edison Company. This matter is of prime importance to anyone introducing a new invention into the land of “amanhã.” It is not that the Brazilians are so inventive that they can readily imitate new contrivances; on the contrary, their mechanical genius is close to zero. But if he seldom invents or initiates, the “Brazie” is not lazy in the sense of complete indolence. He has the gambling instinct as well as the tropical desire to get through life as easily as possible, and laborious trickery seems to him a lesser effort than work. Being quick to appropriate the ideas of others, he is much given to stealing trademarks.

To tell the truth, the Argentine is worse than Brazil in this respect. There is a regular band of rascals in Buenos Aires who do nothing but steal and register foreign trademarks, while in Rio the traffic is at least unorganized. The laws of both countries give the first person to deposit a trademark in the national archives the sole right to use it. The mark may have belonged for half a century to an American or a European company; it suffices for some argentino or Brazilian to get it registered in his own name to prevent the legitimate owner from using it in that country without paying the thief blackmail. One of this gentry reads in a newspaper or a catalogue of some new foreign invention with a catchy name, rushes to register it as his own, and then lies in wait for the real owner. Even a trademark of the French government tobacco monopoly was stolen by an argentino and France was forced to pay him a handsome sum to get it back. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, Linton had found the Kinetophone already registered. But as the native whose eye had been attracted by the word had not understood what it represented, he had registered it as the name of a lechería, or milk-shop! Nevertheless Linton was compelled to pay him several hundred pesos for the privilege of using the word in his advertising or even in the theater, for the moment he put up a poster or ran a film and record in which the word “kinetophone” appeared, he could have been arrested and his outfit confiscated. It costs only 120$000, including lawyer’s fees, to have a trademark registered in Brazil, yet Americans have been blackmailed out of as much as 30,000$000 for neglecting to do so in time.

It turned out that the Kinetophone had been overlooked by Brazilian tricksters, but we had to wait three days to make sure of this before we dared publicly use the name. Meanwhile we had visited incognito the fifty cinemas then running in Rio, with a view to classifying them for future purposes; we had offered the “A. C. M.” a benefit performance later for the privilege of trying out our apparatus in their hall, and had set out in trio to make our first contract.

The chief moving-picture man of Brazil, with a string of cinemas in Rio and São Paulo and connections elsewhere, was a Spanish ex-bootblack. Like his colleagues and rivals, he informed us that it was not customary in Brazil to pay a fixed sum for such a novelty as we had to offer, that he “never risked a cent,” but that he would be willing to talk to us on a percentage basis. Then we found that the ex-bootblack had Missouri blood in his veins—perhaps because he had once driven mules—and that he would not believe in the drawing powers of Edison’s new invention until he had been shown. We had no misgivings as to our ability to show him, so we went out along the Mangue Canal, with its mirrored double row of royal palms on either bank, and rented for a day the old open-work wooden “Theatro Polytheama,” where we gave the doubting Thomases of the “movie” world, and a throng of newspaper men and “influential citizens,” a convincing private exhibition.

Next day we signed a “fifty-fifty” contract with the ex-bootblack to play for sixty days in his establishments in Rio, São Paulo and vicinity. By that time it was already September 7th, the first of Brazil’s two Independence Days, and “Tut” and I had taken up our abode on the Praia do Flamengo in the district called Larangeiras, or “Orange-trees.” It was nearer town than my former room; moreover, while I am duly exhilarated by the beauties of nature, no amount of scenery will make up for a constant diet of black beans and dry rice, surrounded on four sides by a constantly caterwauling Brazilian family dressed in soiled underwear or grease-spotted kimonos. As a matter of fact I lost nothing even of scenery by the change. We had a marvelous view of the “Sugar Loaf,” of all the great bay and its islands, of Nictheroy and the hazy outline of farther Brazil beyond. With our feet on our own railing we could see the steamers that might be bringing us news from home come slipping in at the harbor’s mouth, or watch a blood-red sunset on the cloud billows across the bay. We were four doors from the President’s palace of Cattete, and in the morning we could stroll across the Beira Mar in our bathing-suits to dive off the president’s private wharf and swim out to the little warship he always kept ready for the day when motives of health should force him to leave Brazil in a hurry. Men, women and children, with a towel over their shoulders, were familiar morning sights all along the Beira Mar—the women, of course, chiefly of foreign origin, for no real Brazilian lady would ever dream of bathing—at least in semi-public. Swimming was allowed along Rio’s magnificent driveway until nine in the morning, and some bathers were to be seen now and then at other hours, for, as the resplendent black policeman on our corner told us, while he watched several of them pass. “Oh, yes, they do bathe after nine, but it is against the law.”

Finally, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, the fourteenth of September, we gave the first public exhibition in Brazil of the Kinetophone—and before midnight we had given eleven of them. We had opened in the “Cinema Pathé” on the Avenida Central, in many ways the proudest and most fashionable motion-picture house not only of that sumptuous thoroughfare but of all Brazil; but our début was not attended with the customary formality. For a week Linton had been cooling his heels in the anteroom of the Cattete Palace, hoping to have the honor—and incidentally the prestige and publicity—of giving the president of the republic a private exhibition before disclosing the virtues of the new invention to the general public. But those were busy times in government circles, for, in addition to his manifold political troubles, the president had recently acquired an eighteen-year-old wife, so that at length we were forced to start without his blessing and the customary send-off of important novelties in Latin-American countries. By this time the World War was on in earnest and Brazil was loudly complaining of “A Crise,” or hard times; yet when our first day at the “Cinema Pathé” was ended, we found that the box-office had taken in considerably more than three million—reis! Even in real money that was better than a thousand dollars.

That very night Linton fled to Buenos Aires, leaving behind a document making me the “Brazilian concessionary” of the Kinetophone, and the weight of the whole enterprise fell abruptly on my shoulders. My first duty was to get our share of the opening day’s receipts. High noon having been agreed upon as the time to divide the previous day’s earnings, I called at that hour upon the general manager for Rio of the “Companhia Brazileira,” to get our half of the three million in cash—Brazilian cash, unfortunately—and carried it to the British bank. That was a daily formality thereafter, for while we had all due respect for the Brazilian and his business methods, we adopted the same viewpoint in dealing with him as the Scotchman who, asked for a recommendation by a retiring clerk, wrote:

“This is to certify that Sandy McCabe has worked for me the past twelve years. Regarding his honesty I can say nothing, as I never trusted him.”

The Kinetophone consists of a series of films projected from a booth like an ordinary motion-picture film, and of a large electrically operated phonograph, with six-minute records, set on the stage or behind the screen and synchronized with the film by means of tiny stout black cords running over pulleys attached to the walls or the ceiling of the intervening room. As ours could not be thrown from the same projecting machine as the voiceless films, the usual process was to set up our special apparatus in the same booth with the other, if there was room, cutting a second opening in the front of this to “shoot through;” otherwise we required a special booth to be built for us alongside the regular one. Our outfit consisted of fifteen films and their corresponding phonograph records. First of all, on every program was an explanation of the new invention and a demonstration of its power to reproduce all kinds of sounds, a film specially made to order in Portuguese, with the flag of Brazil, the president’s picture, and other patriotism-stirring decorations in the background. The only other film in the native tongue was a dialogue called the “Transformation of Faust,” in which two Portuguese youths, who had somehow been enticed out to the Edison factory, ranted for six minutes through a portion of Goethe’s masterpiece. But there were extracts from five popular Italian operas and three Spanish numbers, all of which took well with Brazilians, and though the remainder were in English, they were musical and comical enough to win interest irrespective of language.

The Kinetophone requires two operators, one in the booth and the other at the phonograph. Thus I was not only manager, auditor and “concessionary,” but obliged to run the stage end of the performance. Fortunately we did not furnish the entire program, our part of the bill consisting of the “Portuguese Lecture” and two other numbers, filling one-third of the hour constituting a “section” and leaving the rest of it to ordinary films or whatever form of entertainment the local manager chose to supply. Every hour, therefore, from one in the afternoon to eleven at night, seven days a week, I had to be on hand to put on the first of our records, jump out to the edge of the audience and signal to “Tut” in his special booth, spring back again and touch off the phonograph at exactly the right instant, repeat this with the other two records, thrust these back into their special trunk, lock it—and spend the next forty minutes, other duties willing, as I saw fit. Never during those eleven hours a day did I dare go far enough away from the theater to get a real let-up from responsibility. The most I could do was to snatch a lunch or stroll down to one end or the other of the Avenida, to see the ships depart or, on windy days, to watch the sea pitching over the sea-wall of the Beira Mar, wetting even the autobusses—and then hurry back again for our part of the next “section.”

Besides running the films, “Tut” had to rewind them after each performance, so that his leisure time was ten minutes less to the “section” than mine. I soon found that he was not only a highly efficient operator, but that he had just those qualities needed to make a long companionship agreeable. Honest and genuine as gold coin in war time, easy-going, optimistic, unexcitable, wholly ignorant of foreign languages, temperaments, or customs, yet pleasant with all races and conditions of men, he was an ideal team-mate, having large quantities of that patience so much needed in tropical and Latin lands, and of which I have so scanty a supply. Thanks to “Tut,” the Brazilians got better Kinetophone performances than most Americans have heard. The novelty did not take particularly well in the United States, though for no fault of its inventor. The essential and all important thing with the Kinetophone is perfect synchronization. If the character on the screen speaks or sings exactly as he opens his mouth, the illusion is remarkable; let there be the slightest interval between the sound and the lip movements and the thing becomes ludicrous. When the invention was first shown in the United States there was perfect synchronization, and a consequent rush of orders for machines and operators. There being no supply of the latter on hand, they had to be trained in a hurry. Many were ill prepared for their duties, with the result that when they were hurriedly sent out on the road they frequently gave distressing performances. Gradually, therefore, the invention was withdrawn, with the promise to perfect it further and make it “fool proof,” so that by the time Linton had taken the concession for Brazil, “Tut,” the expert who had trained others, was available and the new form of entertainment made a much bigger “hit” in Brazil than in the land of its origin.

I had only one serious fault to find with “Tut,” one that added materially to those of my managerial duties which had to do with keeping on pleasant terms with the somewhat sour manager of the “Cinema Pathé.” Less fond than I of strolling the downtown streets during our breathing spells, “Tut” usually spent them with an American novel or magazine in the unoccupied second-story anteroom of the theater. There the “Pathé” had stored its extra chairs, and from them “Tut” was wont to choose a seat, place it at the edge of the stone balustrade of the balcony, where he could look down upon the crowd surging up and down the Avenida, and pass his time in reading. But the chairs, as is usual in South America, were of the frail variety, and “Tut,” a generous six feet in height and by no means diaphanous in weight, had the customary American habit of propping his feet on a level with his head—with the result that at more or less regular intervals “crash!” would go a chair. On the day when the manager, his eyes bloodshot with rage, requested me to visit the second-story anteroom with him, during “Tut’s” absence, the wrecks of eleven chairs were piled in one corner of it. After that I never had the audacity to go up and investigate, but crashing sounds were still heard during the half hour devoted to the silent films.

The “Companhia Brazileira” advertized extensively, and the Kinetophone was well patronized from the start. Brazilians take readily to novelties, especially if they can be made the fashion, and our audiences of the second day included both priests and “women of the life,” which is a sure sign of popular success in Brazil. As our doubled entrance fee of two milreis was high for those times of depression, also perhaps because the “Cinema Pathé” was considered a gathering place of the élite, we entertained only the well dressed, or, perhaps I should say, the overdressed. They were blasé, artificial audiences, never under any circumstances applauding or giving any sign of approval; they always gave me the impression of saying, “Oh, rather interesting, you know, as a novelty, but I could do much better myself if I cared to take the time from my love-making and risk soiling my spats and my long, slender, do-nothing fingers.” But as they continued to bring us as our share of the receipts more than a conto of reis a day, it was evident that they found the performance pleasing.

The moving picture might be a real educating influence on the imaginative and emotional Brazilians, were it not that those who manipulate this business see fit to put their faith in an intellectual bilge-water which gives chiefly false notions of life in the world beyond their horizon. The same “Penny Dreadfuls” in film, concocted of saccharine sentimentality, custard-pie “comedy,” and a goodly seasoning of the criminal and the pornographic, that add to the weariness of life elsewhere, are the rule in the Brazilian capital. Here even the élite, or at least the well-dressed, flock to see them. This is partly due to the lowly state of the legitimate stage in Brazil and the atrocious performances given by nearly all the “actors” who seek their fortunes in South America. Though some Latin-American playwrights, and a few of the players, have done things worth while, the stage depends almost entirely upon “talent” imported from Europe, entertainers of Spanish (or, for Brazil, of Portuguese) origin, with the crudest notions of histrionic art, or superannuated discards from the French or Italian stage, mixed with youthful hopefuls who have crossed the Atlantic to try it on the dog. These misplaced porters and chambermaids, mere lay figures dressed to represent certain characters, romp about the stage in their natural rôles, their eyes wandering in quest of friends in the audience, whom they give semi-surreptitious greetings and seek to charm by “grandstand plays,” making the while the mechanical motions they have been taught and automatically repeating what they are told to say by the prompter. It is strange that the often artistic Latin races will endure the prompter, instead of insisting that actors learn their parts. It is a rare experience to find a place in the house where one can hear the play and not hear the prompter snarling the lines five words ahead, so that any semi-intelligent person in the audience could repeat them after him more effectually than do most of the louts behind the footlights. As is the case with literature, the theater in South America is mainly designed to appeal to the male. Respectable women are rarely seen at the average playhouse, not merely avoiding the “casino” with its “specially imported blond artistes” of not too adamantine morals, but even what corresponds to our vaudeville, where the audience sits smoking with its hat on and the boxes are graced by demimondaines. In fact, the stage and respectability have no connecting link in the Latin-American mind. All over South America, and especially in Brazil, “actress” is synonymous with less complimentary terms; nor is it possible to convince a Brazilian that such is not universally the case elsewhere. Rarely anything better than stupid and salacious appeals to men, it is small wonder that the living drama has been nearly ousted from South America by the cinema, with its easily transportable, international form of entertainment.

The motion-picture having come after all the business part of Rio was built, there was no room to erect “movie palaces” which have elsewhere followed in the train of Edison’s most prostituted invention. All the cinemas along the Avenida Central are former shops, without much space except in depth, and as the temperature quickly rises when such a place is crowded, the screen often consists of a curtain across what used to be the wide-open shop door, so that one on the sidewalk may peep in and see the audience and even the orchestra, though he can see nothing of the projected pictures within an inch of his nose. Alongside the “movie” house proper another ex-shop of similar size is generally used as a waiting-room. Here are luxurious upholstered seats, much better than those facing the screen, and some such extraordinary attraction as a “feminine orchestra specially contracted in Europe.” For the waiting-room is of great importance in Rio. It takes the place in a way of a central plaza and promenade where the two sexes can come and admire one another, and it is often thronged immediately after the closing of the door to the theater proper, by people who know quite well they must sit there a full hour before the “section” ends. In fact, young fops sometimes come in and remain an hour or two ogling the feminine charms in the waiting-room and then go out again without so much as having glanced at the show inside. In contrast, many cinemas have “second-class” entrances, without waiting-room and with seats uncomfortably near the screen, where the sockless and collarless are admitted at reduced prices.

It does not require long contact with them to discover that Latin films are best for Latins, for both audience and actors have a mutual language of gestures and facial expressions. The lack of this makes American films seem slow, labored, and stupid, not only to Latins, but to the American who has been living for some time among them. It is a strange paradox that the most doing people on the earth are the slowest in telling a story in pantomime or on the screen. What a French or an Italian actress will convey in full, sharply and clearly, by a shrug of her shoulders or a flip of her hand, the most advertised American “movie star” will get across much more crudely and indistinctly only by spending two or three minutes of pantomimic labor, assisted by two or three long “titles.” The war quickly forced the “Companhia Brazileira,” as it did most of its rivals, to use American films; but neither impresarios nor their clients had anything but harsh words for the “awkward stupidity” and the pretended Puritanic point of view of those makeshift programs—with one exception, Brazilian audiences would sit up all night watching our “wild west” films in which there was rough riding. Curious little differences in customs and point of view come to light in watching an American film through South American eyes. For instance, there is probably not a motion-picture director in the United States who knows that to permit a supposedly refined character in a film to lick a postage stamp is to destroy all illusion in a Latin-American audience. Down there not even the lowest of the educated class ever dreams of sealing or stamping a letter in that fashion. An American film depicting the misadventures of a “dude” or “sissy” was entirely lost upon the Brazilian audiences, because to them the hero was exactly their idea of what a man should be, and they plainly rated him the most “cultured” American they had ever met. Bit by bit one discovers scores of such slight and insignificant differences, which sum up to great differences and become another stone in that stout barrier between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon divisions of the western hemisphere.

On Thursday came the customary mid-weekly change of bill, and we were thankful for a new program after hearing the old one more than thirty times. Also the “music,” which the cinema orchestra ground out incessantly during every moment when we were not giving our part of the show, changed, though hardly for the better. We were a godsend to the musicians of that orchestra, especially to the player of the bass-viol. Hitherto they had been required to play unbrokenly from one in the afternoon until nearly midnight; our advent gave them ten or eleven twenty-minute respites during that time. This they usually spent lolling around the room behind the screen, about the phonograph and our trunks, where they frequently fell asleep. Particularly the anemic quadroon who manipulated the largest stringed instrument seemed never to catch up on his sleep. Barely did our part of the program begin than he stretched out in such comfort as he could find in the improvised green-room and went soundly to sleep, so soundly that no noise under heaven could wake him—save one. When it came time for them to return, his companions would shout at him, jostle him, sometimes even yank him erect; nothing had the slightest effect on his somnolence. But the instant the first strains of their never-varying “music” were heard in the orchestra pit outside, the sleeper would awake with a flash, make one spring through the door, and be automatically scraping off his part with the others by the time they had reached the second or third note.

Sunday is the big theater or “movie” day in Brazil, for then the families of the “four hundred” turn out in full force. On our seventh day they were standing knee-deep in the waiting-room most of the afternoon and early evening. The congestion increased that part of my duties which had to do with auditing, for the head of a family often paused to shake hands effusively with the door-keeper, after which the entire family poured boldly in, and it became my business to find out whether there had been anything concealed in the effusive hand, and if not, why the box-office had been so cavalierly slighted.

One afternoon the Senhor Presidente da Republica came to honor the fourth performance of the day with his patronage, and to give us the official blessing without which we had been forced to open. A corps of policemen was sent first to hang about the door for nearly two hours—giving passers-by the impression that the place had been “pinched.” There followed a throng of generals, admirals, and un-admirables in full uniform, who waited in line for “His Excellency.” The president came at length in an open carriage, his girl wife beside him, two haughty personalities in gold lace opposite them, and a company of lancers on horseback trotting along the Avenida beside them. The waiting line fawned upon the leathery-skinned chief of state, bowed over the hand of his wife, then the whole throng surrounded the loving pair and, pushing the humble door-keeper scornfully aside, swarmed into the cinema without a suggestion of offering to pay the entrance fee. Luckily the doors were not high enough to admit the lancers, who trotted away with the red of their uniforms gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. It was my first experience with the official “deadheads” of Brazil, but by no means my last.

We quickly found, too, that the official gathering was bad for business. Surely any American theater holding 510 persons would fill up when the President of the Republic and his suite were gracing it with their presence! Yet here there was only a scattering of paying audience as long as the “deadheads” remained, which, thanks perhaps to a film showing them in the recent Independence Day parade, was until they had heard the entire program once and the Kinetophone twice. The president, it seemed, was hated not only for his political iniquities, but the élite looked down upon him for marrying a girl little more than one-fourth his own age and letting her make the national presidency the background for her social climbing; and to enter the theater while the president and his retainers were there was to risk losing both one’s political and social standing as a high class Brazilian.

It soon got on our nerves to know that we were the only persons, alive or dead, in the whole expanse of Brazil who could operate the Kinetophone, that if anything happened to either of us it meant a ruined performance, our income cut off, and an unamused Rio élite. Let one of us fail to be on the dot ten times a day and the thing would have been ruined, for the Carioca is nothing if not critical and of so little patience that, had we missed a single performance, word would have gone out at once that the “novelty” at the “Cinema Pathé” had failed. I decided, therefore, during our second week to get and break in a native assistant, and next morning the two principal dailies contained this appealing announcement:

Preciza-se de um operador de cinema, jovem, sem familia, com ao menos dois annos de experiencia, sabendo bem a electricidade e algo de inglez.

I intended to be particularly insistent on those points of youth, “without family,” and “something of English,” but I soon found that we would be lucky even to get the other and indispensable requirements of cinema experience and a knowledge of electricity. In Buenos Aires mobs had besieged Linton’s hotel in answer to a similar announcement; in New York it would probably have brought out the police reserves. Yet hardly half a dozen applicants turned up at the Praia do Flamengo after our morning swim, languidly to inquire our desires. The first was a stupid looking negro who did not seem to fulfill any of the requirements; the second was a shifty-eyed mulatto with no physique—badly needed for the one-night stands ahead; the third was quite visibly impossible. I engaged the fourth man to appear. Carlos Oliva was about “Tut’s” age, which did not hinder him from already having a wife and four children. But then, so do all Brazilians, legitimately or otherwise. He was a Paulista, that is, born in São Paulo, though of Italian parents, a practiced mechanic and experienced operator of ordinary “movie” films, and he looked intelligent. To be sure he spoke no English, but that vain hope had died early and it became evident that “Tut” would have to learn enough Portuguese to get along when it came time for me to go ahead of the show to make bookings.

I had gradually been acquiring a better command of that tongue myself, and now made use of it to draw up a formidable contract tying Carlos hand and foot. Though I was forced to pay him the equivalent of a hundred dollars a month and traveling expenses, I required him to stay with the Kinetophone until the tour of Brazil was completed, not to exceed one year. On every “second feast day” after the first month he was to get four-fifths of his pay, the rest to remain in the hands of the “Linton South American Company” until the tour was finished, when the balance was to be paid him in a lump sum, together with his fare back to Rio. If he left before that time, both the balance and the transportation were forfeited, for we did not propose to spend weeks training a man only to have him leave us at the first whim or better offer—though the latter contingency was not likely. Lastly, he was not to engage in any other occupation while with us, he could be discharged upon a week’s notice if he proved unsatisfactory, with balance and fare paid, and he was required never to show or explain to others the workings of the Kinetophone, nor disclose knowledge of anything connected with our company which he might learn directly or indirectly. With all these clauses duly included and the document signed in duplicate, I fancied even a Brazilian could find no means of leaving us in the lurch. Little had I suspected, when I was tramping the streets of Rio six weeks before, carrying all my worldly possessions wrapped in a square yard of cloth, that I should soon be strutting down the Avenida Central as one of her captains of industry, laying down the law to mere mortals, and shouldering my way daily through her narrow downtown streets to deposit a large sum of money.

About the time Carlos joined us I found myself in new and wholly unexpected trouble—silver trouble. It scarcely seems possible that anyone could protest at getting too much silver, but many strange things happen in Brazil. There is no Brazilian gold, except in theory; and its paper does not suffice for small transactions. One day the Rio manager of the “Companhia Brazileira” met me at our usual noonday conference with the announcement that he would have to pay me a part of our percentage in silver. I saw no reason why he should not, other than the trouble of carrying it a few blocks to the bank, and accepted 200$000 in paper-wrapped rolls. But when I dropped these down before the receiver’s window, he declined to accept them. I fancied the tropical heat had suddenly affected his sanity, and went in to see one of the English “clarks.” From him I learned that it was only too true; the banks of Rio do not accept silver! I had heard of South American bankers doing all kinds of tricks, but I had never before known one to refuse money. I tried several other banks of various nationalities with the same result; they all accepted only silver enough to make up odd multiples of ten milreis. The English manager of the British bank, who had lived so long in Brazil that he had lost some of the incommunicativeness of his race, took the trouble to explain the enigma to me. The year before, the agent of a German firm had arranged with certain Brazilian officials to issue a new coinage and the firm had flooded the country, about the capital, with shining new silver 500, 1000, and 2000 reis pieces. But silver is legal tender in Brazil only up to two milreis; therefore, when it suddenly became plentiful, the banks could not accept any great amount of it because they had no outlet and would have had to build new vaults to hold the stuff. At the cinema door we naturally took in much prata, so that even after making change a donkey-load of it remained to be divided each noonday. I could not buy drafts with it on New York; the government would not receive it—nor its own paper money in most transactions, for that matter; being “made in Germany” it was hardly worth melting up. The one rift in the silver clouds was that merchants were so anxious for trade during this period of depression that they would accept any kind of money in any amount if only people would buy. We paid Carlos in silver and we spent silver ourselves whenever we had to spend. What we could not get rid of in that way I could only sell at a four per cent. loss, and as I was already paying 5$000 a dollar for drafts, I finally took to dropping pounds of silver into our trunks.

But the worst was still to come. Commerce was suddenly swamped under a flood of nickel! Its “refunding loan” having failed, Brazil was hard put to it to find money for current expenses, and disgorged anything that could be found lying about the federal treasury. If the government refused to take its own silver and nickel, it did not by any means refuse to pay it out. The lower and less influential officials were paid, when at all, in rolls of silver, those without any political pull whatever in nickel, and there were cases of being paid in vintems, the obsolete copper coins of twenty reis each which may be seen in use only among beggars and negro street hawkers. On government pay-days, ever more rare now as time went on, one might see a government bookkeeper or a school teacher come in to buy a long-needed bar of soap and a flashy new shirt, lugging in both hands, like dumbbells, great lumps of paper-wrapped silver, nickel, and even copper.

It was not until September 25 that I could risk letting Carlos run the stage end of the show, even under my immediate supervision, but he learned with reasonable speed and three days later I spent the afternoon climbing Tijuca and turned up at the cinema after eight, much relieved to find that nothing had gone awry. “Tut,” however, was forced to stick close to his booth during all performances as long as we remained in Rio.

Then came the end of the month, the figuring up of accounts, and the startling discovery that I was a millionaire! In a single week I had earned more than I had spent since entering Brazil three months before, and my salary and commission for the month, little more than half of which we had been playing, summed up to 1,250,000 reis! What it would have been under normal conditions, when Brazilians were able to maintain to the full their reputation as “good spenders,” only the mathematically minded can compute. Now that I had my first million, by all the rules of Wall Street I should have had no difficulty in rapidly joining the multimillionaire class. However, when I found that at the prevailing rate of exchange my earnings amounted to barely three hundred dollars, and when I added the knowledge that a five-cent handkerchief sold for 1$500, that it cost 600 reis to have a collar badly laundered, and that rather a thin letter mailed to the United States required the equivalent of twenty-five cents in stamps, I realized that I was in no immediate danger of descending into the pitiable class of the idle rich.

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XII. A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL

Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable old station of the Central Railway of Brazil. Having a suitcase now and lacking time to wait for the second-class trailer in which persons so plebeian as to carry baggage may ride, the trip by taxi cost me—I mean Linton—9$600 instead of 400 reis! Nor was that the only shock I got at the station. On my journey northward from Uruguay, with my worldly possessions in a bundle under one arm, the fact that the railroads of Brazil have no free baggage allowance had scarcely caught my attention. But now I was responsible for an outfit consisting of half a dozen large trunks and an enormous phonograph horn in its special case, totaling about a thousand pounds. Hence the seriousness of the discovery that for the single day’s trip from Rio to São Paulo personal baggage paid 256 reis a kilogram and all other kinds 400! No wonder Brazilians drag into the trains with them all manner of strange and awkward bundles, for though any portable amount of hand-luggage is transported free of charge in the passenger-cars, everything else must pay almost its weight in human flesh. In fact, a fat man can travel more cheaply on Brazilian railways than can his equally heavy trunk.

There are private, state, and federal railways in Brazil, and the “Estrada de Ferro Central” belongs to the last category, being operated by the national government. I had already seen public ownership of railroads working—or failing to work—in Chile, however, and was therefore not so surprised at some of the manifestations of the system as a complete stranger might have been. One quickly learned that government railways are operated primarily for the convenience of trainmen and government officials, and that the public is privileged to fight for any space that may be left after these have been accommodated. Our cars were as sadly down at heel as any I had seen since leaving Chile, yet in the station from which we departed stood an official train of the “Administração e Inspecção” that was the last word in transportable sumptuousness, its sides almost wholly of plate-glass and its interior fitted with every luxury. In this, and others like it, government railway managers and higher officials not only flit about at will but carry a host of political friends and their relatives down to the fourteenth cousinship. The “Central” shows a firm belief, too, in the modern trade-union principle of never letting one man do what four men might pretend to be doing, so that not only do useless higher officials swarm but the actual railroad men are little less numerous than the passengers.

Notwithstanding my rule never to go over the same ground twice when it can possibly be avoided, I was returning to São Paulo because our contract with the “Companhia Brazileira” specified that we present the Kinetophone there during the month of October. The night train would have been more comfortable and a bit swifter, but I had never been overland between Brazil’s two largest cities; besides, I wished to have things prepared for our estrea when “Tut” and Carlos arrived next morning. The day train covers the 310 miles in twelve hours—at least on the time-table. For the first of them it was but one of a constant procession of trains in both directions, not only the “Central” but the private-owned and contrastingly efficient “Leopoldina” railway maintaining incessant service to the suburbs. Then we took to climbing from the coast to the great interior plateau, more or less following a small river sprawling over rocks and boulders, passing many tunnels that brought out the incompetence of the train gas-lamps, a low-wooded valley sinking below us as we rose ever higher. Once out of this and above the coastlands, we turned southwest across an almost flat plain. By no means covered with the jungle of the imagination, it was dry and bushy, sometimes wholly bare, occasionally somewhat grass-grown. Reddish trails along which wandered mules and donkeys, and now and then one of the humped sacred bulls of India between the thills of a heavy cart, climbed away across scrub-covered, mist-touched foothills or low ridges here and there punctuated with decapitated palm trees. The soft coal that Brazil imports for her railroads abetted the dustiness of the season in making the trip uncomfortable. Beyond Cruzeiro, already in the state of São Paulo, huge dome-shaped ant-hills of hard, reddish earth began to litter the brownish landscape. The low hills had been ruthlessly despoiled of their natural adornment by the systematic incendiarism of man, who for long stretches had made his destruction of the primeval forest absolute. It struck a note of sadness, this devastation of the beauties of nature for utilitarian purposes, without even the excuse of necessity, since the forest had been destroyed merely to save the trouble of cultivating more intensively and by more modern methods lands that had become weary from overwork and lack of fertilizing nourishment—and because of the native superstition that soil which does not produce forest will not grow anything else. Long lack of rain had left the whole country powder-dry and water-longing; even the palm-trees drooped as if tired and thirsty. In folds of the earth clumps of bedraggled banana plants, sometimes with a few choked coffee bushes beneath them, called attention to primitive huts before which a black colonist, squatting aimlessly on the ground, and his numerous brood offered to the sun’s caresses skins which it cannot tan. It is a nonchalant life at best where the earth gives a maximum of return for a minimum of exertion. Here and there a bit of late spring plowing was going on, giving the ground a suggestion of the same nudity as the happy-go-lucky inhabitants. Now and then, from the summit of a ridge, we caught sight of an old plantation house with a long series of walls behind which only a generation ago were herded troops of negro slaves, and about it vast coffee-fields abandoned for want of labor. Everywhere was an air of do-nothing poverty and ruination, coupled with a fatalistic surrender to circumstances. The unimportant towns along the way, little less thirsty and weary of life, seemed to be inhabited only by non-producers, ranging from priests to shopkeepers. At length the thick dust-and-heat haze of day turned purple with evening, a heavy sun went down somewhere to the west, leaving a great red blotch irregularly radiating on the horizon, the night grew almost cold and, two hours behind time, we rumbled into the glass-domed Luz station.

São Paulo was not what I had left it ten weeks before. Not only had the drought made it dry and dusty and even more hazy than Rio, but the war had brought its industry almost to a standstill. Swarms of workmen without work competed with hungry boys for the chance to sell a few newspapers. In the poorer section a serious epidemic of typhoid had broken out; the hotels that had seemed numerous before, now, with only a guest or two each, appeared trebly so; “actresses” who had always had a native “friend” to help out, had taken to suicide because even the amigo could no longer pay their rent. The very cafés concertos in which rich fazendeiros from the coffee-growing interior had been wont to squander fortunes on blond charmers from across the sea were succumbing one by one to the “brutal crisis.” Everywhere the city had a sad air and many of those one met were too sad to speak; even the weather was gloomy, in the face of approaching summer. The sun was rarely seen; palm-trees shivered in a cold wind; disheveled banana plants huddled together as if for mutual warmth. Professionally the “industrial capital” looked unpromising indeed. The Paulista had not yet come to realize that the war was really the opportunity for a land with such vast resources, so far barely touched by commercial enterprise, to shake off borrowing and indolence and become one of the wealthy and powerful nations of the earth.

Approached from the federal capital, São Paulo showed at a glance the effect on the human race of even a slight difference in climate. Though not appreciably farther from the equator than Rio, and barely half a mile above sea-level, its atmosphere was wholly different. The negro element is conspicuously less and seems to be decreasing, so that a century hence, São Paulo will have perhaps no more of the African strain than the Portuguese have now. The average citizen one saw in the business streets, or in the palatial homes of coffee kings and captains of industry—not to mention successful politicians—out along the Avenida Paulista and in other flowery and fashionable suburbs had much less in common with the motley Carioca than with the people of southwestern Europe.

“Tut” and Carlos arrived at dawn with the outfit. I had been disgruntled, though not greatly surprised, to find that our coming had not been advertised, except with a small portrait of Edison in some of the newspapers, the ex-bootblack being a true Latin-American in never believing a promise until it has been fulfilled. This was contrary to our contract and it would have caused us to lose not one, but several days had I not obliged the distrustful Spaniard to let us open at one of his theaters the following night and to plunge at once into advertising, which I aided by a special performance to the press and “influential citizens” at six that afternoon. As we were booked for a month in the city, “Tut” and I took quarters—the scarcity of transients having brought them within our means—in a palace overlooking the stately and dignified Municipal Theater, from which we could look down upon the band-concerts in the gardens below as from a balcony—unless they coincided with our own performances. Carlos, being in his home town, joined his increasing family in one of the sections chiefly devoted to workmen of Italian antecedents.

The “Companhia Brazileira” operated eight cinemas throughout the city, and these were in the habit of changing their programs nightly, instead of twice a week. As we were to play in all of them, I set to work to shift our numbers in such a way as to give us more than twenty-five combinations of program with our fifteen films, both in the hope that those who might already have heard one number would be attracted by the other two and because Brazilians will not stand for sopa requentada (reheated soup), as they call a repetition of program. Our work in São Paulo was quite different from that in Rio. Here the cinemas ran only two, or at most three, sessions, totalling less than four hours a night, with matinées only on Sundays. One man could easily have done all that the three of us were called upon to do in those days, had he been able to split himself into triplets at the critical moments. Nor was our income cut down as much as the difference between two or three and ten performances a day would suggest, for the theaters were large, with boxes, balconies and galleries, and the public was accustomed to take its entertainment in common at reasonable hours. Theatrically, however, the Paulistas were quite like the Cariocas. Their favorite in the “movies” was a Parisian comedian whose specialty is the fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-evening-dress brand of humor, and it was difficult to unseat this king. To be sure, São Paulo audiences did show a few more signs of life than those in the national capital, an occasional snigger at least; but on the other hand, unlike Rio, with its pose for the exotic, they somewhat resented that our records were not all in the native tongue. “Tut” suggested that we take them out and have them translated.

Though the “Companhia Brazileira” was required by the terms of our contract to do all advertising, I decided to try my own hand at flim-flamming the public. The usual posters, newspaper notices, and banners were all very well, but I wanted something special, something unusual, that could not fail to impress upon everyone that “the Kinetophone, the wonderful talking-moving pictures, the marvel of the age,” and so on, was in São Paulo for a very limited time indeed, “só trez dias (only three days)”—after which it would move to another theater a few blocks away. Our enterprising partners were not so conservative in advertising as they were lacking in new ideas. But though they were always harping on the American genius for publicity and insisting on their eagerness to be shown, they invariably backed water when any unfamiliar scheme was physically laid before them, and this dread of the unusual was so often in evidence during our tour of Brazil that it is evidently a typical Brazilian characteristic. In São Paulo I hired an Italian dwarf, who had been hanging about appealing for a job, to parade the streets as a sandwich-man. That particular form of advertising apparently had never been seen in Brazil. The company highly approved of the scheme in outline, but refused to sponsor an unprecedented innovation when the time came actually to carry it out. I determined, therefore, to risk a few dollars of Linton’s money. Taking two of our large cloth-mounted portraits of Edison as a background, I had special sandwich-boards made on a design of my own—except that the painter, frightened at any suggestion of novelty, reduced my idea to the commonplace, and then told another man to complete the job. This he did eventually, under my stern supervision, and I turned the innovation loose on São Paulo. An hour later, I met my dwarf carrying the two boards above his head in the form of a banner that had been the “last cry” in Brazilian advertising for at least a decade! He had some maudlin excuse to offer for not carrying out my orders and next day he left even the banner loafing on a corner while he worked at a better job during the best hours of Saturday, leaving me no choice but to turn him back into the ranks of the disgruntled unemployed. Thanks to rain, the war, and other drawbacks, we did so poor a business on several nights that the ex-bootblack talked of breaking the contract, for though they expect “um inglez” to live strictly up to his side of an agreement, on their side a contract means nothing whatever to these people. To make things worse the milreis dropped again to five to the dollar, yet money was so scarce that we dared not raise our admission price. By moving every three days to a new theater, however, we got fair-sized audiences and did moderately well, though nothing like what we should have done before the war.

All my other troubles as a theatrical potentate, however, were nothing compared to my struggle against “deadheads.” Though our contract called for “complete suppression of the free list during this engagement,” the carrying out of that clause was quite another matter. Excuses for entering a theater in Brazil without paying an admission fee are without number. One might suppose that a Justice of the Supreme Court would be ashamed to use his office to force his way into a “movie” house, admittance to which cost barely the equivalent of a quarter. But many men of that class not only usurped free admission, but usually took their entire families with them—and the average Brazilian family can fill many seats. It is the custom in Brazil for theaters to send annual passes to all higher politicians. Thus the judge is given a richly engraved yearly pass, which claims to be non-transferable and for his personal use only. But he cannot, of course, be expected actually to show it, like a popular, or a common fellow, or to have his right questioned to bring with him such guests as he may choose. It is the business of everyone connected with the theater to know the judge and not put him to the annoyance and degradation of showing that pass, which would be an insult comparable almost to dunning him for a debt. So he thrusts the obsequious gateman haughtily aside and marches in with his whole progeny—and a little later a barefoot negro boy appears with an elaborately engraved annual pass which states that he is a Justice of the Supreme Court, and he must be let in without question, lest one have to answer next day to contempt of court!

We were incessantly pestered by official mendicants and well-to-do beggars, by friends of the management or of the cinema employees, by “influential people” in droves. Favor to a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, the friend of a friend’s friend, to anyone with an authoritative manner, and the lack of moral courage that goes with it, is the curse of all Brazilian door-keepers. If a man had ever met a person in any way connected with the institution, he expected to get the glad hand and a smiling invitation to “go right in.” It was not so much that they were trying to save money; the milreis admission fee was not serious to the official and influential class; it was fazendo fita, showing off by stalking past the cringing ticket-collector with an air of daring him to challenge them. To march in with his whole decorated, upholstered, and perfumed family gave a man the sense of being a person of superior clay, for whom there are no barriers. This attitude ran the full gamut of government officials. One of the standing privileges of a newly appointed Minister of War is to go to the theater and ignore the ticket collector; it is his visible and final proof of office. Negro youths employed in the customhouse forced their way in without protest because some form of trouble would be sure to follow any interference with that class. My ears were constantly being importuned with, “Please, senhor, may I go in? I am an ‘artist’ or a poet, or fourteenth cousin of the delegado, or great-grandmother of the town dog-catcher, or a bag of wind, or....” When mail arrived for me at our consulate the native clerk was careful to keep that fact to himself if I called during the day, so that he could bring it to me at night and use it as a ticket for himself and his female hanger-on. In addition to all this, the short-sighted managers think it necessary to give permanent passes to many of the “influential families” in their neighborhood so that others will see that the place is fashionable and will patronize it. As a result, those who have money do not need to spend it, because they have season tickets, and those whom they are expected to imbue with the desire to go cannot do so because they do not have the money.

A woman of the comfortable class comes to the cinema with two, or even three nearly full-grown children, and though she knows perfectly well that they are expected to pay at least half-fare, she presents a single ticket for herself and starts to drag the children in after her. If the door-keeper has the courage to halt her, the woman, feigning great indignation, says:

“Why do they pay admission, little bits of children like that?”

“Yes, senhora,” replies the bowing manager, with far more courtesy than firmness.

“Oh dear,” sighs the woman, “I have just ten tostões with me for my own ticket and I’ll have to go way back home and get the rest”—whereupon the manager hastens to say, “that’s perfectly all right, senhora, go right in,” for he knows that if she turns homeward it will be in wrath and he will lose even the “dez tostões” she has paid for her own ticket. As often as she comes to the cinema the woman, and many like her, works the same trick with a most serious and innocent face.

We had to admit free the chauffeurs of private automobiles in order to keep the friendship and family influence of the patrons who came in them. Sometimes it was evident that the cinema was making use of us during our short engagement to win friends for themselves during the rest of the season. One manager went so far as to try not to include us in the program at all one Sunday afternoon, knowing he would fill the house anyway with Edison’s portrait outside and not have to share the receipts with us. Then anyone in any way connected with a newspaper, from the office-boy down to the editor’s third mistress, must be let in without question or the entertainment is forever blasted in that community. A decent and unusually good show for Brazil opened near us one evening. Being newly arrived from Europe, the manager gave two seats each to the principal newspapers, instead of allowing anyone attached to them to get in merely by mumbling that fact as they passed the door-keeper. Next day, after highly praising a salacious and worthless thing at another theater, the papers one and all announced that no decent Brazilian families should be seen at this one, and the following night the police closed the performance.

At the “Cinema High Life”—the mulatto boy operators had chalked the name on the back brick wall of the stage so that they could remember how to pronounce it, “Ai Laife,” in three syllables—which prided itself on attracting “le monde chic” of São Paulo, I counted 215 “deadheads” one night out of an audience of barely six hundred, and I missed a number when duties took me away from the door. Moreover I did not count the score or more in uniform, nor the friends of the stagehands who saw the pictures from the rear.

I soon cut off some of this dead-heading, but it was at the expense of much diligence and audacity, not to say diplomacy, for one cannot manhandle the Brazilians as one can a more straightforward people, without running the risk of being boycotted by the entire community. It meant constant vigilance, too, for the crooked are notoriously more energetic and cunning than the honest. In the beginning I lost considerable sleep over this petty form of grafting, but one soon learns in Brazil to take a new view of life, to smile and be “sympathico” and fit in as well as possible with the society about him. It is the only society he will find in any appreciable quantity as long as he remains in the country, and he may as well make the best of it.

Once in a while, though by no means often enough to make up for the “deadhead” losses, men went to the other extreme in fazendo fita. A fop now and then came in alone and bought an entire box for himself; or men well known in the community might come the first night with their families, thrusting the door-keeper aside, and take seats in the parquet, while the next night, when he came with his bejewelled mistress, the same man would take the best box available, and pay for it, less out of a sense of fairness than in order advantageously to display his prize to his envious fellow-citizens.

However, in compensation for my troubles new honors were heaped upon me. The Brazilian dearly loves an honorary title, and being unable to think of any other that would fit a man of my undoubtedly important position as “concessionary” for all Brazil of a great invention, they took to calling me “doctor.” In time I grew accustomed to being introduced with deep bows and the words, “Permita-me presental-lhe o Doutor Frawnck.” In “movie” circles I let the error pass as unimportant, but when one day even the American president of the college of São Paulo publicly addressed me by that title, I protested.

“But you have a bachelor’s degree, haven’t you?” he asked, in some surprise.

“Yes, I believe so, if I haven’t lost it somewhere along the road, but——”

“Then you are a doctor in Brazil,” he replied, “for the bachelor’s degree carries with it that title in this country.”

“Dr.” Franck I remained, therefore, as long as I continued to manage the Kinetophone.

With matinées only on Sundays, I found plenty of time for my favorite sport of tramping the countryside. One afternoon I strolled at random out beyond the low, dry, reddish cliffs at the edge of town and struck off in the direction of São Caetano. Great banks of white clouds lay piled into the sky on all sides, and the dead-dry, almost burning stretch of rolling country was half-hidden under a haze of red dust. I passed several suburban beer-halls, each with its “Giocce di Bocce,” or Italian nine-pin earth court behind it, and wandered on along more red roads, the light-colored houses scattered over the rolling country showing up in front and disappearing behind me in the thick, dust-laden atmosphere as in a fog. Gradually I came to realize that almost a procession of men, women and children was bound in the same direction, some tramping the dusty road on weary, blistered feet, others lolling at their ease in carriages and automobiles. Not a few of the latter were expensive private cars with chauffeurs in livery.

For nearly an hour I followed the same direction. Then all at once, topping a slight ridge, I came upon all the concourse that had gone before—automobiles, carriages, and pedestrians—gathered in a broad bare space on the brow of a treeless, thirsty hill. Down below the throng was a small tile-roofed hut with two bar fences so arranged before it that only one person at a time of the crowd that was jammed up against it could enter and bend over a sort of counter across the open door to talk with a man inside. Each ended the interview by handing the man a ten, or more, milreis note and passed out through a gap between fence and hut. Though the entire assortment of Brazilian complexions was to be found in the throng, many were full whites, blond European immigrants as well as women in silks and diamonds, dandies in gloves, spats and canes—and every mother’s son and daughter of them talked with bated breath while they waited their turn to approach the counter. When this came, the men reverently raised their hats, the women gave a species of curtsey and in many cases kissed the man’s hand, then conversed with him for two or three minutes in an undertone, which could not but have been heard by those crowded nearest to the speaker. Then they paid the fee and passed on, with as contrite and sanctified a look on their faces as if they had just ended a private conference with St. Peter. Each carried away a mammoth visiting card bearing the name Vicente Rodriguez Viera, and at the exit a shaggy countryman halted each by thrusting forth photographs of the man behind the counter, which each hastened to buy with a meek and grateful countenance, as if by divine command.

Inside the hut was an electric push-button which, like the back door, connected with a rambling lot of fazenda buildings, and near at hand was a large liquor emporium and two restaurants of a crude, frontier-like variety. I was preparing to sample the attractions of the latter when the man behind the counter suddenly rose and strolled toward the farmhouse in the rear, leaving the perspiring crowd—automobiles, diamonds and all—to await his sweet will about returning. He was a big bulk of a countryman, plainly a caboclo, or copper-colored native Brazilian of considerable Indian and probably some negro blood, with a great bushy black beard. Dressed in an uncreased, broad-brimmed felt hat, a heavy, dark suit, and black riding-boots, he wore also a colored handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck, a conspicuous watch-chain and charm across his slightly prominent abdomen, and huge brass rings on seven of his fingers considerably enhancing his general air of cheap vulgarity. His face was puffy under the eyes and had a “foxy” expression that no one of a modicum of experience with the human race could have mistaken for anything than what it was,—proof of cunning rascality.

As the fellow was returning to the hut I approached the vendor of photographs and asked who the man was. His ally gave me a look of mingled astonishment and disgust for my ignorance and explained that the noble being was a curandeiro, or a “curer.”

“You mean a physician?” I suggested.

“No, senhor, not a doctor; a curandeiro.”

“Does he give medicine?”

“None whatever.”

“Does he cure by laying on hands?”

“Not at all. He merely gives them his card and they buy his picture. After nine days they come back again, and three times in the next month, and then once or twice a month, if they are still ailing, until they are cured. He is a caboclo legitimo” (a dyed-in-the-wool Brazilian) “and has been here eight years.”

The “curer” was taking in money at a rate that should have allowed him to retire in much less time than that, but no doubt pride in his work kept him at it. Formerly he had operated in São Paulo itself, but had been banished outside the city limits. An elaborate enameled sign announced that on Sundays and holidays he gave no cures, “no matter what the provocation.” As he reëntered the hut, the whole throng uncovered or curtseyed. A peculiar fact was that a large number of his clients seemed to be in the most robust of health; no doubt in these cases his cures were most effective. Several well-dressed little girls were forced in to consult him, plainly against their wills and better judgment, for they laughed at the silly fraud, and one of them shocked the sanctimonious crowd by calling him “velho barbudo” (old bewhiskered). There is a Brazilian saying that “E mais facil enganar a humanidade que desenganal-a,” which might be freely translated, “It is easier to squeeze the human head into an uncouth shape than to squeeze it back again to normal.”

We found that the Kinetophone appealed less and less as we descended the scale of wealth and education. In the workingman’s district of Barra Funda, to which we went after a week down in Santos, we were escorted by mobs of urchins until we felt like a country circus, but there was little gain in playing to such audiences. In the slang of Brazil, “brass was lacking,” and we gave matinées to scatterings of “deadheads” and half-price children and evening performances to thin, apathetic houses. The young toughs we would not let in free took revenge by mutilating our cloth-mounted posters, the managers lost our newspaper cuts, and nearly half our slight share of the receipts was paid in nickel! We were held up, too, by one of the ubiquitous national holidays. The second of November was the Dia dos Finados, a sort of Brazilian Memorial Day sacred to weeping and the laying on of flowers—not to mention flirting—in all the cemeteries, and not to be enlivened by mere theatrical performances. Those of the undress variety “got away with it” by announcing a “solemn program,” but when I protested against this forced holiday, contrary to contract, the irreverent ex-bootblack grew wrathy and insisted that on such a day our show was “too frivolous!”

But if the human audiences did not respond, we now and then got proof, sometimes in disastrous form, that our entertainment was realistic. In several of the barn-like theaters in the outskirts of São Paulo we were obliged to “shoot from the back,” that is, the projecting machine was set up at the rear of the stage and the pictures were thrown upon the back of the curtain. One evening some friend of the stage hands brought a terrier with him. Among the demonstrations of the “Portuguese Lecture” with which we opened our part of the program was a collie that rushed out barking upon the screen stage. Barely had he dashed into view this time when the terrier sprang madly upon him and all but wrecked the curtain and the performance.

It was not until the fourth of November that my real job began. Our engagement with the “Companhia Brazileira” was drawing to a close at an old theater out by the gas-works, and the hour had come for me to find out whether I was a real “movie” magnate or merely a ticket-taker; for the carrying out of a contract made by someone else is quite a different thing from faring forth into the world and making contracts. I set out for the interior of the State of São Paulo, therefore, with misgivings, not only as to my own abilities but because only “Tut” and Carlos, who did not yet speak the same language, were left to run the show.

I was bound for Campinas, third city of the state, but the town of Jundiahy looked promising and I dropped off there. It was a straggling coffee center of some sixteen thousand inhabitants, rather picturesquely strewn over a rolling hillside, at the summit of which bulked a big yellow building bearing the familiar name “Polytheama.” In the electric-light plant next door I learned the name of the manager, but I visited a dozen other buildings before I ran him down, only to find that the real owner and contract-maker was the prefect and chief mogul of the town. We found him surrounded by much ceremony and a score of cringing fellow-citizens in his inner sanctum of the prefeitura. I introduced myself with as brief formality as possible and told him that the Kinetophone was to end its engagement in São Paulo a week later and that it might be to his advantage, as well as to that of Jundiahy, to have it stop there for the night of Friday, the thirteenth, on our way to Campinas. He replied that he had made a special trip down to São Paulo to see this new “marvel of the American wizard,” but that he had never dreamed we might be induced to come to Jundiahy. He was highly flattered, but could he and his modest little town really afford so remarkable an entertainment? I offered to book the attraction for a hundred and fifty dollars. He looked up the rate of exchange in the São Paulo morning paper, smiled sadly over the figures he penciled on the margin of it, and regretted that it was impossible to pay a fixed sum, especially in such hard times.

I took leave of him and turned back toward the station. But I felt almost superstitious at the thought of failing in my first attempt to make a contract and yielded to the entreaties of the manager beside me to return and seek some other basis of arrangement. The prefect showed more pleasure than surprise at my return and offered to rent me the “Polytheama” for one night at 80$, we to pay for orchestra, light, license, employees, and all the rest. I declined. “Tut” could scarcely be expected to handle so complicated a proposition to our advantage. It then being my move, I dug down into my portfolio and brought forth a contract which Linton by some stroke of luck or genius had made in a small town of Chile, giving him seventy per cent. of the gross receipts. I would gladly have accepted the “fifty-fifty” basis on which we were then playing, rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of the Chilean contract and my ever improving Portuguese I got the prefect to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the privilege of charging to his account the cost of our transportation from São Paulo, just in order not to seem too eager, I agreed. I drew up duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next train north.

It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling coffee-clad hills, and the siesta hour was not yet over. I took a tigre, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed myself in a big bare front room of the principal hotel, began my professional inquiries at once. The important theaters were the “Casino Carlos Gomes” and the “Theatro Rink.” The former looked rather small and dainty for our purposes; besides, it ranked as a municipal playhouse, and I did not yet feel like going into politics on so lavish a scale. The “Rink” was a great barn of a place of less aristocratic appearance, and in the course of an hour I coaxed the negro boys attached to it to rout out the manager. He was a plain, business-like young fellow with almost American ideas of advertising and management, and we were soon engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and as he grew interested we sat down at a table on the gloomy unlighted stage where a Portuguese company was stuttering and ranting through the comedy they were to perpetrate that night. The first two days we might devote to Campinas were much more important than the one I had booked in Jundiahy. For one thing they were Saturday and Sunday, and in addition the latter was November 15th, Brazil’s Second Independence day. I proposed that we play five nights at two hundred and fifty dollars a night. The manager smoked half a cigarette pensively, then said that if I had only come before the war he would readily have consented, but that now it was impossible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract on him. No, he would only split even, and there we stuck for some time. He was adaptable, however, and we finally came to an agreement. He was to double the price of admission, advertise “three days only” with much gusto, including a special street-car covered with banners and filled with musicians to parade the streets, and give us half the total receipts. On the less important days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday he was to give his customary subscription section without our assistance, we to appear about nine, which is the fashionable hour in larger Brazilian towns, with the price reduced to the normal one milreis—this concession to be kept dark, of course, until the double-priced holidays were over—and we to get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our sections.

My misgivings had largely taken flight, for before sunset of my first day “on the road,” in this new sense, I had contracted the principal theaters in two important towns at better terms than Linton himself had been able to get in Brazil, and had the show booked for two weeks ahead. It took me all that evening to draw up the contracts with the “Rink,” write the contents of them in English for “Tut” and in Portuguese for Carlos, and explain to the manager our several advertising schemes, but I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for frail humanity to be.

After so good a day’s work I decided to allow myself time to look Campinas over, instead of departing at dawn. It is a place of considerable importance, both as a coffee center and as the largest and most prominent city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Only a few years before it had been a focus of yellow fever; now that scourge had disappeared and sanitation seemed to have come to stay. Any city on earth would point with pride to the rectangle of royal palms, here growing unusually far inland, which surround the Largo Carlos Gomes. That name is widespread throughout the city, for it was here that the mulatto, Gomes, composer of the opera “O Guaraní” and generally rated Brazil’s chief musician, was born. There is a statue of him, baton in hand, bronze music-desk behind him, in a prominent little square in the center of town—a fragile fellow of typical Brazilian lack of physique, overweighed by the mass of unbarbered locks which seem to be the sign of musicians irrespective of nationality. Campinas appears to have a special trend toward music, for it is also the birthplace of the pianist, Guiomar Novaes.

The train sped away through endless rows of coffee, stretching out of sight over rolling horizons. The region seemed more fertile than that about São Paulo city, with a redder soil, though this may only have been because here it had recently rained. Unlike those elsewhere, the Brazilian coffee bushes stood out on the bare hillsides entirely unshaded, the fields often looking as if they had been combed with a gigantic comb. Within an hour I stopped at Villa Americana, a small country town with a plow factory, a cotton-and-ribbon-mill, and a fertile landscape in every direction. It is the railway station for large numbers of Americans, or ex-Americans, chiefly farmers, who are scattered for many miles roundabout. I found the first of them opposite the station, a doctor who had been practicing here for a quarter of a century, and who stepped to the telephone to call upon one of the colony to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress, looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant church which he had been mainly instrumental in building.

In 1867 bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started anew as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family during Sherman’s march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older generation in this region had fought through the war as “Johnny Rebs,” as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon after the beginning of reconstruction days “to escape carpet-baggers, free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again.” They still called Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, “them down East Yanks,” and seemed hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery, the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the resultant advantages in production when high prices prevailed. But the majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their color-line.

Most of these transplanted Americans now admit that they would probably have done better, at least economically, to have remained in the United States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as “belonging to the overseer class,” others as “right low down trash.” On the whole, the colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards of morality, though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their pronunciation had peculiar little idiosyncrasies, such as giving a Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their English. Their farm-hands they called “comrades,” though these were in almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, preferred that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on English. Among the “low down trash,” most of the second generation was said to know no English whatever. On the whole, the colony was another demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her immigrants to any such extent as does the United States.

When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all that goes with it, the son “hitched up” and drove me out through eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English vocabularies and the mountaineer’s self-reliance. Yet they were not always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely of wit, with a manner which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their way into town. When the Americans first arrived, they had planted much cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned, and they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving their attention chiefly to corn and beans.

It is a great misfortune to Brazil that nearly all her rivers run inland to the Plata or the Amazon, for lack of this natural transportation has undoubtedly retarded the development of the country, though it has probably also abetted the development of railroads. Particularly in the State of São Paulo there is perhaps as great a network of them as anywhere in the western hemisphere outside the United States. No fewer than five systems, better laid and equipped than the Brazilian average, and with many branches, connect São Paulo city with the rest of the state and with those to the north and south, while a few months after I passed that way one of these opened direct rail communication to Corumbá, far across the wilderness of Matto Grosso on the Paraguay river. One of the results is that the coffee state is surprisingly well developed, with many important towns, vastly more agriculture, and much less forest than the imagination pictures.

As far as Rio Claro, a few hours north of Villa Americana, the railroad service was excellent. Beyond that large, one-story, checkerboard, monotonous town ran a wood-burning narrow-gauge, the tenders piled high with cordwood. Though ours was a “limited” train, passing many stations without officially stopping, the British “staff” system required the engineer to exchange orders with every station master, and made it necessary to slow down to a walk at every settlement. The farther we got into the interior the more often were we entrusted to wood-burners, the smaller became the trains, the closer the engines with their deluge of smoke, sparks, and cinders, and the more we pitched and rolled along the narrow tracks, which wound incessantly among low hills. The landscape grew more and more wild, almost a wilderness in places, though no such tropical jungle as I had imagined, with sometimes no real stop for an hour or more.

São Carlos was a lively town of some 15,000 people in a hollow among rolling hills, its houses separated by masses of green trees. There were plenty of Fords at the station and swarms of carregadores, baggage-carriers with license numbers on their caps—you couldn’t sell your old shoes in Brazil unless you wore a license showing that the politicians had given you permission to do so. Here one was struck again by the fact that great competition does not necessarily mean low prices. Considering themselves lucky to get a job or two a day, these carriers growled at anything less than a milreis for the slightest exertion, and expected enough for carrying a suitcase across the street to keep their families for a week.

In the best room available at the best hotel I could scarcely turn around without barking my shins, and the window opened so directly on the sidewalk that the shoulder of every passer-by seemed to jostle me. The weather was volatile as a Brazilian, with heavy downpours for ten minutes alternating with ten minutes of sunshine. I waded down into the valley through wide streets reeking in blood-red mud and up to the “Theatro São Carlos,” the manager-owner of which I at length unearthed, in spite of the prevarications of his negro servants. As usual he was one of the pillars of the town, of that aristocratic flimsiness of the man who has never done any real work for generations back, and his air said plainly that he knew he could outwit any simpleton of a foreigner. I set my first demands high, therefore, in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he had driven a close bargain when he at length agreed to as much as I had expected and ten per cent. more than I would have accepted under compulsion. I got his name signed to duplicate contracts while he was still under the influence of my hypnotic eye and was giving him instructions, in the guise of information, on advertising and the arrangement of programs, when he remarked casually:

“Of course Edison himself comes with the show? Our people will be as anxious to see him as to get acquainted with his new invention, of which I have heard such splendid reports.”

“Why—er—it may be that he will not be able to get here,” I stammered. “You see, he has several little things on hand; besides, he is a married man and—and——”

How excellent my Portuguese and my winning salesman manner had become was proved by the fact that in the end I did not have to abrogate the contract for two days at the “Theatro São Carlos.”

The town of Araraquara proved to be of about the same size and activity as São Carlos, and especially well off in public buildings somewhat out of proportion with its general appearance. Clustered in the center, about the large, red-earth praça, was the church, an old sheet-iron playhouse, an ambitious Municipal Theater, closed as usual, a large and well-arranged cinema bearing the unescapable name “Polytheama,” and, across the street in a red lot of its own, an ambitious new two-story building labeled in English the “Araraquara College.” I took a turn through several of the wide, irregular, red-smeared streets to make sure that the place was worth playing, then found that the man I sought was also manager of the largest store in town, next door to his playhouse. He proved to be a short, unshaven young Italian who had not been long in Brazil, which accounted for his being so good-hearted and easy-going that I had no difficulty in taking sixty-five per cent. away from him for Saturday and Sunday night performances. I might have had as large a share of the special Sunday children’s matinée, but as what had become a custom required him to distribute candy and toys to the children, I took pity on him and split that part even.

One of my fellow-countrymen was head of the college. His most noticeable characteristics were as a smoker of corn-husk wrapped cigarettes and as an authority on the history of Brazil. He had long been a teacher and would have preferred to spend his summer vacations in the land of his forefathers; but these came in December and January, when it is cold in the United States, and it would take nearly the two months to reach and return from there, while he could cross to Lisbon in twelve days and spend most of his vacation comfortably tramping about southern Europe. His Brazilian wife and two bilingual daughters were almost American in point of view, though by no means in appearance. The boys of Brazil, the head master asserted, are more tractable than American boys, also more superficial, learning more easily but forgetting much more quickly—a statement frequently heard from American educators throughout South America. That they were tractable was quickly evident, for when a native teacher sent to show me over the establishment called a boy away from a football game—rugby is popular even with workmen on coffee estates in São Paulo State—he trotted meekly off to do an errand without a hint of resentment. There were half a dozen American boys in the school, all Brazilian born of men from our South, and not merely had they taken on many of the characteristics of their companions, but they had washed-out complexions and no suggestion of that “scrappiness” familiar on our own playgrounds. This pastiness of skin is general among the sons of northerners born in Brazil and quite different from the color of the blonde descendants of Portuguese in whom the Goth crops out.

Morally the head master had been thoroughly Brazilianized. He had grown tolerant of the many little things which are not quite as they should be, having lost the familiar American longing to reform the world and fallen into many of the lesser vices and easy-going customs of Brazil. He had, however, introduced coëducation into his school, against the advice of the natives, because he believed it necessary to proper sex development, and now the families that had been most strongly against it sent their children to the college. In the afternoon we drove by automobile to the professor’s fruit-farm, which a former slave was paid 75$ a month to keep in order. Two of his piccaninnies followed us around like pet raccoons, constantly holding plates of fruit within our reach, and the atmosphere of the place was much what it must have been in our South before the war when the “mastah” visited one of his plantations. On our return we met an American farmer from far out in the country. He had come to Brazil twenty years before, when already an adult, but he spoke English with considerable difficulty and a distinct accent, though his Portuguese was by no means perfect.

Beyond the River Mogy Guassú, the first I had crossed since leaving São Paulo, I changed from the “Paulista” railway system to the winding and narrow-gauge “Mogyana.” We passed many fields of charred stumps, suggesting how matta was cleared for the planting of coffee. The rare towns were monotonously alike, dull-white walls and red-tile roofs of the same shade as the soil, which turned all light-colored animals, including the children who played in it and the men who worked in it, a pinkish hue. This red soil is the terror of housewives in São Paulo State, especially in the dry season, when it sifts thickly over everything and clings tenaciously to every exposed surface. Soon we were completely surrounded by coffee fields, sertões of coffee, a world absolutely shut in by coffee bushes, which actually brushed the sides of the train and stretched away, endless and straight and unerring as the files of a well-trained army, up and down over hill and dale, with never the slightest break in alignment, into the dense-blue horizon for mile after swift mile.

One plantation through which we traveled for more than an hour has 2,500,000 bushes; an English corporation owns an unbroken sixteen kilometers of coffee trees, crisscrossed by a private railway. Down in the hollow of each fazenda, or section of plantation, were long rows of whitewashed, tile-roofed huts, all run together into one or two buildings, sometimes with a church attached. These were the homes of the colonos, or coffee workmen, once negro slaves, now chiefly Italians, though I caught glimpses of a number of Japanese, the women still in their native dress and carrying their babies on their backs by bands across the breast. Some years ago a few ship-loads of Japanese were sent to Brazil, landing in Santos, and most of them came so directly into the back country, and are so nearly segregated there, that even their racial tendency for imitation has not caused them to throw off home customs. Here and there, too, were groups of European immigrants still in the costumes of their homelands in the year, in some cases distant, when they left them. Italian colonization succeeded negro slavery closely in São Paulo State, which owes its prosperity and its leadership in the world’s coffee production mainly to these newcomers. In addition to their living quarters and modest wages, the colonos are usually given a piece of ground on which to plant corn, black beans, and mandioca for their own use, and sometimes permission to graze a few head of stock. One of the chief troubles of the coffee fazendeiro, however, is the tendency of Italian colonos to abandon the sun-drenched fields as soon as they get a bit of money together and go to town to engage in some minor form of business.

Coffee blossoms and berries are often found on the same bush at the same time, and there are seven grades of the product, according to the time in which it is picked. The regular harvest is from May to July or August. Then the ground under the bushes is carefully swept, if it is smooth, or is spread with cloth, and the berries are scraped from the branches with one motion of the hand, sparing as many leaves as possible, after which all is swept together and sent to great drying platforms that look not unlike concrete tennis courts. The colonos labor on the piece-work system, each family being responsible for a given number of plants and the picking being paid by the liter. The berries are planted some eight feet apart in both directions, making straight rows from four angles. It is better to set out young plants from a nursery, but this is too slow a process for large plantations. Some of the land was formerly treeless campo, but a large part, and the most fertile, has been cleared of dense matta in the crude and wasteful way of pioneer communities, leaving only here and there a majestic tropical tree topping a ridge. The plant begins to produce in about four years, and has been known to continue to the age of a hundred and thirty, growing up from the stump as often as it is cut down. An ordinarily good tree will produce twenty-five quarts of berries, which in their maturity considerably resemble small cherries, the two coffee beans inside requiring continual attention before they are finally dried and sorted and disappear in sixty-kilogram sacks in the direction of Santos and the outside world.

The plants were brought to Brazil from French Guiana long ago, and coffee-growing was a paying business in the State of São Paulo “until the government heard of it.” The number of non-producers who get a finger into the coffee cup before it reaches the actual consumer is beyond belief. Taxes begin with so much per thousand “feet” of plants, and continue incessantly until the product reaches the retail market. Transportation from the field to Santos is ordinarily two or three times as much as from Santos to New York, and a sack for which the grower received ten dollars the grocer in the United States has been known to sell for forty-five, even in the days before the World War produced so many experts in profiteering. It is often asserted that the coffee fazendeiro makes more profit out of renting the bottom lands, where the danger of frost makes the planting of coffee inadvisable, as chacaras, or small market gardens, or from the catch crops that can be planted between the rows after picking-time, than from his many times more acres of coffee-trees. Throttling taxes are his greatest trial, and the prophecy is frequently heard that this growing habit of Brazilian government will eventually ruin the great coffee industry of São Paulo.

At sunset we coasted down into Riberão Preto, fourth city of the state, in the bottom of a great shallow bowl of earth lined uninterruptedly with coffee bushes as far as the eye could reach. In the pink glow of evening a carregador put me and my baggage into a carriage before I had time to express any personal desires on the subject, and I was driven through the Saturday night activities of a lively, rather frontier-like town to the chief hotel. What the other half dozen in town must have been I dread to imagine, for this resembled nothing so much as a dingy, careless, unadorned, lack-comfort style of barn, suggesting that I was getting back again into the real South America, away from the fringe of near-civilization on the coast. It was seething with travelers, salesmen, an Italian theatrical company, servants, dogs, and innumerable caged parrots, and I was assigned another of those intolerable ground-floor rooms opening directly on the street that are unescapable in the one-story towns of interior Brazil. Nor had I had time to test the one comfort of such establishments, the shower bath, when a jangling bell demanded that all guests come to supper at once, on penalty of going without it entirely.

It would be difficult to speak kindly of Brazilian hotels. As in Spanish-America, nothing but black coffee is to be had until almoço, or “breakfast,” between ten and eleven, which is followed about sunset by jantar. Both these meals are heavy, lacking in everything but quantity, and made up almost entirely of meat. This carne verde (“green” meat), having just been killed and so called to distinguish it from xarque or carne secca, the salted or sun-dried variety familiar in the rural districts, is cooked in several different ways, all of which leave it hopelessly tough. Whether in hotels or railway-station restaurants, the menu is unvarying, and eight or ten huge plates of meat are slapped down in the middle of a long, noisy, public table, where each guest grasps what he can before his neighbors make way with it. To save time or trouble all dishes are served at once, and are habitually cold before they reach the ultimate consumer. There is a great paucity of vegetables, even potatoes being considered a luxury and rarely reaching the interior of the country. Instead, there stands on every table a glass jar of what looks like coarse yellow salt, but which proves to be farinha, flour made of the mandioca or yuca that is served boiled in the Andean countries, and which is used throughout Brazil to thicken soups, or eaten dry.

The hotel proprietor usually gives his attention exclusively to the bar, which he claims to be the only paying part of his establishment. By night a servant sleeps just inside the front door, leaving room between it and his cot for the belated guest to squeeze through; in the daytime the pateo is an uproar of unguided servants and ill-bred children. If you ask to have your bread brushed off after the waiter has dropped it on the floor you are henceforth known as “that curious gringo”; if you prefer your coffee or soup made without having an unwashed cook frequently dip in her spoon to taste the progress and toss the residue back into the pot, there is just one way to get it—by bringing your own cook with you. In your room the mirror is certain to be placed at about the height of the average American’s belt buckle, so that to shave requires either kneeling on the floor or sitting on something, usually not to be found, about the size of a soapbox. Hot water being unknown, shaving becomes an ordeal equal to trying to shut out the sight of a mulatto across the table inhaling a mammoth all-meat meal with such boa constrictor ease that he needs only to give the tail of an occasional extra large mouthful an affectionate pat with his knife as it goes down.

Whatever he lacks in other ways the typical Brazilian hotel-keeper makes up for in prices. He is rarely a native, and you can scarcely expect a European to come over and set up hotels in the wilderness of South America out of mere love for his fellow-man. Usually his only interest is to make as much as possible as soon as possible and hurry back to his native land. Not merely are the rates high, but it is the almost invariable custom to manipulate the items in such a way that a stay of twenty-four hours becomes at least two days. Personally, I early adopted the habit of handing the proprietor the amount called for by his posted daily rate and assuring him that I would look on with great interest while he collected more than that; but the native Brazilian has the notion that he loses caste if he protests at any price charged him, so that the foreigner’s refusal to be fleeced is sure to make him conspicuous, even if it does not cause his fellow-guests to rate him a freak and a nuisance.

Nearly every street of Riberão Preto runs out into red earth, a tenacious soil that is tracked along the sidewalks and into every shop and dwelling, until the whole town takes on a reddish tinge. Near the center of town, at the lowest spot of the hollow in which it is built, there is a perpetual frog chorus, and from the outskirts coffee-fields stretch up out of the great shallow bowl and away over endless horizons. The Italian company announced its début on the evening after my arrival by shooting off fireworks, one advertising scheme that had not occurred to me. There were so many cinemas in town that I had to spend real money to visit several of them before I was competent to decide which one would best answer our purposes. All those of importance, it turned out, from the municipal “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” covering a whole block in the center of town, down through the inevitable “Polytheama” to the loose-mannered “Casino,” flowing with liquor and aging French adventuresses, were in the hands of a hard-headed Spaniard of long Brazilian experience, so that I considered myself fortunate to get his name at the bottom of a contract giving us fifty-five per cent. of the gross receipts during a six-day engagement.

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XIII. ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT

We steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin of Riberão Preto on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town of any size. Coffee-fields at length gave way to brush-covered campo and grazing cattle, the train winding in great curves around slight hills, like water seeking an outlet or a lost person wholly undecided which way to go. Early in the afternoon we crossed the Rio Grande into the State of Minas Geraes, which at once showed itself less developed, more dry and sandy, with an increasing number of wooded valleys and ridges. There was some coffee here, too, but cared for in a half-hearted way compared with the great plantations of São Paulo. We passed a large gang of Japanese workmen, and many zebus or humped cattle, both in the fields and working as oxen. The ride was not only too dirty and dusty to be pleasant, but sparks from our wood-fired engine poured in at the open windows until, for all my dodging and brushing, a dozen holes were burned in my still comparatively new movie-magnate garb. One station stood 3400 feet above sea-level, and we all but shook ourselves and the cars to pieces as we rattled down again into Uberaba, at an elevation of 2500, just as day was escaping over beyond the mountains.

The place was smaller and less progressive than I had imagined, with certainly not more than ten thousand inhabitants, instead of the 25,000 credited to it by the “Handbook of Brazil.” I was not over-anxious to make a contract with the one pathetic little cinema in town, at least until I had seen what lay beyond and decided whether it would be worth while to come this far inland. The manager, a clerk in the local drugstore, was more than eager to present so extraordinary an attraction to his fellow-townsmen, but fares and baggage rates would have cut deeply into our profits and I refused to sign without a guarantee of a conto for two days’ performances. He offered 800$ and would undoubtedly have given almost any percentage, but I held out for the million reis until we finally parted good friends but not business associates.

Somehow I had always thought of Minas Geraes as rocky, arid, dry, and cold, something like upper Peru; the mere name “General Mines” had a hard and chilly sound to it. But long before noon in Uberaba, high as it was, I was reminded that it is well north of Rio and almost tropical. There was an old air about the town, partly because the humidity causes grass, bushes, and even trees to grow on and about the churches and other loose-jointed buildings of stone and porous bricks, but also because Minas is a much older state than São Paulo, overrun by miners long before the agricultural riches of its neighbor were scratched.

We were off again at one behind the same old narrow-gauge wood burner, through a rolling, bushy country, and scattered with huge ant-hills, mildly similar to the Bolivian Chaco. The only real town along the way was Uberabinha, squatting in the bottom of a sandy and shallow valley, inhabited by barefoot and red-earth smeared people whose only place of entertainment seemed to be the double-towered church bulking above the general hut level. Night was falling when we pulled into Araguary at the end of the “Mogyana” railway. The tidal wave of baggage-carriers and hotel touts was only less in size than those farther south, but for once I escaped them entirely by putting my valise on the head of a negro boy and wading through the mud with him to a pensão run by an old woman. The room was really a mud cave, the mattress filled with corn-husks, and I was reduced to candle-light for the first time in Brazil. But the special chicken supper was a great relief from the avalanche of meat, surrounded by wolfing natives, that would have been my lot at a hotel, and, best of all, the pensão was just across the way from the first station of the “Goyaz Railway,” on which I was to depart at dawn.

It was pitch dark, with frequent heavy showers, when I set out to wander incognito through the town. The weak electric-lights along its mud-and-grass streets and praças suggested fireflies or will-o’-the-wisps flitting about through the thick, black night. There was, to be sure, a dentist, who was also owner, editor and printer of the local paper, and the town undertaker—and the tombstones behind the lips of many of the inhabitants hinted that he mixed the three professions.

I came more or less near requiring his services in his least popular capacity. As we were drawing into the station the mob of porters and hackmen had given me their special attention, one negro in particular thrusting his uninviting face through the car-window and pawing me with his long unwashed hands in that half-affectionate, half-wheedling way of his class and profession throughout Brazil, at the same time offering his undesired services some seventy-five times at the top of his voice. When I could endure him no longer, I rapped him over the knuckles with the handle of my umbrella. Now a blow, however light and for whatever provocation, is a shocking indignity in Brazil, only to be properly wiped out in blood. I was not long, therefore, in recognizing the fellow again when, during my stroll about town, he suddenly bobbed up noiselessly out of the night and, after bawling a mouthful of vile language after me, slipped away again with the information that he would fix me yet. I gave him no more attention than one usually does a half-drunken negro in tropical lands, and had entirely forgotten the incident when I boarded another tottering little train next morning. All at once a sound caused me to look up from my reading in the first-class car I was sharing with one other passenger, to see the same negro advancing swiftly down the aisle toward me, grasping a long and sinister-looking knife. It was my luck to be unarmed for the first time in Brazil that I had needed a weapon, having left my revolver with “Tut” as a protection for the money he might take in. Even my umbrella, which would not have been wholly useless in a hand-to-hand encounter, was in the rack above me, and to rise and grasp it might suggest fear. I sat where I was, therefore, with my feet drawn up on the opposite seat, where they could shoot out quickly if danger became really imminent, and stared at the fellow with the unwinking eye of the professional lion-tamer. Whether it was this or his lack of any other intention than to retrieve his reputation among his fellows and salve his injured feelings by a threatening gesture, he confined himself to flourishing the knife, advancing several times with rolling eyes almost to within reach of my feet, and then backing away again. Finally he retreated toward the door with an expression ludicrously like that of a whipped animal, while I rose and walked leisurely down upon him with the same fixed stare until he stepped to the ground. During it all neither train nor local authorities made any attempt to come to my assistance, and I carried away the impression that I should not have gotten out of Araguary in a hurry had circumstances forced me to shoot a man of the same color as the majority of the population.

We tossed and creaked along all the morning to cover the seventy miles of the little bankrupt line that penetrates the south-westernmost corner of the great interior State of Goyaz. The bustling modern civilization of São Paulo and the coast had gradually petered out to nothing more than two telegraph wires jumping from pole to crooked pole across a more or less rolling wilderness of bushy forest, pura matta, as the Brazilians call uncleared country, in a voice almost of terror. Here and there were vast, heavily wooded basins around the edge of which we slowly circled, fighting wood-burner sparks with one eye while taking in the slight scenery with the other. There was a bit of coffee-growing and a bit of lumber was being cut, but as a whole the region was completely undeveloped and unexploited. A flaming purple tree here and there broke the rolling, bushy, brown monotony. The scant population was a sort of semi-wild outcast of civilization, wedded to dirt and inconvenience, living in open-work pole houses covered with aged thatched roofs that resembled dilapidated and sun-faded straw hats. The men wore wide belts, with many silver, or imitation silver, ornaments and with half a dozen leather compartments in them for their money and other small possessions. In a pocket of their thin cotton coats even our local fellow-passengers carried the dried covering of an ear of corn, and when they wished to smoke, which was almost incessantly, they pulled off a corn-husk, shaped it with a knife, rolled it up and put it behind an ear, cut off a bit of tobacco from a twist plug, crushed it between their palms, and rolled a corn-husk cigarette.

At eight we rumbled across the River Paranahyba into the State of Goyaz. At the same time we crossed the nineteenth parallel of latitude, and the climate should have been warm and humid; but as all this vast tableland averages 2500 feet above sea-level, it had distinctly the atmosphere of the temperate zones. There were a few cattle, less well-bred than those of Minas. At Goyandira, a few scattered huts beside a small stream, we were given time to gorge the customary Brazilian meal on a table already crowded with dishes when we arrived, and at eleven we drew up at Catalão, last outpost of civilization in this direction, and a personified End of the Railroad.

It was evident at a glance that I need not consider Catalão from a business standpoint. Though from a distance it had looked like quite a town, it was merely a village of a scanty thousand inhabitants scattered along a small creek, with mangos trodden underfoot, its houses built of mud plastered on sticks and then whitewashed. Compared even with the Mineiros over the nearby state border, the Goyanos were backwoodsmen; beside the energetic, up-to-date Paulistas they had the vacant expression of ruminating cattle. About the town an almost treeless world, rather dry for lack of rain, stretched endlessly away in every direction. When the midday heat had somewhat abated—for there was nothing cold about Catalão, for all its altitude—I climbed to a barren hillock topped by an old ruined church in which scores of black rooks had built their nests and from which bushy and rolling Goyaz spread away like a lightly broken sea. The view was so vast that one could see the curve of the earth, the blue haze ever thickening until it grew almost opaque on a horizon so distant that it seemed raised well above the general level. The line of this was quite distinct for its entire sweep, yet it joined almost imperceptibly a sky heaped and piled with irregular masses of white clouds that cast their broken, fantastic shadows everywhere across the spreading plains, yet did not conceal overhead the sky of mother-of-pearl tint. Below, the village, like a capricious waif that has come here far from nowhere out of mere spite or unsociability, made itself as comfortable as possible in its shallow hollow among dark-green masses of mango-trees. Roads, just born rather than made, straggled out of it in all directions, soon to be lost in the green and haze-blue immensity, as if man had dared venture only a little way out into the unpeopled universe, vast and trackless as the sea. A few venturesome fazenda houses peered forth from their mango groves a mile or two from the town, but these did not noticeably break the uninhabited and virgin world, the sertão or matta, which mere mention of “the plains of Goyaz” calls up in the imagination. It was a distinct pleasure to be again entirely beyond the hubbub of cities, beyond the reach even of the ubiquitous trolley, with the world below deadly silent but for the occasional far distant, yet piercing scream of an ox-cart creeping imperceptibly along one of the languid, haphazard, straggling trails that appeared from somewhere out in the wilderness. They sounded like factory whistles, these distant carros de boi, with their solid wooden wheels and total innocence of grease on their turning axles, the scream of which—chiar, the Brazilians call it, aping the sound—ceased at length abruptly before the principal shop, run by a “Turk,” where the eight or ten oxen, steered by a driver who prodded them in the neck with a goad lying over his shoulder without so much as glancing back, and whom they followed unerringly, fell into the spirit of the scene, the silence broken now only by the occasional sharp, vexed note of a worried rook and the somnolent humming of flies. The End of the Railroad means far away and quiet, indeed, in these seething modern days. Before long we may not be able to find it at all; yet one feels at times impelled to come to such ends of the road and climb to a high place overlooking the world, there to sit and unravel the tangled threads of life into some semblance of order again before descending to plunge once more headlong into the fray.

The worst of coming 710 miles up-country from Santos—and the time it had taken made it seem ten times that—was that I must spend as long, without even the reward of new sights and experiences, to come down again. The same glorified way-freight carried us southward in the morning, and for once it was crowded. Not only were there all my fellow-guests at the run-down hovel owned by a “Turk” who had lived so long in Brazil that he seemed to prefer Portuguese to his native Arabic, all of whom had spent the night playing some noisy form of poker, but a new fork of the railroad was being opened that day to Roncador (“Snorer,” it would be in English), and everyone in Catalão who owned shoes had been invited to ride out and help inaugurate. In consequence our tiny two-car train was so densely packed with well-meaning but unpleasing mortals of all ages, sexes, sizes and colors that we mere ticket-holders were crowded out of seats and forced to stand on the swaying platforms as far as the junction of Goyandyra. There we had to go without “breakfast,” because the inaugurators assaulted the limited table supplies in such force that passengers could not get within grabbing distance. It was perhaps as well, for hunger is slight suffering compared with watching at close range the contortions of such a throng stoking away whole knife-lengths of those viands which they did not spill on the earth floor.

Below Uberaba the “Mogyana” branches, giving me new territory all the way back to Campinas. Most of it looked unpromising for our purposes, until nightfall brought me to Franca, only three hours north of Riberão Preto and the terminus of a daily express. Here were two cinemas, side by side on the central praça. I drifted into one of them and handed my card to the owner-manager. When the crowd at last gave us a chance to talk it over, I set my remarks to the tune of “Oh, this is an unimportant, far-away little place and I don’t believe we will bother with it.” The result was that I soon had the man all but on his knees to have us come. He offered to rent the theater for ten per cent. of the total receipts, and when I declined the trouble of staging the affair ourselves, he begged me to let him do everything and take as our share seventy per cent. of the proceeds. At last I had equalled that fabulous Chilean contract! Indeed, had I been born with a mean disposition I fancy I could have made that pillar of Franca do anything, short of presenting me with his playhouse, to keep me outside the doors of his hated rival.

I was gone again at sunrise and know naught of Franca, except what may be seen at night and one added bit of information. It has a match factory in which a huge stock of an article that the region still imports from the outside world is locked up by government order because the owners cannot raise the seven contos in twenty-reis stamps needed to decorate the boxes before they can be placed on the market. Only once during that day’s journey did I halt. At Cascavel, fittingly named Rattlesnake, I took a branch line into the cool, grassy uplands of the “Brazilian Switzerland” and spent the night in Poços de Caldas. This is far-famed throughout the country as a watering-place at a goodly elevation for Brazil, with sulphurous hot springs much frequented by well-to-do natives during the season. But that was over; the barracks-like hotel with its monasterial cells of rooms had only a scattering of guests, and there was no visible reason why the Kinetophone should journey to a spot that had fallen upon such lean days. Half a day south I might have taken a direct line from Mogy Mirim to Rio, but it was eleven days since I had heard our artists sing or learned how things were faring with my two companions without a tongue between them. I hurried on, therefore, to Campinas in time to be refused admittance to our first performance at the “Rink”—until the youthful manager, catching sight of me, thrust the door-keeper aside with extended hand.

I found “Tut” and Carlos conversing freely together in a language that was not Portuguese and certainly was not English. In Jundiahy they had carried out my first contract so well in the face of rainy weather, toboggan streets of uncobbled red mud, and a reputation as a “poor show town,” as to win high praise, while even here in such a metropolis as Campinas they showed every evidence of being able to give their performance, watch the doors and at least count the “deadheads,” and collect our share of the money without my assistance. The manager of the “Rink” had lived up to his promise in the matter of advertising, and had sent a street-car carrying a band and entirely covered with posters and the likeness of Edison over every trolley-line in town. Yet our audiences were not all they should have been on Brazil’s second Independence Day, whether by reason of the possibility of a political upheaval at the change of the national administration, that musical Campinas was too “high-brow” for what Edison had to offer, or, as we suspected, because city, state and nation were beginning to feel seriously the pinch of the “brutal hard times.”

On the morning after our Campinas engagement the show and I again parted company. While the former sped away up the broad-gauge “Paulista” to São Carlos and points beyond, I took the slow and narrow “Mogyana” back the way I had come, intending to catch the noon train westward from Mogy Mirim toward Rio. But the pleading of a compatriot slightly altered my plans. In Campinas we had made the acquaintance of a man from New York and Jerusalem who was misusing his racial talents in strenuous efforts to refute, in the interests of an American insurance company, the Brazilian argument of “But why should I have my life insured and leave my wife a lot of money to spend on some other man when I die?” Ideas, specially those with a $ attached, sprouted overnight in the fertile brain of my misplaced fellow-countryman, and bright and early that Thursday morning he came running down to the station with a new one. He had suddenly seen a chance to retrieve recent bad fortune by hiring the Kinetophone outright at the conto for two nights which I had set as the fixed price for small towns and taking it out to his old stamping-ground of Amparo, where he proposed to enlist the services of his bosom companions, the priests, nuns, and other Biblical influences of the town, into selling tickets beforehand on the church-festival plan. I am always ready to let a man make money, especially if he makes some for me at the same time, so we dropped off at Jaguary and took the branch to Amparo.

It was an unusually pleasing little town for Brazil, with all its streets paved in stone blocks, several pretty little parks, and spread along so narrow a valley that one could fancy the beans from its coffee-clad hills rolling right down into the central praça ready for roasting. But, like all the State of São Paulo, Amparo had unwisely put all its eggs in one basket—the coffee basket—and whereas ten milreis an arroba is considered by coffee-growers only a fair price, Brazil’s chief export was then selling for 3$500! Hence the town was “muito ruim,” cold, stony dead from the theatrical point of view, and, though there was a nice little theater with cozy seats and plenty of boxes for the “excellentissimas familias,” the impresario had lost his nerve completely. When my friend and guide gently mentioned 600$ a night as the bargain of a life-time, the manager all but swallowed his neck, then recovered sufficiently to say that a Portuguese company of the type most beloved in Brazil had given a first-night the week before, after an uproar of advertising, and had taken in just 25$! I immediately lost all desire to bring the Kinetophone to Amparo, though my friend from Manhattan and the Holy Land, with the admirable buoyancy of his race, went up to the convent school to talk it over with the mother superior, and saw his efforts crowned with success—to the extent of an invitation to dinner.

From Mogy Mirim a shaky little train carried me westward through more wilderness than coffee, past the lively little town of Itapira roofing a slight hill, to a helter-skelter village called Sapucahy, where it unloaded us on a platform, bag, baggage, and bathrobes, and backed away. As frail a train backed in from the other direction and loaded us up again, all the Brazilian travelers paying carregadores to set their bags down from the windows and up again, and after more than an hour of fuss and frustration we creaked on. The yellow creek of Sapucahy, it transpired, was the boundary between São Paulo, where the “Mogyana’s” concession ended, and the State of Minas Geraes, where we had been taken in charge by the “Rede Sul Mineira,” a branch of the “Brazilian Federal Railways.”

The land was somewhat swampy now, more wild and unsettled, with parasol pine-trees beside slender, undeveloped palms with thin tufts of disheveled foliage. The town of Ouro Fino (“Fine Gold”) was a small, off-the-main-line sort of place, but here the daily train got in at five at night and did not leave until five in the morning, so whatever we might make would be money in pocket. After supper I set out on the steep hillside up which the town is built and down which run red mud streets, and at length found at his club—the club, in fact—the manager of the local theater, a tar-brushed youth of aristocratic manners, or at least gestures, who naturally accepted and signed without argument the contract I handed him. Upon my return to the hotel I found the dingy-looking room I had left an hour before gay with speckless white bedclothes and fancy mosquito canopy, evidently in honor of the large theatrical troupe which rumor already had it would soon be following in my wake. Our train stood all night just outside my window, giving me, perhaps, too great a feeling of security, for I was all but left behind. It was already pulling out toward a faint crack in the darkness when I scrambled on board, breakfastless and not fully dressed, and with the privilege of paying a fifty per cent. fine on my ticket for not having bought it at the station.

Long piles of wood for the locomotives stood along the way through a wilderness inhabited by “poor white trash” in rags smeared with red earth, who crowded to the doors of their thatched huts as we passed. For some time we followed the Sapucahy, swollen red with floods that gave a picturesque appearance to the hilly village of Itajubá on its banks. This was a friendly little town where everyone spoke to strangers, after the pleasant manner of back-country districts, but though it has an important engineering school, it is little more than a grass-grown hamlet, with a populous cemetery conveniently situated on a hill close above it, so that all the inhabitants can drink to their ancestors. Itajubá was just then the object of a general interest out of all keeping with its size. Just next door to the “Cinema Edison” in which I arranged for our appearance was the modest home of the new president of Brazil. There he had lived most of his life—even since his election on March first, though he was “Dudú’s” vice-president and required by the constitution to preside over the senate—and he had left less than a week before for his inauguration.

The train next set me down at Caxambú, another of the watering-places on the irregular line across southwestern Minas, where the rolling country from the Plata northward begins to break up almost into mountains and produces a stratum of hot and cold mineral springs. Huge hotels accommodate those who come to “take the waters” in Caxambú, as in Poços de Caidas not far distant, and a mineral water that sells all over Brazil at a milreis or more a small bottle is here as free as the air. The largely negro and barefoot local population comes in a constant stream, carrying every species of receptacle, to a low spot in the center of town in which the water bubbles up incessantly, and where all manner of paupers and loafers sit under the feathery plumes of waving bamboos, drinking in turn out of a broken bottle.

The same ancient, dirty, German-made cars that had bounced me into Caxambú bounced me out again in the afternoon, and all the rest of the day I bumped along at the tail end of a way-freight that seemed constantly on the point of falling to pieces as it thundered in and out of the hills on a warped and unrepaired old track. To the north the earth lay piled high into the heavens, for Minas has some real mountains. Swift tropical darkness fell, and we went banging on into the night, our old wood-burner leaving a trail of fireworks behind us that gave it the suggestion of some fire-spitting dragon of medieval legend, and yanking us at last into Cruceiro. Next morning I took the direct line from São Paulo to Rio, and it was pleasant indeed to ride once more on a broad-gauge, roomy, coal-burning train. Rain had given the country an aspect quite different from that of two months before, but nothing could disguise the lesser industry and progress toward civilization in the State of Rio de Janeiro than in that of São Paulo. Rezende, the first town over the boundary, proved to be a village posing as a city, a ragged, barefoot place, overrun with dust and squalor, with ambitionless loafers and negro good-for-nothings. Professionally, too, it was a shock; far from finding it worthy of a Kinetophone performance, we could not have given a dog-fight there to advantage.

The slightly fertile country began at length to tip downward and we descended through long tunnels between vast opening vistas cut off at some distance by a great blanket of fog coming up from the sea. At Belem there was already an atmosphere of Rio, still some thirty miles away, with frequent towns and suburban service from there on, though we halted only at Cascadura and drew up at length in the familiar scent and hubbub of the capital. Carregadores snatched my belongings without so much as “by your leave” and bundled me into a taxi—which reminds me that inside my unlocked valise, that had been tossed about and left lying in all manner of places since leaving Campinas, there were a million and a half reis of our earnings in Brazilian bills. One’s possessions are so much safer under such circumstances in South America than in the United States that what would seem criminal carelessness in the north becomes a common habit.

It was like getting home again to hear the newsboys bawling “A Rua!” “A Noite!” “Ultimas Noticias!” in the guttural throat-growl peculiar to Rio, to be accosted by the same old lottery-ticket vendors, the same street-car conductors, to see the same “women of the life” strolling the Avenida and riding invitingly back and forth on the first section of the “Botanical Garden Line.” There was almost a monotony of familiar faces, so accustomed had I been for years to always seeing new and strange ones. The “Sugar Loaf,” hump-shouldered Corcovado, topsail Gavea, lofty Tijuca, and all the rest still looked serenely down upon the human ants’ nests at their feet with the immutability of nature’s masterpieces.

Yet Rio was different than I had first known it. Had I left it for good and all when I had expected, I should have had a better impression, but a false one; I should have known only the winter Rio, which is magnificent and has little in common with Rio of the summer-time. Statisticians assure us that, thanks to the trade winds and its greater proximity to the ocean, Brazil’s metropolis falls several degrees short of Buenos Aires in the most infernal months of the year, but it is doubtful whether anyone except the thermometer recognizes the advantage. In late November it lay sweltering under a lead-heavy blanket of heat that drenched one at the slightest exertion, mental, moral, or physical. No sooner did one put on a collar than it melted about the neck—and not only is a fresh white collar indispensable in Rio, but they cost sixty cents each and twelve cents a washing, and rarely outlive more than four journeys to the beat-’em-on-a-rock style of Brazilian laundries.

There was less evidence, however, than I expected of the rioting that had marked the change of administration a few days before,—a few broken windows between the office of O Paiz, chief journalistic supporter of “Dudú,” and our first Brazilian playhouse, a bullet-mark in a stone or brick wall here and there to recall the battling hordes that had surged up and down the Avenida. The trouble had started on the eve of the inauguration of the man from Itajubá. Among “Dudú’s” Machiavellian bag of tricks was a company of government bouncers and strong-arm men under command of a ruffian known as Lieutenant Pulcherio. On Saturday night, in the last hours of the detested régime, the lieutenant and his fellow-officers were discussing their glorious past over a quiet whiskey-and-soda in the Hotel Avenida bar when a group of the populares they had so long oppressed stopped to mention what they thought of them. The political protegees replied to this vile affront to their noble caste by firing on and attacking with swords the mainly weaponless populares, and among other gallant deeds worthy of their past killed a negro newsboy of twelve. The povo, however, for once vulgarly resisted their noble superiors by laying hands on bricks and cobblestones and weltering back and forth across the Largo da Carioca and the Avenida, managing in the process to prepare the beloved Lieutenant Pulcherio for funeral.

Early the next morning the opposition newspapers were already pouring out their pent-up spleen on the head of the outgoing president, resurrecting censored articles and deluging the disappearing administration with vituperation. The names they called the “odious gaucho” were scarcely fit to print; those applied to “Dudú” sometimes had the genius of intense exasperation. There were columns of such gentle remarks as:

The four years now terminating mark the blackest, the most nefast page in our history, the most painful calamity with which Providence has flagellated us since Brazil was Brazil. During the administration of the analphabetic sergeant who got possession of the chief power by knavery and the imposition of the barracks, justice was disrespected and reviled, immorality created rights of citizenship, robbery and corruption ruled unrestrained. There has not been a day since the inauguration of this unpleasant mediocrity, degenerate nephew of our great Deodoro, that the President of the Republic and his auxiliaries did not go back on their plighted word, in which there was not registered a new political infamy, in which we did not hear of a new crime or a new immorality. Praise God, this terrible four years of darkness is ended!

The inauguration took place in the early afternoon of Sunday, the fifteenth of November, anniversary of the day on which the republic was declared. In Brazil this ceremony is as simple as the swearing in of a juror. The incoming president takes the oath privately, signs his name, bids farewell to his predecessor, and the thing is done. On this occasion things moved even more swiftly. The instant the other had taken his place, “Dudú” sprang into an automobile, even forgetting in his haste to embrace the new president, according to time-honored Brazilian custom—of thirty years’ standing—and fled to the protection of Petropolis and his youthful consort. He had good precedent for his eagerness; other retiring presidents of Brazil have done likewise. When Campos Salles left the presidency in 1902 he was stoned by the populace, yet all Brazilians agree that he was by no means as corrupt or poor a president as the “unpleasant mediocrity” who was just then fleeing.

It quickly began to be apparent, however, that perhaps “these terrible four years of darkness” were not entirely ended. The new president was considered an honest and, within Brazilian limits, a democratic man, but he was evidently not quite strong enough to throw off the domination of the national boss, the “odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul. It was partly due to this feeling of disappointment, partly to the increased wrath caused by publication of censored articles left over from “Dudú’s” reign, reciting unbelievable official thievery and corruption, and to the release of great bands of political prisoners from dungeons in the islands of the bay, where they had been sent without trial or even accusation, that serious riots again broke out soon after my return to the capital. This time the fuss was started by students from the schools of medicine, law, and the like, who decided to “bury” the ex-president. Something like burning in effigy, this was considered a great insult not only to the former executive in person but to the army which he, as a field marshal, represented. The army general in command of the police brigade of the federal district went out to stop the outrage. The students were already parading the streets with a gaudily gilded “coffin” and using the offensive nicknames of “Dudú” and “Rainha Mãe,” when the brigade was set in motion. Before it could accomplish its purpose, orders came from the newly appointed minister of justice to let the students go on with their brincadeira (child’s play), whereupon the general in command rode back to the ministry and resigned—knowing he was to be dismissed next day anyway. Meanwhile the students had been joined by an immense mob of populares, mainly barefooted out-of-works and men of the porter, street-sweeper and hawker type, who marched back and forth through the business section and at length broke out in attacks on “Dudú” sympathizers or beneficiaries, which resulted in several deaths. When night fell a regiment of cavalry, another of infantry, and all the police of the federal district were protecting the palace of Cattete and that of Gaunabara, in which the new president had chosen to make his home. Nictheroy, across the bay, also was seething; even São Paulo threatened to join the revolt, to avenge the insult of having been offered the most unimportant post in the cabinet, with oily words about being the “agricultural state par excellence.” But the new government, like the old, had too firm an ally in the army for a revolution, with no other support than the weaponless populares, to be successful. Gradually the rioting died away, though by no means the criticism of the new administration, and Brazil settled down to another four years not unlike those that had just been so fittingly brought to a close, but which were to be marked a few months later by the assassination of the “odious gaucho.”

Though they were empty, I did not feel like again taking our old rooms out on the Praia do Flamengo. They seemed hot and stuffy; the very waters of the bay felt tepid; even the president’s palace of Cattete next door had been abandoned in favor of the newer and more sumptuous one of Guanabara. I hunted Leme and Copacabana over in vain for quarters overlooking one of those peerless beaches where the air from the open ocean might make life endurable, but the houses along the shore belong to the well-to-do, who do not have to take roomers even in “brutal hard times.” During my search I accidentally dropped into the Cinema Copacabana, a pleasant little place in one of the most prosperous sections of town. The slow-witted Portuguese who announced himself the owner and manager soon proved to be merely the hen-pecked consort of the real director. But the place promised well, if properly managed, and I finally signed it for five days—and fled to Petropolis for Thanksgiving.

Out at the Praia Formosa—which is no more a beach than it is beautiful—I found a mob of drenched and wilted people fighting about a tiny, discolored hole in the station wall, of the height of the average man’s knees, for the privilege of buying tickets to the “summer capital.” For though there were many daily trains, even when train schedules were being reduced all over Brazil because of the war-created difficulty of importing coal, there were thousands of regular commuters and few places left for the poorer Cariocas who scraped together enough for a round-trip ticket or two during the season. Most of the commuters had their permanent seats, with their names and their business or rank posted on the backs of them, and the mere traveler had to wander through several cars before he could find a place, like a stranger seeking a pew in a fashionable church.

The Leopoldina Railway between Rio and Petropolis is the oldest in Brazil, having been opened to the foot of the range in 1854 so that Emperor Pedro II could flee from hot weather and yellow fever in the summer months. We raced without interruption across a low, jungled plain until the mountains grew up impassable above us. Formerly this region was well cultivated, but man was unequal to the grim struggle with nature, especially after the emancipation of the only race that could cope with the swampy, matted jungle, and to-day the ruins of many a plantation house lie buried beneath the invading bush, while the few hovels with their little fenced gardens look like islands in the tangled wilderness. Yet we sped through many suburban villages shaded with palm-trees and adorned with immense tumbled rocks. On top of one of these, high above the surrounding landscape, sat the two-spired church of Penha, a famous place of pilgrimage. A few peasants were plowing and loading cut grass upon carts drawn by zebu-sired oxen. Puffs of white clouds, like exploded shells, hung here and there above the brilliant horizon. The three-cows advertisement of a well-known malted milk company suddenly loomed up against the background of jungle, its Portuguese words making it doubly fantastic in this exotic setting. Here and there we passed section gangs poling themselves homeward in their unpumpable hand-cars with long bamboo staffs, like Dutch canal boats.

The first-class seats, cane-covered in respect for the climate, were divided by an extra arm in the middle, obviating personal contact, which is the way train seats should be, no matter what fat men or honeymooning couples may prefer. Many of my fellow-travelers were as much worth watching as the scenes along the way. Here a man as black as a beachcomber’s hopes of signing on in Singapore leaned back in pompous full-dress in his placarded seat, acting like the millionaire president of some great corporation as he pored over the contents of his elaborate leather portfolio. I would have given the price of a Brazilian meal to have seen the couple across the aisle from me suddenly transported to one of our “Jim Crow” states. He was a self-important mountain of a man, as white as you or I; she, just as self-important, dressed in rich plumes and Paris fashions, hideous with diamonds and other glittering pebbles, was about one-third negro. One poor woman farther on had only ten fingers, two ears, and as many wrists—her skirts covered her ankles, strangely enough—on which to wear her jewelry, though she had made the most of her meager opportunities by putting three or four rings on each finger. Still farther along an old woman in mourning had bits of black cloth sewed over her earrings. A nice jet nose ring about two inches in diameter would have been so much more original, and as becoming, and would have made conspicuous one’s poignant grief even to those who might miss so commonplace an adornment as earrings.

There came a stretch of swamp and uninhabited lowland, thick with bulrushes, then heavily wooded hills grew up before us and we came to a halt at the edge of the plain. A little engine, built like a kangaroo, took charge of two of our cars and shoved them up the steep mountainside on a rackrail track. Now we were buried in narrow cuttings, now gazing upon magnificent panoramas that opened out through dense woods. There overhung the line many tremendous boulders, on one of which, large as a house, some wag had written in red paint, “Va com esta” (Take this along with you). The vegetation presently became sodden wet; the incessant singing of the jungle, scarcely noticed until it stopped, died away and vast views opened out on what we had left behind. Flooded with the rays of a full moon, the far-off range of mountains cut a jagged line across the sky. It grew cooler every minute; the air became clearer, and as the oppression of wilting heat wore away a drowsiness came upon us. At Alto da Serra, some 2500 feet above but barely a mile farther on than the station at the foot of the range, civilization began again, with all its pleasant and unpleasant concomitants.

Petropolis, fashionable resort of the wealthy Cariocas, national legislators and foreign diplomats, lies snugly ensconced among the cool hills, a charming assemblage of villas peering forth from tropical gardens. The former emperor for which it is named made the town to order by importing three thousand German and Swiss settlers in 1845, as examples of cleanliness and industry to his own people. Formerly the entire government came here during the summer months, but when the mosquito and his playmate, yellow fever, were routed, most of the native officials went back to the city, though the diplomats remain, pleasantly cut off from the rough world of practical politics, which seems far away indeed, instead of merely an hour and a half distant by Brazil’s best train service. There is a suggestion of a German watering-place about Petropolis, with its bizarre little residences, its trim streets lined by bamboo hedges, its roses, hydrangeas and honeysuckle, its “kiss-flowers” gathering honey from the fuchsia-trees. The Teutonic type has persisted in spite of interbreeding and comparative isolation from the fatherland in a strong Brazilian environment, and up to the beginning of the war there were still German schools in Petropolis. A spotless room in one of its quiet summer hostelries is a relief after months of Brazilian hotel squalor and uproar; or, if one’s income is limited, there are cheap and pleasant rooms to be had with the German inn-keepers.

But Petropolis is tropical enough to be unpleasantly warm on a summer noonday, and among her honeysuckle are horrid hairy spiders as large as belt-buckles, with perhaps a deadly bite. Like Rio, the town spreads up many narrowing valleys, fresh green Cascatinha with its weaving-mill beside a rivulet sliding down a sloping rock and breaking in little cascades at the bottom, or the restful tree-lined banks of canals meandering away through the wooded hills. Through the gap by which the railway creeps up to the plateau may be dimly made out all the Carioca range and, faintly, the well-known form of the Pão d’Assucar. There is a vast panorama of Guanabara Bay and all its islands, but Rio is only hazily suggested, and nearer views of it are much more striking. Another world on quite another plane spreads out below, careless, happy-go-lucky negro huts straggling up the wooded valleys as high as they can easily climb, the soothing sound of mountain brooks, playfully taking little rocky tumbles here and there without much hurt, joining the birds in making a kind of sylvan music.

Pedro II still sits out here in a little palm-topped square under the filtered sunlight or the summer moon, his book closed over a finger, the tails of his Prince Albert falling on either side of his armchair, his congress gaiters fitting the ease of his posture, gazing benignly forth from his great black shovel beard with the studious, half-dreamy look of the man who hated action. He is by no means our preconceived notion of an emperor, but a dreamy, easy-going, democratic aristocrat who seems eminently in his place here in this quiet village far from the rumble of the world and the heat and labors of the day below. Small wonder he was the last emperor of this turbulent, pushing western hemisphere. “A great Brazilian,” they had called him in celebrating his birthday a few days before, “who gave happiness to his people during almost half a century.”

“Dudú,” looking most comfortable and contented with life, was driving about the quiet streets of Petropolis with his girl wife behind a pair of prancing iron-gray horses and a liveried driver frozen in stone. As in all towns where kings and presidents are regular residents, no one paid him the slightest attention, though the same pair would no doubt at that moment have brought the business, and perhaps the peace, of Rio to a standstill.

There was a nice little up-to-date cinema just outside my window that would have been an ideal place for us to have made several hundred dollars—if only we had come to Brazil when the world was still going round. For the moment it was inhabited by a Portuguese barn-storming company, and the manager had not only lost heart over the “brutal crisis,” but had so extraordinarily good an opinion of himself and his establishment that nothing would induce him to offer us more than forty per cent. I would not have made a contract at that rate with St. Peter for a series of performances on the Golden Stairs, and as the only other cinema in town was small and unimportant, and run by an Italian too artless to do business with to advantage, there was nothing left but to fold up my arguments and say good-day.

I came down to Rio to see the show come in, but got a scare instead, for it did not appear, and we were due to open in Copacabana the following night. They turned up that evening, however, with a tale to tell. When they reached Ouro Fino for the Saturday engagement, they found that bandits had torn up the railway between there and Itajubá, evidently out of spite against the new president. “Tut” had been equal to the occasion, however, for though they could not fulfill the Itajubá contract—the only one we ever failed to carry out—they did not lose the date, but played a second time in Ouro Fino to a good Sunday house. Then they had returned to São Paulo, catching the night train and paying a fortune of 400$ to get themselves and the outfit back to Rio in time, though nothing like what they would have had to pay had not the baggage-man mistaken them for “artists” and the trunks for their wardrobe and stage costumes. Otherwise all had gone smoothly with them, except for one flattering error on the part of a charming young society lady of Franca. That town had been placarded, as usual, with our large three-sheet posters of Edison, and it was natural that “Tut’s” six feet and more of height should have drawn the attention of the susceptible sex as he sauntered about the streets. That evening the young lady in question was heard remarking to her escort, “Isn’t it strange that Senhor Edison looks so old in his pictures when he is really so young and handsome?”

During our stay in it, the American flag was somewhat overworked in Copacabana, there being one over our cinema door and another in a sand lot a block away in which a battered and paintless one-ring American circus had recently opened. Not often, I wager, have American showmen directly competed so far from home. We soon made friends with the animal trainer, whose ten years of knocking about Brazil had brought out into sharper relief his native Iowa dialect and point of view. Among his collection of moth-eaten animals in rusty old cages were two of savage disposition. The hyena had several times bitten him, but “Frank,” the tiger, which sprang at anyone who came within ten feet of the cage, was the only one really to be feared.

“Once,” said the exiled Iowan, holding up the ring finger of his left hand, which was curled up in a half-circle, “I was doing my act at a burg up in Minas when ‘Frank’ made a swipe at me with one paw. Lucky she didn’t get all her claws in, or it would have been good-by hand, but she happened to get just one claw into the inside of this finger at the base. She pulled, and I was so scared I guess I pulled too, and she peeled the whole inside of the finger off the bone—tendons, nerves, veins and all. I hid that hand behind me so the audience couldn’t see the blood, or ‘Frank’ smell it, whelted her a few, and finished the act. I couldn’t go out, for the animals would have followed me into the audience; I had to finish the act and let them go out the regular way, like they’ve been trained. Then I wrapped up my hand in a towel and hiked over to a drug store and he threw a whole bottle of iodine into it, and then they called in one of these here native doctors and he chopped around in it and did it up in pasteboard, which of course bent, so that he had to chop into it every day or so and near killed me, and finally it twisted into this shape and stayed there. And that guy had the nerve to charge me a hundred and fifty mil! After the first dressing I went over to a bar and had a whole glass of rye whiskey and then about a quart of this nigger rum they call cachaza on top of it—but hell, I didn’t feel it any more’n milk, and for four nights I never got a wink of sleep. I was afraid to drink anything for fear of making it worse, but finally I says, ‘Oh, to hell with it! I’m going to have a sleep,’ and I went out and got drunk—God, I never got so drunk before in my life! And then I went home and slept a whole night and a day. But it sure does make a man sick at his stomach to get caught by an animal.”

“Tut” and I had taken a room—my seventh residence in Rio—out at the end of the tunnel in Leme—so called because a rock shaped like a leme, or rudder, juts out into the ocean at the end of the beach. By this time Christmas was drawing near and shops were everywhere offering “brinquedos á granel” (playthings by the bushel), and the rains had come on in earnest. Rio was suffering so severely from the “brutal crisis” that people in the cinema business had lost their nerve completely, and it began to look as if the show would catch up with me before I could make a new contract. For several days I dashed about in pouring rain before I finally succeeded in running to earth in the bosom of his own family—which is very bad business form in Brazil—a man with a string of theaters in Rio, Nictheroy, and the two largest towns of Minas Geraes. I quickly got his name signed to a sixteen-day contract and, relieved of the fear of having the show run over me, settled down to take life easy again.

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