XIV. WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES…

XIV. WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES

On December 13th our alarm-clock having gone astray and being evidently unreplaceable in Brazil, where time means so little, I sat up all night in order to rout “Tut” out at four and send him off to the station, following him next day up on the cool and comfortable plateau to the second town of Minas Geraes. Juiz de Fora lies in a deep lap of wooded hills, with a conspicuous monument and statue of “Christo Redemptor” on a little parked hilltop high above yet close to the city, and revealing its site from afar off. Fir trees, masses of roses of all colors, and other flora of the temperate zone add to stretches of densely green grass, so unlike the gravel or paved squares almost universal in South America, in making the town a pleasant place of sojourn. The country round about is very rolling and without a suggestion of the tropics, but its coffee is unfortunately small, poor, and ill-tended, grown completely over in places with weeds and creepers; and as the town depends almost entirely on this product, it had a squeeze-penny mood that was not natural to Brazil. Like many another Brazilian town, its name is of simple origin. A juiz de fora, or “outside judge,” went about the country on a regular circuit in colonial days, holding court in various places, of which the present town was the most distant, not from Rio, which had no official standing in the olden times, but from the ancient capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto.

It was toward Ouro Preto that I continued a day or two later, pausing in one town to make a contract with the local saloon-keeper, in another to find a cinema about the size of a box-car tight closed and the owner off traveling; in a third that turned out to be a mud village without electricity, even had I been willing to risk dragging our outfit through the atrocious streets to its toy theater. It was in the last that I boarded the northbound train an hour before it arrived, which is not what the Chileans call a “German tale,” but an everyday fact. For there the government railway, which comes that far with a gauge even wider than our own, suddenly changes to a meter in width, and I had already grown weary of sitting in the train I was waiting for when it rolled in and, transferring its contents to its narrower self, rambled on across the cool plateau.

Besides our cloth-mounted three-sheets, I had had printed several thousand posters and window-cards, and the towns of Brazil blossomed with Edison behind me. Then there were great bundles of avulsos, or handbills, of many colors, to be strewn among the eager populace when the show actually arrived. Except for the printer’s errors, which were legion, these new masterly appeals were all my own handiwork, as were the articles on the life of Edison which sprang up in the newspapers along my route, for I had at last almost tamed the mis-jointed Portuguese language. By the time our tour was finished Brazil would certainly have known the story of Edison far better than he knows it himself, had he not already been the best-known American in South America—with the possible exception of Franklin, whom thousands took to be his contemporary, often asking if the two great inventors sometimes worked together and were on good terms socially, or whether they raged with jealousy over each other’s achievements.

There were many tunnels on the way to Ouro Preto, and much winding among deep-green hills, the soil still reddish, but showing little cultivation. All this region is at least 3000 feet above sea-level, where corn feels more at home than bananas or even coffee. Herds of cream-colored cattle of part zebu ancestry roamed the broken, grassy countryside. It was a dull, showery day, and the wet green trees clung to the hillsides like the plumage of birds, while everywhere the palms stood with disheveled hair. We made several stops on the branch line eastward from Burnier, just why I do not know, and at length halted at an isolated building with the information that we had reached Ouro Preto.

On the train I had chanced to mention my business to one of several local celebrities in heavy overcoats, who quickly shouted the information to all within hearing, so that when I disembarked the negro hotel runners were already calling me “Doctor Franck.” One of them piled my baggage on his head and we set out on foot into the night, for Ouro Preto, I quickly discovered, is so steep that vehicles have never become acclimated there. As we panted upward past great sheer-cut bluffs, scattered lights gradually disclosed the town, piled and tumbled far above and below us, the round cobblestones of its precipitous streets worn so icy smooth by many generations of bare and shod feet that my own showed a continuous desire to lag behind me. In a hotel as old as Vasco da Gama, and about as dilapidated, I was shown with ceremonial courtesy into an enormous front room with a “matrimonial” bed wider than the street outside, the springs of which I quickly discovered to be solid planks. Recalling my courteous colored companion, I gave him five minutes in which to find me a real bed. We wandered much longer than that through a labyrinth of rooms and anterooms—the latter all with narrow bedsteads, suggesting the old slave days when each traveler brought with him a servant to sleep outside his door—before we found a cama de arame, or “bed of wire,” in another vast chamber, with a window looking out across what seemed to be a bottomless gorge to patches of small, window-shaped lights climbing high into the sky.

I went out for a stroll, climbing cobbled streets so sheer that a foot-slip would have landed me in quite another part of town, passing buildings so old and quaint and medieval that in spite of the modern lights Edison has bequeathed the place I expected some old Portuguese viceroy in his cloak and sword and plumed hat to step out of any dark passageway followed by his slaves and retainers and preceded by his link-boys. I had all but forgotten the “feel” of old South American mountain towns, with their something peculiarly their own, and could easily have fancied myself back in the Andes again. Indeed, I was only beginning to realize the charm of those old Andean pueblos, barely guessed when one is physically lost in their squalor, yet fascinating from a distance of time and space, every twist and turn and descent and rise of their streets a lurking mystery, like a winding mountain road, cool and silent—especially silent, in the absence of all wheeled traffic.

Ouro Preto means “black gold.” The hills and young mountains lying in tumbled heaps about the town are honeycombed with abandoned mines, as the town itself is said to be with secret subterranean passageways. Not even Ayacucho in the Andes is so overrun with churches. Only an accurate man could throw a stone without hitting one, most of them of light colored rock, beautified with age, bulking far above the few little old houses apportioned to each, both by their size and by their places of vantage on some eminence or mountain nose. Evidently whenever they killed a slave or committed some particularly dastardly crime the old Portuguese adventurers salved their consciences or quieted their superstitions by building a church. Between them the little old houses straggle in double rows far up every steep valley that has room for them, here connected by very old stone bridges over narrow, yet deep, gorge streams, with time-crumbled stone benches along them, there refusing to follow when the cobbled street suddenly lets go and falls headlong with many a racking twist into another abyss.

In general, the old capital of the mining province is built along both sides of a small swift stream, which spills down through town with a musical sound, picking up some of its garbage on the way. Old colonial ruins, built in the leisurely, plentiful, massive fashion of long ago, still bear coats-of-arms and cut-stone Portuguese emblems, some half-hidden behind masses of white roses or climbing flowers. Old fountains of variegated colors, very broken, much weather- and time-faded, still have tiny streams trickling forth from the stone mouths of human heads or strange creatures unknown to natural history; scores of quaint old balconies, mysterious corners, and queer porticos jut out over streets or abysses. There was evidently no building plan except that imposed by nature. Each householder built on his few feet of space at any height and slope he chose, so that although the buildings nearly all cling close together for mutual support, they present most fantastic combinations, each with its red-tile roof faded from bright to drab according to its age and situation.

In the main praça up at the top of the town, which is rectangular and square-cobbled and singularly quiet, is a statue of “Tiradentes” high up on a slim granite pedestal, his hair wild, his shirt open, his wrists weighted down with chains. This nickname of “Pull Teeth” was given a sergeant who, way back in 1792, started the first revolution for Brazilian independence, but who was captured, executed, and his head hung up in an iron cage in this same praça. There is a School of Mines, the principal if not the only one in Brazil, in an old viceregal palace that was later the seat of the state government until that honor was taken away from Ouro Preto. The Indians of Minas could not or would not be enslaved, and the workmen required in the mines were brought from Africa early and often. I do not recall a mountain town anywhere with so large a percentage of African blood, though it is not now, of course, pure African, for the old Portuguese settlers were not slow to dilute it with their own, and with the exception of a very few of the proud old families of Minas, who have overridden their environment and kept their veins free from the taint of slaves, there are not many of full white race. In the morning the inhabitants straggle home from the outdoor butcher-shop, carrying strips of raw meat by a grass string run through them; in the later afternoon the frequent clash of jogging horse-shoes on the irregular cobblestones calls attention to some young blood come prancing by the window of his desire, peering out from her window-ledge over the otherwise silent and almost deserted street.

As to my own job, I did not even have to go out to look for contracts, for as I sat reading the newspapers and recovering from a Brazilian lunch, there came slinking in upon me the local pharmacist and owner of the “Cinema Brazil.” He had heard that I had come, and why, and as he was eager to outdo his one rival in town, he—ah—er—he, too, had come. If we played in Ouro Preto it meant four important days—Christmas, followed by a Saturday and Sunday, and a Monday also, for the trains did not run on that day. The only entertainment in town, my visitor rambled on, in his eagerness to attract us, was that provided by two old Italian “women of the life,” who offered a song and dance nightly at the other cinema. At a town eight kilometers away there were many “Englishmen” employed in the gold mines, who would be delighted to come in and see their fellow-countryman Edison—what, he was not coming himself?—well then, his invention. No doubt Senhor Edisón did not think poor old Ouro Preto worth visiting, now that it was no longer the capital, but it had many wonders even for a great inventor, if one really knew where to look for them. By this time I had handed him our printed contract, through which he carefully spelled his way, while I read several columns of newspaper. Then he brought me back to Brazil with, “Ah yes, very good, only—er—sixty per cent. is a very large percentage and——” At which point I broke in with “Why, I ought to charge you eighty per cent. for being way off here on a branch line, in a town without even wheeled vehicles!” Whereupon he shuddered and begged me to figure to myself that he had not said a word and, reaching for the contract, he signed it on the dotted line.

Rain was pouring and the night was still black when I followed my baggage down the steep cobbled road to the station. There I discovered, in a sudden flash of genius, why all Brazilian trains start at daylight and stop at dark; it is not because they are afraid to go home in the dark, but so that the languid employees will not have to light the car-lamps. Even the government night expresses rarely have more than a firefly of a gas-lamp or a couple of flickering oil-wicks in the end of each coach. Brazilians are not a nation of readers, and do not demand decent lights, though there is nothing to prove they would get them if they did. The print-loving stranger is often warned that it is dangerous to the health to read during, or just before, or until long after meals, which may be true, but the Brazilians themselves are living proof that it is still worse never to read at all. In most stations there are waiting-rooms only for women, and not a spot for the mere male to sit on unless he boards the train itself, which is also the favorite lounging-place of scores of the local population who have no intention of traveling on it. Here an affectionate crowd was embracing and fondling one another after the Brazilian fashion and gradually filling a tightly closed car in which it was not easy to breathe. It is really foolish, too, to ride first-class on the trains of the interior, for it means little more than paying double price, when the single is bad enough, for the privilege of sitting in a cane seat at one end of a car, instead of in a wooden one at the other. However, a few kind words may unhesitatingly be said for the railways of Brazil. One may leave all he possesses in a train seat and not only will no one touch it, but his fellow-travelers will stand for hours rather than disturb the smallest parcel left to hold a place. Nor is the baggage-smasher indigenous to Brazil. Several pieces of our outfit were delicate, yet during a year’s travel by every known means of conveyance except aëroplane through nearly every state of Brazil, it was never seriously injured—though on its return to my beloved native land it was badly damaged between New York and the Edison factory, an hour away.

Beyond the old town of Sabará, where the first of the gold that was to make Minas Geraes famous and Portugal wealthy was discovered in 1698, we turned westward and a few moments later sighted through bedraggled palm-trees the glaring new town of Bello Horizonte. No doubt it was to escape the labor of propelling themselves about the precipitous streets of Ouro Preto that led the calfless legislators of Minas Geraes to dethrone the time-honored old capital at the beginning of the present century and move the government to a hitherto uninhabited spot, justly called “Beautiful Horizon.” The site chosen on which to build to order this new capital is a broad shallow lap of rolling country, a bare, treeless landscape which abets the light-colored new buildings in producing a constant uncomfortable glare. It is strange that they did not choose a place with water, a lake or at least a river, which may be found even in the lofty State of Minas. As it is, there is only an insignificant creek creeping through town and an artificial pond in the center of an unfinished park in which the water is so red that even the swans paddling disconsolately about in it have a reddish hue. The designers have all the details of a complete city in mind; the difficulty is to carry out their well laid plans and produce one. For Bello Horizonte is visible proof that it takes more than houses, streets, and inhabitants to make a city. Its public buildings are large and plentiful. Whitewashed houses with bright new red-tile roofs lie scattered far and wide over the rolling landscape. Wide park streets with electric tramways stretch out in every direction in a wheel-shaped system evidently copied from Washington. But the broad avenues are still unpaved, unpacked stretches of red mud, resembling newly plowed potato patches, and one soon recognizes that they run nowhere, that they are an exotic, forced growth which men are still chopping farther back into the red flesh of the virgin, scrub-grown hills. A few have stretches of broad cement sidewalks lined with trees, but they are trees still in their swaddling clothes of protecting frames, or at best are half-grown and unfamiliar with their duty of giving shade and beauty and restfulness. Such grass as exists grows in scattered tufts over bare earth, in no way resembling sod. Though the houses are new, many of them are set in the beginnings of walled bush and flower gardens, with steep outside stairways leading to the real residence in the second story and having fanciful paintings of such scenes as Rio’s Beira Mar on the walls under the porches. They have an alien, unsatisfying appearance which suggests that it is better to let even towns grow up of themselves than to force them by hothouse methods. There are, of course, some advantages in a city, especially in a capital, built to order, but though modernity’s gain over medievalism is in some ways shown, Bello Horizonte lacks not only the charm of old Ouro Preto but even the air and spirit of a city. The whole place feels like a house one has moved into while it is still building over his head.

While they were about it, one wonders they did not build in stone, instead of adobe bricks and plaster. The impression that everything is built only for a temporary halt, by people who, like Arabian nomads, expect to move on again to-morrow, pervades all modern America, in sharp contrast to Europe and the ancient American Indian civilizations. But at least there are as yet no slums, unless one counts as such the large clusters of small new houses that were almost huts scattered through the several shallow valleys spreading out from the town. It is curious how a city draws houses about it like a magnet even when there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants to do but take in one another’s washing—or do one another’s governing. Though it offers free sites to any industry that will establish itself there, only the scream of a single small weaving mill is heard in Bello Horizonte. The city produces nothing except government for the state, and the man who comes into personal contact with that soon realizes that it “costs expensive” and is none too good governing at that. More fuss is made over the state president than over our own national executive. Negro soldiers in khaki and bright red caps guard his “palace” and great high-walled garden, parading back and forth day and night before all government buildings with fixed bayonets, not because there is any real danger—except to the unwary pedestrian who might run into the pointed blade of some sleepy guard—but because all Latin-America loves to make a show of deadly weapons even in time of peace. The population had the bland, sophisticated air of people already trained to city life elsewhere, like transplanted flora from other gardens of varied kind and situation. Strangers attract far less attention than in even larger interior towns, because here all are more or less strangers and the inhabitants have not lived long enough together to form that sort of closed corporation of old established towns, which not only makes a new and unfamiliar face an object of curiosity, but arouses a kind of distrust and annoyance among the native inhabitants.

The show reached Bello Horizonte before me and had done a good Saturday and Sunday business, but “Tut” reported that all records for “deadheads” were being broken. The manager was a bullet-headed mulatto—whose name, by the way, was Americo Vespuccio—and who did not have the moral courage needed to cope with the swarms of official beggars which infest a state capital. When the doors opened on Monday night I was lolling incognito nearby. The ticket-taker was a mulatto girl of about fourteen who thrust out her hand whenever anyone walked in, taking the ticket if there happened to be one to take, but paying no attention to the fact that as often as not there was none. Not only were there many people with monthly passes and permanent free tickets, but the negro management, being afraid of anyone with authority, real or pretended, had given everyone capable of manufacturing a shadow of excuse the conviction that he had the right to enter without payment. In the first few minutes I saw seventy persons enter without tickets, exclusive of the house employees and men in uniform. Then I burst into the manager’s office and informed him that he was going to pay us our percentage for every person who had not, and did not thereafter, pay an admission fee. He turned an ashy gray and begged me to take full charge at the door. I discharged the mulatto girl on the spot, made a ticket-box of my hand-grip by cutting a slot in it—hitherto ticket-takers had stuffed the tickets into their pockets or any other convenient receptacle—and proceeded to shock the good people of “Beautiful Horizon.”

An elaborately dressed man in a frock coat, accompanied by two women glittering with diamonds, pushed haughtily past.

“Your ticket, senhor?” I smiled, in my most ceremonial Portuguese.

“I never pay admission,” the man replied haughtily.

“And why don’t you?” I retorted, which wholly unprecedented question so dazed him that without a word he went back to the wicket and bought three tickets. The same incident was repeated dozens of times that evening.

Another favorite trick was for a man to enter with one or two women and purchase tickets only for them.

“Where is yours, senhor?”

“Eu volto” (I am coming back) was the unvarying reply, by which the speaker meant to imply that he was merely going to escort the ladies to their seats and come right out again, but in almost every case he remained an hour or more until the “Kinetophone” number had been run and came slinking out with the air of having kept eyes and ears tight closed during the performance.

No doubt many of the well-dressed, haughty individuals I sent to the box-office were state senators and the like, but what of it? We were paying heavily to support them, paying every time we moved from one town to another, every time we gave a performance, every time we left or entered a state, in addition to what we had paid to enter the country, every time we drew a check, or put up a poster, or inserted an advertisement, and even in my most charitable mood I could not see why we should give free entertainment to any government official who was not there in line of duty.

During the second section a chinless, pomaded popinjay in full evening dress, with an own-the-earth air, pushed scornfully past when I asked for his ticket. I stepped in his way, repeated my question, and finally laid a hand lightly on his arm, whereupon the manager, frightened to a kind of grayish pink, came running forward to assure me “It’s all right.”

“But who is he?” I insisted.

“I’ll tell you later,” whispered the trembling mulatto.

The chinless individual, who turned out to be the delegado, corresponding to our chief of police, remained only a few minutes, all the while plainly boiling with rage. As he came out he stopped before me—the rush having ceased I was seated—and in a voice and manner that no doubt scared ordinary people to death, he growled:

“Before you ever grasp anyone by the arm again you want to know who he IS!”

“Senhor,” I replied, without rising, which is a shocking insult even to the most petty Brazilian official, “I want to know who everyone is, and any man who is a cavalheiro will tell who he is under such circumstances in any civilized country, and until I know who he is I’ll catch him by the arm or by any other part of the anatomy that is handy.”

He went out, fuming at the nostrils, leaving me wondering if he would send a subordinate to place me under arrest, but abuse of authority had become so rampant that I would have been willing to explore the interior of a Brazilian prison to bring the matter to a head. When the performance was ended I cornered the manager in his office and forced him to pay us our share for every “deadhead” I had counted, and though he and his equally dusky assistant hastened to assure me that my demands were wholly justified and that they did not stop officials and ladies “because they did not have the courage of Americans,” there was something in their manner that told me they would have taken supreme delight in knifing me in the back. That evening I turned my papers, valuables, and revolver over to “Tut,” in order to be prepared for the probable next move of the delegado. But he must have suffered a change of heart, for thereafter even soldiers and policemen in uniform had orders to pay admission unless they were on duty and wearing their sidearms to prove it. Thenceforward every resident of Bello Horizonte who entered the “Cinema Commercio” either handed in a ticket or gave proof of his right to free admission, whether he was president, senator or state dog-catcher. When we had broken all records for the time and place, I ran the second section of the show myself, just to keep in practice against the day when I must become a motion picture operator, and went to bed leaving orders to be called at dawn. By this time “Tut” spoke considerable Portuguese—though, having learned it mainly from Carlos, he had many of the errors of grammar and pronunciation of Brazil’s laboring class—so that I left on my next advance trip with less misgiving.

Nowadays you can go to famous old Diamantina by rail. The world is building so many railways that there will soon be no place left for those who prefer travel to train-riding. I had little hope that the diamond town would prove worth the time and expense necessary to bring the Kinetophone to it, but I had a personal desire to see it, and also, though I could not get exact information on the subject, the map suggested that I might be able to cross on muleback from Diamantina to Victoria and thereby save myself a long and roundabout trip.

The rain had let up at last, though sullenly, like a despot forced out of power. All that day there came the frequent cry of “chiero de panno queimado!” (smell of burned cloth), whereupon everyone jumped up and shook himself—everyone, that is, except the advance-agent of the Kinetophone, who had ridden behind Brazilian wood-burners often enough to know how to dress for the occasion. Our “express” not only stopped but was sidetracked at every station, and every time it gave a sign of coming to a halt the passengers sprang up as one man, crying “A tomar café!” and poured out upon the platform, to return growling if even a dog-kennel of a station miles from nowhere was not prepared to serve them their incessant beverage. “Tut” used to say that the Brazilians drank so much coffee that their minds went to dregs. It is a curious paradox, too, that the Brazilian, often an unprincipled rogue in business, never dreams of cheating the coffee-man out of his tostão, even if he has to exert himself to hunt him up and pay it before scrambling aboard again as the warning-bell rings.

Beyond Sete Lagoas the country began to flatten out, with patches of corn in new clearings, then more and more heavy brush and only the red-earth railway cutting and a wire fence on either side. Curvello, the largest town of the day, was almost a city, but so largely made up of negro huts that it probably would not have paid us to make it a professional visit. The traveler never ceases to wonder how all Brazil came to swarm so with negroes; all the ships of Christendom could not have brought so many from Africa, and the original slaves must have multiplied like guinea-pigs. In the afternoon I got reckless and bought an apple, which only cost me a milreis—but then, it was a very small apple. Far up here in the interior prices seemed to be easing off a bit, but this was largely offset by the lack of small change. In contrast to Rio, there was almost no silver or nickel, which made an excellent excuse for plundering the traveler of a few tostões every time he approached a ticket-window, and forcing him to accept dirty old bills often patched together out of six or seven pieces that were completely illegible.

It would have been sunset, had there been one, by the time we pulled into Curralinho, whence a branch line carries a two-car train three times a week to Diamantina. I believe I was the only first-class traveler with a ticket next day, one having a kilometer-book and the rest government passes or uniforms. There was not a woman on board, though one man with a government pass had with him a boy of seven who, the conductor weakly declared, should pay half fare; but he did not insist and let the matter slide in the customary Brazilian way. No wonder the Belgian syndicate which built this line and another starting toward Diamantina from Victoria hovers on the verge of bankruptcy, though my own ticket cost 14$800, plus 1$600 for the federal government and 1$600 for the State of Minas, or $5.80 for ninety-five miles of uncomfortable travel.

Except in spots the country was almost sertão, a bushy wilderness with here and there long piles of wood for the engines. We crossed the Rio das Velhas, flowing northward and inland, carrying red earth in solution and pieces it had torn away from the forests through which it had commandeered passage. There were some cattle and here and there a patch of bananas in a hollow with a hut or two, but the rest was a desolation of black rock, which proved to be white inside where the railroad builders had broken into it. Rare patches of corn were the only visible cultivation; between scattered collections of miserable adobe huts there appeared to be no travel; the listless part-negroes lolling their lives contentedly away in their kennels seemed to raise nothing but children and, not being cannibals, it was a mystery what they lived on. Slowly and painfully we climbed to the top of a great ridge, a wild country of barren rocks heaped up into hills that were almost mountains, drear and treeless as the landscape of Cerro de Pasco. No wonder the men who wandered up here seeking their fortunes thought the bright pebbles they picked up worth keeping, if only to break the melancholy monotony.

Beyond a miserable collection of huts where those of robust nerves ate “breakfast,” we passed the highest railway point in Brazil, 4,600 feet above sea-level, whence vast reaches of dreary country, broken as a frozen sea, spread to the horizon in all directions. The last station before Diamantina looked like a town in Judea, so ugly was the desolation that surrounded it, and across this one gazed as vainly for the city which the map proclaimed near at hand as one may stare for a glimpse of La Paz from the plains of Bolivia high above it.

Ten years before, one traveled on muleback all the way from Sabará to reach the heart of Brazil’s diamond-bearing territory, and only this same year had the inaugural train reached Diamantina, amid hilarious rejoicing of its population. In the few months that had passed since, the inhabitants had not lost the sense of wonder which the tri-weekly arrival of the puffing monster on wheels gave them, and though it was Christmas Day, nearly the whole town had climbed to the station to greet us. For climb they must. A youth of decided African lineage took my bag and we stepped over the edge of the uninhabited plateau, to find a town heaped up directly below us, all visible roads and trails pitching swiftly down into it. The medieval streets were rough-paved in misshapen cobbles, with a kind of sidewalk of naturally flat stones running down the center. The town was labyrinthian, its narrow blocks of every possible form between the narrower streets, built to fit the lay of the land, spilling down on the farther side into a deep valley and backed on all sides by a rough and savage landscape of blackish hue as far as the eye could see. It was as picturesque as Ouro Preto, which it seemed to equal in age, though it had been somewhat less elaborately built than the old state capital, and its churches were fewer, smaller, and more insignificant. The fact that here also there were no vehicles may be one of the reasons why the population seemed so healthy and active—climbing to the station alone proved that—in spite of their decidedly preponderating negro blood.

The railroad had not yet brought them long enough into contact with the outside world to spoil the simple people of Diamantina. They seemed to live together like a great affectionate family, soft-mannered and little given to quarreling, even the street boys treating one another like French diplomats. No doubt it was their negro blood, perhaps also the adventurous happy-go-lucky, take-a-chance character natural to a mining community, that gave them their considerable gaiety. There was no evidence of anything but kindliness and good-feeling among the barefoot women who stopped to gossip with water-jars set jauntily on their heads—real jars, too, for Diamantina is so far away from the world that American oil tins have not yet come to usurp the place of picturesque native pottery. As final high praise, my hotel host asserted that the town is so different from the rest of Brazil that a man can occasionally visit a family with unmarried daughters without bringing them into disrepute among public gossips. It is, indeed, a Brazilian Utopia!

I was Diamantina’s star guest during my stay, having the main room in the main hotel looking out on the main praça. The latter was small and three-cornered, paved with cobbles back in the days of Shakespeare, and had in its center a bust of a native of Diamantina who was Minister of Viaçao when President Peçanha was coaxed into signing the decree giving the Belgians the concession for their railroad. But then, Brazil is the land of busts, and the man who does not succeed in getting at least one of himself tucked away in some praça is not much of a buster. My huge front room, next to the homelike hotel parlor with many chairs and a cane divan all dressed up in lace coats, was fully twenty feet square, its immense French windows reaching to a floor made of great hand-cut planks fastened by handmade spikes with heads an inch square—or in diameter, according as the blacksmith happened to shape them—and so glass-smooth and warped and twisted that in places one had to brace one’s legs to keep from sliding downhill along it. The house seemed older than the surrounding hills, but there is so much of the new and crude in Brazil that the old cannot but be greatly relished. As a matter of fact Diamantina does not deserve a public hostelry, for nearly all its visitors have the South American habit of stopping with friends or relatives, and for all its electric lights and spring beds, and moderate charges, the hotel had only a couple of paying guests.

The adventurous bandeirantes of São Paulo first penetrated this region looking for gold. A considerable amount of it was found in the muddy stream at the foot of the present town, and early in the seventeenth century the adventurers founded the village of Tijuca, which took its name from a nearby swamp. In olden times gold dust and tiny nuggets were used as money throughout the region, and there were scales in every shop. Gold seems to be found almost anywhere in the region, and placer-mining is the natural occupation of all its inhabitants. When electric-light poles were put up by a syndicate at Boa Vista, in order to give Diamantina as light by night what the company uses as power during the day, the children carried off the earth dug up from the holes to wash out the gold. After a heavy rain tiny particles of gold are picked up in the gutters of Diamantina and along the edge of the little stream below it. So here at last is a place where you can really pick up gold in the streets, yet the people are poorer and more ragged than those who live by planting beans.

It was while searching for gold that the miners of Tijuca came across many bright, half-transparent pebbles that were plainly of no use to them, but the largest of which they gave to their children or used as counters in their own card games. There were a bushel or more of them in such use in the village and its vicinity when a new priest arrived from Portugal. In his first game of cards the pious padre noticed the peculiar poker chips that everyone produced by the handful. He let the information leak out that he thought them very pretty, and would be pleased to have them as keepsakes. They were quite worthless, of course, to his new parishioners, and if his innocent sacerdotal eye was caught by their transparent brightness, they saw no reason why they should not humor his whim, and at the same time gain in favor with the Church, by giving him such of the worthless little baubles as he did not win at cards. Thus he gathered together half a bushel or more of the pebbles, and suddenly disappeared in the general direction of Amsterdam, dropping a hint in Rio on the way.

Word soon reached the Portuguese crown of this new form of riches in its overseas possessions. It turned out that the range of hills from well south of the present town of Diamantina to far up in Bahia, a tract of more than four hundred square leagues, was diamond-bearing land. Indeed, if one may believe local conviction, the finest diamonds in existence come from Minas Geraes, and the world’s most famous black diamonds from Bahia State a bit farther north.

Diamonds were first discovered in India and for centuries came only from there. When they were found in Brazil, thousands of the stones were sold as Indian diamonds not only because buyers were prejudiced, but because the Portuguese government had forbidden private mining on penalty of death, and the contrabandists were forced to reach their market by way of India. The village of Tijuca became a flourishing center, far as it was from the outside world, and for all the stern government régime set over the region. In 1734 Portugal sent out an “Intendente Geral dos Diamantes,” with absolute power to enforce the government monopoly. His palace still exists in a garden near the top of the town, with the remains of an artificial lake on which he kept a sailboat to show the people of what came gradually to be known as Diamantina how he had crossed the sea. The crown forbade individual mining and gave the job to contractors, who worked six hundred slaves and paid 220–240$ yearly per slave for the privilege, yet who made fortunes even though all large diamonds and twenty per cent. of all finds went to the crown. Population multiplied and Diamantina became a center of riches and luxury. Contrary to the case in the rest of Brazil, many broken noblemen and men of education came here to mend their fortunes, and the colony, and eventually all the province of Minas Geraes, became a focus of “civilization,” as that word was understood in those days,—much powdered hair, knee-breeches, beauty patches, minuets—and swarms of miserable slaves. It may be that the courtesy of the poor Africanized inhabitants of to-day is but a hold-over from those times of elaborate etiquette.

Amazing tales are still told in Diamantina of its golden days. It was evidently the custom of the government viceroys to imprison the contractors as soon as they got rich and “roll” them penniless. One official is reputed to have made every guest a present of a cluster of diamonds. The Grupo Escolar, or school building, across the street from my hotel was once the residence of a great diamond buyer, and when the building was made into a school some years ago a score or more of skeletons were found tumbled together in the bottom of a secret shaft. This revived the legend that the buyer had a chair set on a trapdoor, and when a man came in with a large “parcel” of contraband diamonds he was asked to sit down and make himself at home while the buyer looked over the stones—and brought up at the bottom of the shaft.

In 1771 the famous Pombal sent out the “green book,” with fifty-four despotic articles that nearly depopulated the district, but in 1800 the régime softened, and finally, in 1832, the government monopoly was abolished. Since then mining has been more or less intermittent. Diamonds reached their highest price during the war with Paraguay, at the end of which, in 1867, the stones were found in South Africa, a blow from which the industry in Brazil has never recovered. For while it is claimed in Diamantina that Brazilian diamonds average much higher than those from the Cape, the African mines now produce at least eighty per cent. of the world’s supply and with more modern methods and widespread propaganda completely control the market. Abolition was the final straw, and in five years exportations of diamonds from Diamantina dropped from 2,500 to 300 annually.

Unlike those of South Africa, the diamonds of Brazil are found on or near the surface. In a few places quartz is broken open in the search, but in general they are taken loose in the gravel of the alluvial deposits by the simpler process of placer mining. The fact that enormous tracts of territory were worked over by the Portuguese does not mean that they took out fabulous amounts, according to modern local authorities, because they had to feed their slaves anyway and it was to their advantage to keep them working, even if the finds were few. To-day, though there are some syndicates and large companies, most of them are completely paralyzed and such work as is done is mainly by individual natives. The company troubles seem to be due to lack of a good mining law—natives may wash for diamonds anywhere, even on company claims—the insecurity of titles, the prohibitive cost of transportation for machinery, high tariffs, low rate of exchange, the constant war of South Africans against South American diamonds, and finally the “salting” of mines by fake promoters, coupled with carelessness of foreign stockholders in sending out experts to examine the ground before accepting even an honest promoter’s word for it. Thus fortunes have been lost in the Brazilian diamond fields, notwithstanding the fact that diamonds continue to be steadily picked up in them.

The largest diamond ever found in Brazil was the “Star of the South,” found at Agua Suja (Dirty Water), on the line to Catalão. This weighed about the same as the famous Kohinoor diamond,—300 carats. The stones are usually found in the beds of rivers, larger near the source, and smaller farther down, for they wear off in traveling, and in sand, earth, and common gravel, usually with gold. Rough diamonds generally have no brilliancy, looking merely like white, half-transparent pebbles, though any child of Diamantina is said to be able to recognize one at a glance. There is really nothing more prosaic than diamond gathering, and the resemblance is slight between those who hunt for and those who wear them. None of the improved methods of South Africa have been introduced into Brazil, not even the hand screen or the “grease board,” and the negroes still use the batea, or wooden bowl in the shape of a hand basin, in washing for both diamonds and gold. When he has chosen his spot beside some stream the negro sets up a baca, a kind of topless soapbox with one end knocked out, about six inches above the surface of the water and fills it with gravel. Then with the batea he scoops up water and throws it with a peculiar flip on the gravel, washing it from side to side until the loose stuff runs off and leaves only the pebbles. These are then spread out and gone over carefully by hand, the diamonds being readily detected by the experienced eye, particularly since, unlike the other stones, they cannot be wet and for that reason stand out brilliantly from the rest. In fact, in Spanish and Portuguese they are as often called brillantes as diamantes. With the war and the sudden drop in the diamond market that came with it the people of Diamantina largely left off hunting for diamonds and began the more paying occupations of planting corn and gathering firewood.

On the Sunday afternoon following Christmas, the rain having at last ceased, I went out for a walk. An hour’s climb, in which I did not suffer from heat, brought me to a cross on the culminating point of the great mass of gray-black rock of ragged formation across the valley and small stream in which many a diamond has been picked up and much gold washed. Here is a full view of the town, stacked up on the green and fertile side of the long valley and spilling like coagulated grease down into it, scattered groups of eucalyptus trees and its general greenness in great contrast to the rockiness of all the rest of the vast and jagged encircling landscape. The gothic church of Coração de Jesus and the tree-girdled seminary stand somewhat above the rest of the orderless heap, and one realizes that the railroad does indeed come in at the top of the town, for its station is so high that here it cannot be seen above the edge of the plateau on which it sits. Diamantina is a great trading post of the interior, and down in the center of town there is a species of Arab khan, a roof on posts where shaggy sun-, rain-, and road-marked muleteers with long, ugly facas in their belts pile their saddle-blankets and goods and cook over campfires. The old, old highway unravels down across the broken rocky hills, descends into the valley, stops a while at the khan, and having gathered its forces together once more into a compact trail, marches across and out of the valley again and away over the bleak horizon.

It was in the middle of this public trail that I came upon two negroes in quest of gold washed down by the recent rains. While one dug up wooden bowls of earth and gravel, the other stood knee-deep in a muddy, dammed-up pool and, filling his batea with the earth brought by the other and letting water into it, whirled it about until the heavy matter went to the bottom. Then he scraped off by hand the top layer, continuing the process until within ten minutes he had left about a quart of heavy black earth. This he dumped with more of the same in a white sand-nest he had made on the bank of the little stream crossing the trail. Like most of his fellow-townsmen he was talkative and ready to explain his affairs to a stranger. He had washed for gold after a rain ever since he was a boy, getting from two to four milreis worth every time, and where there is gold there are sure to be diamonds, especially the “chapeu de palha” (“straw hat”), which he explained to be a very flat diamond making much show with little weight. Though both he and his companion were shoeless and had been from infancy, ragged, illiterate and half toothless, they were far from ignorant on some points, especially of words used in the diamond industry, which they spoke with a curious negro mispronunciation mixed with slang.

In riding about the vicinity on other days I came upon several gangs of a score of negroes each, bare-legged and ragged, hoeing at an average wage of eighty cents a day in banks of red earth through which a rainy season stream had been turned. This they keep up as long as the rains last, rarely seeing a diamond, which wash along through the artificial gorge with the other gravel and come to rest on a sandy flat place beyond. Then the men are set to “batting the baca,” until the sand is washed away and the diamonds recovered by the same crude methods used in the first days of the colony. One question almost sure to be asked by the layman is how workmen are kept from stealing the diamonds. Theft, it is explained, is by no means so easy to accomplish as would appear at first glance. In the first place, it takes on the average a cartload of sand and gravel to yield a one-quarter carat diamond. By the time the negro has washed a load down to about two bushels an overseer has an eye on him and watches him until the process is finished. It is rare for a diamond to appear suddenly on the surface during the preliminary washing, when the negro might snatch it, and even if he did he would have a hard time selling it. If ever a native of Diamantina has stolen a diamond, even as a boy, he is blackballed in the community for the rest of his life. It is a long way to anywhere else, even since the advent of the railroad, so that thieving of the town’s chief product is extremely unusual. Men from far off up country come in with thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds or black carbons on a pack mule, which lags far behind with its negro driver. Everyone along the way knows what it carries, yet for decades no driver has run away nor anyone “framed” a holdup.

In town, gold and precious stones are handled with a casual carelessness only equalled by the Bank of England. A local jewelry shop, famous in the trade the world over, looks like a miserable little tinker’s den, where a dozen men and boys, all with more or less African blood, work at dirty old worn and smoked benches. About them is a wilderness of junk where cigarette butts, gold nuggets, old iron tools, gold wire, and worthless odds and ends lie scattered and tumbled together with diamonds of all sizes, cut and uncut, old tin tobacco-boxes containing fortunes in diamonds and precious stones of several species wrapped in dirty bits of paper. Gold coins of the former Empire as well as new British sovereigns waiting to be melted up for local use can scarcely be distinguished from the dusty rubbish on the tables; drawers filled with the ragged money of to-day stand half-open; a tiny show-window—recently put in as a concession to modern ideas—has a six-carat diamond stuck against the glass with several smaller ones about it, day and night; a can that originally held soap but now full of emeralds, amethysts, topazes, and half a dozen other precious stones found in the region was kicking about the floor. Yet there was no sign of lock or key, except that used to fasten the outer door at night. The owner only came now and then during the day, and amid this disordered jumble of wealth his dozen workmen and boys toiled from seven in the morning until sometimes nine at night at ludicrous wages without a loss ever having been reported.

Down in the valley near the town there is a native diamond-cutting establishment, a capacious old barn of a building with the immense rough-hewn beams of olden times and two long double rows of “wheels” run by water-power on which the stones are “cut.” Strictly speaking, a diamond is not “cut” at all; it is ground—lapidar or “stoning” they call it in Brazil. Disks of the best grade steel, about a foot in diameter, move round and round at a moderate rate of speed. Rough diamonds are first chipped off by hand to the general shape desired; then they are set into a bed of lead and solder so that one facet may be ground down, after which they are removed at a forge, resoldered, and ground on another facet. The “wheels” must be polished down and filed in slight ridges every two or three weeks, a task that takes about one day, and they are rented at 12$ a month to the individual lapidarios, both men and women, largely of negro blood, who work for themselves, either “cutting” diamonds for others or speculating with such as they can buy themselves. A day is the average time consumed here in “cutting” a one-carat diamond, at a cost of about 7$, the chips and diamond dust left over bringing the ordinary income up to 65$ a week.

Diamond buyers of all nationalities journey to Diamantina, and the town expressed surprise and often incredulity to hear that I had not come to purchase a few “parcels” for speculation. “Everyone” buys diamonds, yet no one pays the state export tax on them, if one may believe local opinion. This would have to be paid if the stones were sent out legally by express, but when a buyer has collected a “parcel”—in Portuguese it is partida—he finds some man bound for Rio and says to him, “If it isn’t too much trouble just hand this little package to —— and Co.,” thereby defrauding both the railroad and the politicians. The men who deal in diamonds in the place of their origin no more wear them than do the men who dig them. Old buyers who have handled the precious stones all their lives are not only plainly dressed but have none of the tendency toward personal adornment so widespread among Brazilians. Two American diamond-men I met had huge blacksmith hands on which a ring would have looked absurd, and the only diamonds one sees in Diamantina are those offered for sale in “parcels” or show-windows, or those worn by an occasional tenderfoot.

Newcomers have sometimes been deceived by this state of affairs. A few years ago there arrived in Diamantina a German with a conviction of his own wisdom and superiority over common mortals, who, with an air implying that the thought had never occurred to anyone else, let it leak out that he was buying diamonds. An old negro wandered up to the hotel in an aged shirt and trousers, a ragged hat, and bare feet, and shuffling in a halting, diffident way into the German’s room, told him that he did not know what the two diamonds he carried wrapped in a scrap of paper were worth, but that he would sell them cheap. The German paid him about half the market price for them and asked him if he had any more, adding with a wink that any transactions they might make would be kept a secret. The poor old negro said he thought he could find a few more about his hut or in the river or among his friends, and for a month or six weeks he continued to slouch into the hotel, until he had sold the wise German about a pint of diamonds for a mere song of fourteen or fifteen contos, say $5,000. Then the Teuton, highly pleased with himself, packed up and took the down train from Curvello, smuggling his untold riches out of the state without paying the export duty—and discovered when he reached Rio that every one of the fine diamonds the poor ignorant old negro had sold him so cheaply were what are known in the trade as “fourths,” or worse, full of knots and gnarls as a century-old olive tree and worth at most some 50c a carat for cutting glass. A bit later, the poor innocent old negro having occasion to go down to the capital and talk with the senator whose political boss he was in Diamantina, blew into Rio in the frock-coat and patent leathers he wears when not doing business with gullible strangers, with a real six-carat diamond dazzling from his little finger and two or three more shouting from his shirt front and, meeting the worldly-wise German on the Avenida, raised his fifty-dollar imported Panama hat with true Brazilian courtesy, and invited him to come in and have a drink for old times’ sake.

One evening my hospitable host of the hotel dragged me over to the cinema he owned, where I found a crowded house come to see what to Diamantina was a brand new romance of their own color, called “A Cabana do Pae Thomaz,” in other words, “The Cabin of Uncle Tom.” It was all too evident, however, that there was nothing to be gained by bringing our show so far inland, for the negroes had little to spend and the railway charges are naturally high to those who can find no excuse for not paying them. Meanwhile I had opened negotiations for a journey on horseback, or even on foot, across to the railhead of the line out of Victoria, which would have brought me out well up the coast on my journey north. A native camarada familiar with the trail offered to rent me a horse or a mule for the journey, with saddle and spurs, for 3$ a day. This seemed reasonable. It would make the trip across come to about 20$? Yes, but it takes two animals. Why’s that? You must have a guide, or at least a man to bring back the horses. Ah, then that makes 6$ a day instead of 3$? Yes—ah—and then of course you must pay the man. How much? Oh, 3$ a day, the same as the other animals. Ah, then that makes 9$ a day, and seven days would be.... No, say ten days. But why ten days? Because in this season that is the least you can depend on. In other words the trip would cost me 90$, nine times ten? No, it would be nine times twenty, or 180$. Eh, what twenty days? Why, the man and the horses would have to come back, wouldn’t they? Sacramento, I suppose so, unless I could chloroform them when I got there. So then 180$ would cover all the expenses? All, completely all—er—that is, of course, you would have to feed the animals and the man on the trip, and it might be much more than ten days, and—er.... And no doubt there would be a tip to the man and the animals, and perhaps a third horse needed when he caught sight of my valise, and of course the government officials here and along the way would come in for their customary graft, and there would be the stamp-tax on each horseshoe, unless they were mule-shoes, in which case no doubt it would be doubled, and a tax on each bray the “burros” might emit en route, and—whereupon I gave him a warm handshake and bade him good night, saying I would think it over and wire him from Bagdad in 1946, and thus eventually got him out of the room. In short, I had come to understand at last why people travel by rail in Brazil, even though their bones are racked on the warped and twisted roadbeds, their movie-magnate garments turned into sieves by burning cinders from the straining locomotives, and there is a tax on every corner of a railway ticket.

All Diamantina was down—I mean up—to see us off, just as they are at the same early hour three times a week. The distance-blue piles of earth lay heaped up into considerable hills where a clearer atmosphere disclosed wider horizons, hung on all sides with fantastic heaps of clouds, that increased the sense of being on the top of the world. On the several days’ trip southward I met a strange man, a juiz de dereito, or district judge, from Serro back in the hills, who refused to ride on a government pass or to accept one for his son, whom he was taking to the medical school in Rio, declaring that there was “much abuse” in such matters by government officials! At Burnier, where we changed to the broad gauge, I got a berth to the capital. Though the car was the familiar American Pullman, the slovenly government employees had discarded most of the small conveniences. The aisle was as carpetless as the floors of Brazil, the berth net had long since been turned into a hammock for the brakeman’s baby, the mattress was thin and hard as a Brazilian wooden bed, and the sleep I did not get as we creaked and jounced through the endless low hills explained why sleeping cars and night trains are not more popular in the mammoth republic of South America.

When I returned from the washroom next morning, “Tut” stood dressing beside the opposite berth. They had played in Palmyra the evening before and managed to pack up in time to catch the night train. Carlos had had his hat stolen in the preceding town and “Tut” had been bitten by a dog while walking out to pay his respects to the English-speaking miners near Ouro Preto; otherwise things had gone well—except for one other personal mishap to “Tut.” While buying his ticket for the sleeper he noted that the berths were divided into “leitos inferiores” and “leitos superiores.” Now why should he take an inferior berth when he had been working hard, and Linton paid the bill anyway? He took a leito superior. Unfortunately, in the matter of berths, the Portuguese word superior means “upper”!

By seven the day was already brilliant and hot, for we were down off the great plateau I was never to climb again, and the familiar suburbs of Rio were rumbling past. I dropped off as we drew into the yards, knowing from experience how long a process it is to get into the station, and diving out through a hole in the railway wall, I hurried away up the Rua Mattoso to the home of our theater contractor. He surprised me by saying that times had grown so “brutally hard” in Rio, to say nothing of the brutal heat of midsummer, that it would not be worth while to play there at all, but that we could finish our sixteen days with him at his theater in Nictheroy.

The ferry that carried us across the bay was crowded with newspaper men and photographers, and the gunboat Sergipe lay close off the state capital with its guns trained on the public buildings. Inquiry disclosed the fact that there was not a new mutiny, but that a revolution was expected in Nictheroy during the day.

Nilo Peçanha, son of a former president of Brazil, had been elected president of the State of Rio de Janeiro for the term to begin with the new year; but, as so often happens in South America, the opposition party still in power was determined to give the office to their own defeated candidate. This was one Lieutenant Sodré, an army man of similar caliber to the celebrated “Dudu” and having the same backing. With the aid of the outgoing state president he had “acquired” arms and ammunition from the federal stores in Nictheroy and was preparing to take office by force, having picked up large numbers of Carioca crooks and gunmen and scattered them among the various cities of the state to stifle opposition. Peçanha, on the other hand, had applied to the Supreme Court for a habeas corpus, giving him the office that was being stolen from him, and after considerable dodging and hesitation the national president had decided to lend federal armed force to uphold the Supreme Court decision in favor of Peçanha.

Mere orders from the federal government mean little in the life of a Brazilian state, however, and Nictheroy was seething on the brink of anarchy when we landed. Sodré, it seemed, had had himself sworn in as president by the state assembly early that morning and had sent word to that effect to the president of Brazil. He could not gain admission to the state presidential palace, but with the support of the state police and the outgoing authorities he did take over the presidential offices. Then suddenly, some three hours later, a cry of “Viva Peçanha!” had resounded through the police barracks, the policemen had taken it up and, headed by two sergeants, threatened to kill the officers unless they joined in also, and the entire state police force on which the rebel had depended swung over to the other side, looted the stolen ammunition, and took to rushing about town shouting and firing in the air.

This was the condition in which we found the state capital. The firemen had joined the police, and auto-trucks crammed full of excited shouting negroes and half-negroes in uniform were rushing about town at top speed, all but overturning at every corner. The lower classes, having likewise filled themselves with cheap cachaza, had joined the general uproar of noise, irresponsibility, and probable violence, and the streets were swarming with populares shouting “Viva Peçanha!” “Viva o Salvador do Povo!” and similar nonsense in maudlin drunken voices, while Sodré sent hurriedly to the national president demanding “guarantees” for his personal safety.

Residence in South America, however, teaches one that revolutions are by no means so dangerous on the spot as they are in the armchairs of those who are reading about them afar off, and we serenely continued our preparations for the evening performance. Desultory shooting, street brawls, and the surging of masses of drunken populares continued throughout the day and for several days thereafter, while the shouting, shooting truckloads of police and firemen continued dizzily to round corners, each time more nearly resembling the drunken brute into which the tropical languor of negro militarism is apt to degenerate in times of crisis or popular excitement. But it was, on the whole, a good-natured rather than a blood-thirsting brute, and though what Brazil calls “persons of most responsibility” kept out of sight, we common mortals, including not a few women, walked about town attending to our business as usual. Once a ragged, drunken mulatto popular came into the leitería in which I was quenching my thirst with a glass of ice-cold milk, walked bellowing and reeling past me and two men at another table up to a little messenger-boy of fourteen, and ordered him to shout “Viva Peçanha!” The proprietor dared not protest, for the police were all drunk and the povo more than likely to take the ragamuffin’s part; but when the latter finally staggered out again the shopkeeper raised his hands to heaven and demanded to know why the fellow had picked on the boy and not, for instance, pointing at me, on “o senhor over there.”

The “Cinema Eden” was right on the waterfront, though the only paradise in sight was the view of Rio piled up into massive banks of white clouds across the emerald bay and the marvelous sunset and steel-blue dusk which spread over its unique, nature-made sky-line as we opened our doors. The near-revolution was still surging through the streets, though a few sober soldiers of the regiment of federal troops that had been landed were riding about town in street-cars, with ball-loaded muskets ready for action. Peçanha had been sworn in that afternoon, surrounded by a swarm of other perspiring politicians in wintry frock-coats and silk hats, but the national president had concluded to avoid any responsibility in the matter by calling a special session of congress to decide between the rival candidates, instead of carrying out the decision of the Supreme Court—“which,” perorated Ruy Barboso, “is what our constitution orders and what is practiced in the United States,” two equally convincing final arguments. Though we were the only theater open the house was not crowded. “Persons of most responsibility” preferred to remain at home, and the populares were plainly in most cases without the price of admission, even had the revolution not promised a more exciting show outside. I took charge of the door in person, not at all certain but that the povo might try to force itself in en masse. Once, during our part of the program, a mighty explosion shook the town like an earthquake and shooting sounded under our very windows; but as the stampede for the door started I barricaded the immense exit and “Tut” went on calmly running an amusing film known as “College Days,” and before it was ended the volatile audience had quieted down again. The explosion, it turned out, was of a great deposit of powder on one of the many islands in the bay, nearly twenty miles away.

Our receipts for the first section were so poor that we cut out the second and went home for a moonlight dip in the sea just outside our waterfront rooms in the charming residential district of Nictheroy. But it was the last day of the year, with a crushing heat after the splendid air of the plateau, and the soft wind that was now sweeping across the bay drew me back for a last glimpse of Rio in the throes of New Year’s Eve. The city lay a vast irregular heap of lights, here in dense clusters, there strung out along the invisible lower hills, all cut sharp off at the bottom by the endless row of them along the Beira Mar. The Avenida was densely crowded, and getting more so. Newspapers had erected booths covered with artificial flowers and colored lights, several police, fire department, and military bands were scattered along the great white avenue, and a constant, unbroken procession of automobiles crept up one side and down the other, pretty girls perched on the backs of the seats and on the furled covers, all filled with the “respectable families” whose plump and physically attractive ladies are rarely seen in the streets after dark on any other day in the year. I was caught where the confetti fell thickest, but there was little rowdyism and no unpleasant din, though paper ribbons spun across the lighted sea of faces and perfumed water was squirted into them in that good-natured and outwardly courteous way with which the Latin-American softens the perpetration of his most hilarious, carnival-time tricks.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XV. NORTHWARD TO BAHIA

More than five months had passed since my first arrival in Rio when, in the first days of the new year, I actually started on my homeward way again. The train from Nictheroy northward left at dawn, after the unfailing Brazilian habit, and I caught a last glimpse of sunrise over Rio and its bay before they passed finally from my sight. The mountains of the cool plateau lay blue-gray along the horizon all that day’s ride through the singing jungle. The flat littoral was considerably inhabited, but chiefly with thatched mud-and-reed huts, contrasted only now and then by a massive, dignified old fazenda-house standing, like some poor but still proud aristocrat, on a commanding knoll above broad reaches of flat corn, cane, or pasture lands, broken by frequent marshes grown full of the omnipresent vegetation. At the stations negro boys highly contented with life sold melons, bananas, mangos, red figs, the acidulous, parrot-beaked cajú, and little native birds in tiny home-made cages. The scream and groan of crude cane-carts in the fields or along the dust-thick roads could sometimes be heard above the roar of the train. Rain had been frequent here during the past weeks, but it had ceased abruptly at Christmas and the implacable sun had already wiped out all evidence of moisture. At Macahé we came down to the edge of the sea again, stretching away emerald-blue and mirror-smooth to the end of space, then turning inland once more across a sand-blown region, we descended at Campos, 176 miles north of Nictheroy.

This second city of the State of Rio de Janeiro is an old and somewhat dilapidated town well spread out on the campo, or sea-flat open country, for which it is named, with a few aged church-towers peering on tiptoe over the broad cane-fields that surround it. Scattered imperial palms slightly shade it, and the widest river I had so far seen in Brazil gives it a light-craft connection with the sea. Neither its mule cars nor its medieval “Hotel Amazonas,” with a single banho de chuva, or “rain bath,” are fit subjects for unbounded praise, but at least its chief cinema manager cut short my professional labors by signing on the dotted line as soon as it was pointed out to him. I left the contract and instructions to “Tut” with the hotel runner, to be handed to the tallest man who arrived by train the next Wednesday, and fled on into the north by the same conveyance by which I had arrived the day before.

The difference between this British-owned line and the government-operated “Central” was as wide as that between discipline and license, yet even on this the ticket-offices were miserable little holes in the wall, barely thigh-high; the sellers always opened as late, and worked as slowly and stupidly as possible, and it was only by crouching like an ape and fighting those struggling about the ticket-hole with trickery, stealth, and bad manners that the traveler could get a chance to buy the exorbitant-priced tickets and escape paying fifty per cent. excess on the train. Kilometer-books are sold in Brazil, but they must be taken to the ticket-window to be stamped and audited and registered and signed each time the holder wishes to board a train, hence nothing is to be gained by using them. The shadowy, saw-shaped range on our left followed us all the blazing, sand-blown day, tantalizing us with suggestions of cool upland valleys and meadows watered by clear, cold streams. As the sun crawled round and peered in at my side of the car the heat grew unendurable, in spite of the electric fans which recalled the government lines by contrast, and the dust-filled air all but refused to enter the nostrils. The insignificant stations were crowded with the curious enjoying their chief daily diversion, but they were silent and listless beneath the appalling heat.

In his “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin speaks of seeing South American ant-hills twelve feet high. I had set this down to the exuberance of youth, but suddenly, not far north of Campos, we came upon great fields of them, like eruptions on the face of nature, mounds eight, ten, perhaps even twelve feet high, but here grass-grown, instead of presenting the solid clay, cement-like surface familiar elsewhere. The sandy condition of the soil evidently made it possible only to pile them up in this oval form, so sharply contrasting with the usual sugar-loaf shape of those made of clay. In mid-afternoon the flat, baking, sea-level littoral gave way to rolling, then hilly country, and we had climbed to a height of several hundred meters when we passed from the little State of Rio de Janeiro into the equally tiny one of Espirito Santo, for here the great plateau of central Brazil forces its way clear down to the edge of the sea. Time was when the State of Rio was enormous, but bit by bit, during the eighteenth century, there was lopped off from it the much larger states of São Paulo, Minas Geraes, Goyaz, and finally Matto Grosso, until to-day the population within its limits—which do not include the federal district and national capital—is estimated at little more than one fifth that of the old mining province, vastly less than that of São Paulo and Bahia, and with Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco also outdistancing it.

Coffee-clad hills and a reddish soil gave Espirito Santo a slight resemblance to São Paulo, though most of it was dense-green with heavy timber, through which a howling wind-and-rain storm came raging toward sunset. We halted for the night in Cachoeira do Itapemirim, so called for the cachoeira, or rapids over a series of rocks in the Itapemirim, the sound of which deadened our footfalls all the way from the station to the “Hotel Toledo” on the tiny main square. It was little more than a barefoot village in the bush, but the show would be forced to spend a night there—nay, two nights, for it would arrive on Saturday—and I soon added to my collection the signature of the “Turk” who, in addition to a little cloth-shop and billiard-and-liquor-room, owned a miniature cinema jutting far out over the rocky river.

Relieved of the feeling that the show was treading on my heels, I let the morning train go on without me and settled down to make up the sleep I was in arrears. Four or five hours slumber out of each twenty-four may be all very well for an Edison, but commonplace mortals require more. Not only was the hotel as quiet and bucolic as the town itself, but it had “beds of wire”; both heat and mosquitoes were conspicuous by their absence; the never-ceasing music of the cachoeira was calming to the nerves, and if I ever did wake up there were horses to hire for a jaunt through the surrounding country. Moreover, the town and vicinity were the scene of one of Brazil’s most famous novels, “Chanaan” by Graça Aranha of the Brazilian Academy, and just then Minister to The Hague—though the town itself was supremely ignorant of its celebrity the world round in the dozen languages into which the tale has been translated. Even the local editor had never heard of it, though he did know the author, “because I am obliged to know all Brazilian diplomats.”

The animal that was intrusted to me for a modest consideration next afternoon could scarcely have been called a horse, though it resembled even less any other known quadruped, as the wooden frame thinly covered with leather and hung with two iron rings into which I could barely insert the ends of my toes must perhaps be called a saddle for want of a more exact term. By dint of reducing my right arm to paralysis I succeeded in forcing the torpid brute up and down the few streets of the village and out one of the roads that wander off as trails through the plump, dense-wooded hills about it. But it would have been as speedy and far more comfortable to have walked, or better still, perhaps, not to have gone at all, for we were overtaken and imprisoned by one of those raging storms for which this region seems famous. Immense banks of snow-white clouds far off on the horizon completely encircled us when we set out, yet so benign was their appearance that I scarcely noticed them, except as a detail of the charming landscape, until suddenly they swept in from all sides at express speed, getting blacker and ever blacker, until the entire sky was wiped out and the sullen growls of thunder grew to violent outbursts of anger that deafened the ears like an artillery barrage, while the wind tore at the trees and bamboo groves as if it would uproot not only them but the sheer stone “sugar-loaf” near which the storm had found us. With the help of two negro boys on muleback and the butt of my heavy native whip I urged the equine caricature into a lame and ludicrous gallop and reached the edge of town before I was wholly drenched, taking refuge in a half-finished building. A negro boy sleeping on a narrow plank high above the still unboarded floor said he was not ill; evidently he was just lying there to let the day get by so that he could sleep through the night and then take a good rest to-morrow. I could only get the head of the alleged horse under shelter, but it was evident that he had stood out in many worse storms than mere wind and rain; and there I squatted for three mortal hours, chiding myself for not having put a bit of reading matter in my pocket. I might have read the negro boy, I suppose, but he looked like a primer, just such a crude and simple volume as makes up the whole human library of Cachoeira do Itapemirim.

Another all-day train-ride of little more than a hundred miles brought me to Victoria, capital of the State of Holy Ghost, or, more exactly, to a little backwoods station on the opposite side of the long narrow arm of the sea on which the capital is situated. So placid was this, and so cool the weather after a heavy rain, that I had to taste it as we were being rowed across before I could believe that we were down at sea-level again. It was an easy-going, less aggressive capital than those farther south, and its prices were so nearly reasonable that I grew bold and marched into the new and showy four-story “Palace Hotel” on the waterfront. The “brutal crisis” had dealt Victoria an almost deadly blow. There was not a show in town, except a free cinema in the liquor emporium of the little French electric tramway company that sends its cars wandering along the waterfront for miles in both directions. On one of these I gradually worked my way out to the home of the “colonel” who owned the imposing theater—and found that he had passed me on the way in. I hurried back to town—if that verb may be used in the same sentence with Victoria’s street-car service—and found that the “colonel” had gone out home again. But by sternly overcoming adverse fate and the fatalistic indifference of those accustomed to hang around the theater I finally had him hunted up, a heavy, middle-aged, over-courteous mulatto, as was also his manager and, for that matter, almost every conspicuous citizen in town. Having impressed upon them the extraordinary good fortune that was soon to descend upon Victoria, I went home to dinner, telling them to think it over. Their theater, like two former cinemas in town, had been closed since the first month of the war; they had so completely lost heart that they were not even having films shipped to them any more, and felt that it would be impossible to get up a show. I assured them that wherever the Kinetophone landed there must be a show, and within half an hour had them worked up to such enthusiasm that instead of accepting my suggestion that we play Monday and Tuesday and sail for Bahia on Wednesday, they were imploring me to book for a solid week.

This having been done, the manager and I made polite and diplomatic calls on the editors of Victoria’s two pitiful little dailies of four foolscap pages each, more than half taken up with advertising and the rest with large-type “news” consisting mainly of birthday greetings to “our most influential citizens.” Neither of the apathetic pseudo-journalists caught even a hint of the news value of Edison’s part in the affair, but they did waste many words in giving a full account of the “delightful courtesy” which “Dr. Franck,” and the distinguished and much-titled fellow-citizen who brought him, had shown in visiting them.

Victoria was one of the old settlements of the Portuguese crown when what afterward came to be known as Brazil was given out in capitanias, having been founded nearly four centuries ago on the island of São Antonio. It may have 15,000 inhabitants in all the coves and corners of rocks among which it is scattered, but it is essentially an unimportant, if picturesque, village. The nucleus of the town is well inland along the narrow, river-like little roadstead, with a yellow presidential palace and some other buildings of size, but it is made up chiefly of one-story buildings quickly running down to huts. There are a few coffee houses that export, and a few stores that supply the interior, but for the most part Victoria lives on government salaries—when conditions are such that these can be paid. How backward it is may be guessed from the fact that negro coffee-porters have not yet been driven out by whites, and that it is the outpost of the reign of hammocks which covers all northern Brazil, at least half the population seeming to spend their days swinging back and forth inside the baked mud kennels they call home. An ancient fort in ruins and the clustered sanctuary of Nossa Senhora da Penha in a striking site on the summit of a stone hill, with the usual collection of wax and pictured proofs of miracles that have been wrought here since 1769, are the main sights of interest. For the ocean is not visible until one has walked—or, if time is no object, taken the tramway—for miles out through little groves of plump, rosy-cheeked mangos and along the single street from which most of Victoria sprawls and scrambles up the rocky, half-wooded hills along her waterway to her huts perched among huge, blackish granite rocks. Then, when the calm, boatless sea and the labyrinthian harbor entrance bursts forth at last from the long, narrow, yellow beach out to which the cars eventually stagger, there is not a glimpse left of the town itself, hidden away among its wet-green hills.

“Tut,” Carlos, and the show arrived on time and were eventually coaxed through the red tape that entangles any state capital and loaded into the canoa, or mammoth log turned into a boat, of the German who reigned in Victoria as the American Consul. This was gradually rowed, not directly to the theater, but to the “American’s” wharf, where we were forced to hire a wagon and lose an hour to cover the hundred yards remaining. We were installed, however, in time to give the two sections as advertised—though the managers were so skeptical of my solemn promise that they would certainly have postponed the opening date had I not been on the ground to forbid it—and were deluged by such a mob of pleasure-seekers that we had to close the doors and hold hundreds of them back until the second section.

Next day the agent of a local steamship line came to the theater and measured all our trunks, arranging to send the whole outfit to Bahia the following Monday for about one-tenth what train-travel had led us to expect. For I had come at last to a break in the railroads up the east coast of South America and was forced to take to the sea for the first time since Hays and I had entered the continent at Cartagena, Colombia, two and a half years before. On Wednesday “Tut” and I took our last Victorian stroll—the negro boys along the way halting open-mouthed and gazing up and down him to see where he was spliced—and in the afternoon I boarded the Maranhão of the Lloyd-Brazileiro and settled down in my cabin. I had dropped into a Brazilian novel of colonial days and completely forgotten the life of the harbor and the little capital that was still crawling slowly on about us, when I was suddenly astonished to see standing before me the owner and manager of the theater. Those two stodgy, bashful, rather artless mulattoes had hired a boat and taken the time and trouble to come out on board to bid me the good-by, which I, in my American incivility, had completely forgotten. One after the other they gave me the fraternal South American embrace of a handshake and an affectionate patting on the back with the left hand, assuring me that the show would be run with as great care and our percentage as honestly computed as if I were there in person, that they would see to it that my entire “company” boarded the Monday steamer, and bade me be sure to stop and see them if ever I came that way again. The most steel-rimmed color-line could not but be joggled by such Brazilian amiability.

On the second morning thereafter, with no other incident than being halted and examined by British cruisers hidden among the Abrolhos Islands in Brazilian waters, the Maranhão slipped smoothly into the immense Bay of All Saints, specks of white sails dotting its blue immensity, distant land with low hills gradually spreading along all the port horizon, and when I chanced to look up again the City of São Salvador da Bahia was gazing down upon us from the ridge along which it stretches for mile after hazy mile.

“Colonel” Ruben Pinheiro Guimarães was manager of the principal playhouse in Bahia. The ancient “São João,” imperial theater when Portuguese viceroys ruled Brazil, still kept much of its stateliness in spite of being rather unkempt and disreputable after more than a century of constant use. In situation it takes second place to no other in the world, sitting out on the nose of the upper city, where to step off its esplanade would be to fall hundreds of feet down to the business section below, and gazing away across the bay to the utmost limits of the ocean horizon. Ruben, a Paulista of unbroken Portuguese ancestry, had the reputation of being somewhat related in business matters to the eel family; but there is a certain pleasure in flirting with possible fraud, as with any other kind of danger. It was not until eight at night, however, that I got his name signed to a “split-even” contract for twenty-five days, fifteen of them in the theaters of Bahia and ten in towns about the bay.

Unfortunately São Salvador da Bahia was not an ideal place to settle down. For one thing, it had a new style in hotels. Elsewhere in Brazil they had been questionable, here they were not in the least so, for not one of them pretended to be anything but what it was,—full of frousy females who had not even the virtue of being young or good-looking, hags on the last rung of the ladder that leads from concubinage in Europe through street-walking in Rio down to the gutter of pandering to the chiefly African rouées of Bahia. Even as hotels they were the worst imaginable, yet high-priced at that, and with adventurous women from foreign parts assigned to every other room and constantly hanging out the windows one had the edifying sensation of living in a brothel.

The hotel I was finally compelled to endure looked out across the marvelous bay, upon the “São João,” and down the wide stone-paved street leading from the upper to the lower town. Up this snorted huge motor-trucks loaded with meat from the abattoirs, straining automobiles, and an unending procession of those citizens of Bahia who found it cheaper to walk than to squander the tostão it costs to be lifted from the lower to the upper level. Great quantities of freight also ascended or descended on foot. A trunk or two, with perhaps a valise on top, often came noiselessly marching up the steep street on negro heads; bedsteads, bird-cages, bureaus and all other forms of furniture, fruit in baskets or without, bunches of bananas laid flat on a frizzled pate, chickens with their legs tied and panting in the roasting sun, every known and nameable article that cannot cave in an African skull moved by what is still the cheapest form of transportation in Bahia, even in this century of steam and electricity.

The former capital and oldest city of Brazil takes its popular name—the official and correct one is São Salvador—from the immense bay on which it is situated—the bay which from anywhere in the upper town stretches away in deepest indigo-blue, everywhere dotted with specks of white sails, to the low ridges of hills, faint with distance, that all but surround it. In some ways it has a finer setting than that of Rio, though it is not so strikingly, so dramatically, beautiful, and the old capital has the advantage over the new that almost constant trade winds sweep across it. Bahia is built in two stories, that at sea-level being at most a few blocks deep and often thinning down to a single row of buildings. “O Commercio” the Bahianos call this lower part, and it is almost exclusively a business section, perhaps the only spot in South America that resembles lower New York in being silent and uninhabited at night, with only a few watchmen and belated pedestrians treading the dimly gas-lighted streets.

The upper town is reached either by a hard climb up the stone-paved roadway, by an American elevator of sixteen-person capacity, or by a steeply inclined cable railway with single cars. Hotels, stores, theaters, almost everything except the wharves, wholesale business, and the main market-place, are on the upper level. Nearly every building dates back to colonial days and many of the old houses are in splendid situations, perched on the edge of the ridge at the very base of which lies the immense bay. But they are taken up almost entirely by the descendants of slaves, with the accumulated uncleanliness of generations, and the white minority of Bahia has been driven to the often less attractive suburbs. The upper and main part of the town is built chiefly on two ridges, facing the sea and the bay respectively and in many places falling sheer into them. On their tops the ridges are thickly inhabited, and the streets crisscross in an effort to conform to the irregular lay of the land, but every now and then they disappear through wooded lanes into hilly virgin forests with innumerable huge trees,—the mammoth aguacate, thickly hung with alligator-pears, the intense green dome-shaped mango, most perfect shade-tree of the tropics, and here and there palm-trees standing haughtily above all else—for the rolling ridges are often broken with deep valleys in which negro huts congregate.

It would be beneath the dignity, as well as contrary to the languid temperament, of Bahia to take a census, but at the popular Brazilian pastime of guessing statistics the city professes to have about one third of a million inhabitants; there is no question that it is the third city in size in Brazil. Of that number certainly eight out of ten are negroes, a majority of them full-blooded, with all the traits their ancestors brought with them from the African bush, plus the faults of their Portuguese-Brazilian neighbors. Except for the two or three élite sections, such as that along the summit of the second ridge, there is scarcely a corner of Bahia in which one cannot stroll an hour or more and never see any but a black face—with the single exception that even in the most African quarters the shops are almost invariably kept by Portuguese, pasty-white of complexion, whether because of the sedentary indoor lives they lead or because of the contrast to the sea of blacks about them. One soon comes to know every white face in Bahia, even those with Caucasian ancestry enough to be individually distinguishable, so frequently does one notice them in the business streets, theaters, street-cars, and more pretentious cafés.

More slaves were brought to the province of Bahia than to any other of Brazil, not only because the planting of sugar and tobacco required much labor but because this part of Portuguese America was earliest settled. The original settlers from overseas were too proud to work; the negroes they brought over to work for them were emancipated and also refused to work, crowding into town to live on what they could pick up between their incessant native dances and church festivals, so that we have the edifying spectacle of an immense state, possessing unlimited natural resources, virtually bankrupt. It is said that the old colonial life, the old-time somnolence, Brazil as she was in the olden days, is still best seen in Bahia. If so, I am glad that my Brazilian journey came at a later date. Compared with the old capital, Rio seems little more than a quadroon city, and few negroes among many whites is plainly better for the negro than to be surrounded on all sides by bad examples of his own race.

The negroes are so numerous and so sluggish in their movements that unless one would be jostled at every turn one can travel the streets only by stepping out of their way. They lie on every corner and in every gutter; they loll, blocking the streets, in every shaded spot, on every threshold—wearing a few rags, yet often with a crude native cigar protruding from their thick lips, irrespective of sex, for Bahia is Brazil’s tobacco center and “fumo” is cheap—negroes, negroes everywhere, until they swim in black specks before the eyes when one closes them. It is another amusing example of the pseudo-civilization of South America that in the upper town the police will stop any man in full comfortable dress of summer who wears no coat, while negroes and even a few poor whites parade anywhere in a ragged, unbuttoned jacket without the suggestion of shirt or undershirt beneath it and barely enough suggestion of trousers to save them from complete nudity.

The negroes of Bahia speak Portuguese much as those of our southern states do English. In their mouths noite becomes “noitche,” muito is “muitcho,” senhor is “’nhor,” and “’nha” may mean either senhora or senhoras. How much of his Latin garrulousness the negro has caught from living with that race and how much his ancestors brought him from the Dark Continent is an interesting question. I do not believe the native African chatters with such a flow of words and gestures as are to be seen in any black gathering in Bahia. The cheerfulness and hilarious gaiety for which the race is noted stands out clearly in the general temperament of the old capital; while the Carioca is the gloomiest and most suicidal of Brazilians, the Bahiano rarely shows either tendency.

Down in the swarming market-place in the lower town powerful negroes of both sexes—the most splendid physical specimens in Brazil are the blacks—lie languidly about, hoping to sell a few cents’ worth of something,—pineapples, melons, mangos, sapotes, lemons, huge alligator-pears at a cent each, the blushing cajú, the jaca, or jack-fruit, which grows to watermelon size on the trunks of trees and has a white meat so coarse that it is eaten only by negroes; bread-nuts and bread-fruit, bananas, rosaries of what seem to be shelled but unroasted peanuts, small oranges, green in color—for though there are fine big seedless ones in Bahia this was not the season for them—and every other known fruit of tropical America, except a few native only to the Amazon region. Here one may have a coco molle gelado, in other words, iced milk of green cocoanut, than which there is no better way of quenching tropical thirst; here one may even find a man who, as a last resort against starvation, will almost be willing to work, at least to the extent of carrying away on his head anything less than a grand piano or the heavier makes of automobiles. Many copper coins, virtually unknown in the rest of Brazil, are used in the markets of Bahia,—vintems and double vintems, or twenty and forty-reis pieces—and the negroes still make their computations in the old colonial terms. In Bahiano market dialect a meia-pataca is 180 reis and a pataca twice that, though there are no actual coins of those denominations. Nickel, in one hundred reis pieces and higher, is too valuable for most negro transactions. As they say in Bahia, with a black it is “vintem pa’ cachaza, vintem pa’ farinha, e prompto!” (a copper for rum, a copper for mandioca meal, and enough!) He will not work again until he must have more cachaza and farinha. Whenever any real work is required, such as the digging of sewers, paving of streets, or laying of street car tracks, gangs of white Europeans have to be shipped in to do it.

Yet sometimes it is hard to blame the negro if he just lies in the shade and a soft breeze and gazes away at the beautiful bay, indigo-blue by day, shimmering with moonlight by night, ever fresh with the breezes that lightly ruffle its ocean-like bosom, as if he were making up for the loafing denied his enslaved fathers. After all, if Nature wished man to exert himself, why does it produce such perfect weather and cause bananas and jack-fruit to grow of themselves? The languid picturesqueness of Bahia is best personified in the typical Bahiana, black or near-black in color, wearing many bracelets and similar ornaments of tin and wire, sometimes gilded, her immense hips heavy with bulky skirts only a trifle less gay in color than her waist, shawl, and turban, placidly smoking a big native cigar and carrying on her head a small stool or a tiny table, legs-up like a helpless turtle, with perhaps a closed umbrella lying flat on top of that, on her way to squat on the one and lean on or raise the other in church or market. If she has only a single banana with her, the Bahiana will carry it on her head rather than by hand. I have seen the ancient anecdote of the negro-girl servant given a letter to post, who put it on her head and laid a stone on top to keep it from blowing away, duplicated in the streets of Bahia. Racial languor, however, gives way to passionate activity when some black troubadour takes to thrumming his guitar and singing modinhas and chorados. These popular ballads of Brazil, especially of Bahia and Pernambuco, mixtures of the moda and fado of Portugal and of the tribal rites of savage Africa, are childish in thought and monotonous of rhythm, weird, languishing, half-wild songs, often improvised by the unlettered troubadours and accompanied by sensual dances and strange African movements of the body into which the whole negro throng gradually merges, discarding all remnants of their second-hand civilization.

With such an electorate it is scarcely to be expected that Bahia should swarm with honest politicians. Indeed, it is frankly admitted that elections there are so corrupt that few bother to go to the polls and take part in what the native papers refer to as “our electoral farce,” knowing that the votes cast have nothing whatever to do with the result, which the government in power fixes beforehand. Graft and misgovernment are acknowledged to be worse than in Rio. Yet on the surface there is the usual Latin-American polish. The scavengers of Bahia had not been paid a cent in months, yet the municipality was building a “palace” in which a single staircase cost 400,000$000! A year before my arrival a delegation from the Boston Chamber of Commerce had landed at Bahia on a water-edge tour of South America, were brought ashore in a magnificent launch “at the city’s expense,” and treated with such tropical generosity that their letters to home newspapers bubbled over with praises of the wonderful hospitality of Bahia. Agostinho Manoel de Jesus, owner of the launch in which they had landed, was still going daily to the city treasury asking in vain for his money.

Bahia was said to be the only place left in Brazil where bubonic plague and yellow fever still persisted. It could hardly be otherwise with rats running up and down every pipe, with every opening, corner, or slightly out of the way place covered with accumulated filth, and with sanitary arrangements almost everywhere in the old town quite beyond the descriptive powers of Boccaccio. In contrast, great placards and posters everywhere, bearing the heading “Directoria Geral de Saude Pública” (General Directory of Public Health) strive to carry out the bluff that the town boasts a system of sanitation. Even the highest priced hotel would be instantly condemned in any civilized city; the conditions in which the vast majority of the population live are beyond any imagination. During the preceding April thirty-five members of the foreign colony, almost one third of it and including the English pastor, had died of yellow fever, which was expected to begin again with the rains. Yet my hotel furnished no mosquito net and I awoke each morning bitten in a dozen places—and any Brazilian will tell you that only white foreigners take yellow fever. In compensation only natives, and chiefly negroes, die of the equally prevalent bubonic plague. The federal government offered to send to Bahia the man who disinfected Rio, but the state government haughtily replied that they were quite capable of cleaning up the place themselves, and meanwhile sudden death continues to flourish.

On my first Sunday in Bahia one of her innumerable festas was at its height, that of “Nosso Senhor do Bomfim,” a miracle-producing shrine of great popularity among the negroes. On Saturday night the street cars in that direction were so crowded that I could not even hang on. Bands of negroes carrying Japanese lanterns, singing, beating drums, tamborines, and tin cans, marched in almost constant procession past my window down to the lower city and on out to Bomfim, a section of town three miles away around the harbor, the electric-lighted façade of its miracle church standing forth from the night like a monument to the ignorance, squalor, and hunger of Bahia. From midnight on the throngs were even thicker, frequently waking me with their maudlin din, for the festival of Bomfim is especially an all-night affair, with much drinking and worse. On Sunday afternoon I went out to the scene of the festivities. There were thirty persons in the street-car, of whom two were white. On the climb up the hill to the church the way was flanked by two unbroken rows of beggars, lame, halt, blind, twisted, deformed, degenerate monstrosities, idiots of all degrees and every percentage of African blood, every imaginable horror in human form, and just plain nigger loafers, all holding out their hands, or whatever they had left in place of them, in constant appeal.

The church itself was so packed that I could only enter by climbing the stairs to a small side-gallery and look down upon an unbroken sea of black faces, wrapt up in what sounded like a medieval Catholic service translated into African voodooism. Among the schemes concocted by the swarming priests of Bahia is one that shows the suggestion of originality. At the huge church and monastery of São Antonio the faithful can buy, at a milreis each, special stamps designed by the priests, with which to write to St. Anthony in Heaven, and be assured of a direct answer from him—through his priestly agents on earth, of course—on any subject.

“Lots of churches in Bahia,” I remarked conversationally to the white Bahiano beside whom I stood watching the riot of gambling, drinking, and indecency about the home of “miracles.”

“Oh, not out here,” he apologized. “Here there is only Nosso Senhor do Bomfim, and São Antonio,” and Sao This and Sao That, naming a dozen or more as he pointed them out roundabout. “This is only a little corner suburb of our great city, but in Bahia itself there are churches.”

It is a popular saying in Bahia that there is one church for every day in the year, an exaggeration probably, but there are scores of massive old colonial ones, not to mention monasteries full of fat, loafing monks, on all the best commanding heights and taking up perhaps half the city’s space. While some are fallen in ruins and are melting away from the physical impossibility of keeping up so many, even now this ignorant, poverty-stricken city was building several more, the latest to cost three thousand contos—though not thirty per cent of the contributors can read. In contrast, the schools of Bahia are horrible little dens over butcher-shops and saloons and brothels, with forty or fifty children packed into rooms that would not be comfortable for ten, without any arrangements whatever for their bodily requirements. Even at that, if every school in the city were packed to suffocation from dawn until dark, not one third the children of school age could attend them. The public library in this capital of an enormous and potentially rich state, in a town of one third of a million inhabitants, reported that “632 books or works of reference were consulted during the year.” Yet fear or superstition caused every newspaper in town to print long editorials praising the “beautiful festa of Bomfim” and the honor it did to “Him whom it honored,” while the drunken debauchery was still going on.

By the Wednesday after my arrival “Colonel” Ruben, who, whatever his faults, knew the art of advertising, had the fronts of all street-cars and every blank wall in town plastered with Kinetophone posters mostly of his own concoction, announcing to his fellow-citizens that on Quarta Feria—Fourth Festival, to wit: Thursday—would open the Greatest Cinematographic Occurrence of the Ages; The Eighth Marvel! Surprising! Stupendous!! Phenomenal!!! The Discovery of the Year. Man no longer dies! Edison has immortalized him! And at Popular Prices!! Everyone to the SAO JOAO!!! When a brilliant sun woke me before seven on that epochal morning, there was no sign of a steamer in all the blue expanse of All Saints’ Bay. I shaved and was just starting for the “rain bath,” however, when I caught sight of one nearing harbor. I still had time to dress, drink the thimbleful of black coffee they call a breakfast in Brazil, and descend to the wharves before the craft tied up there, with “Tut” and Carlos hanging over the rail. I brought them up to my hotel, for as all those in Bahia were equally disreputable it was as well to be together for mutual protection, but it took us until noon to unravel the red tape necessary to get our trunks ashore, quite as if we had been landing from a foreign country.

For all his reputation, “Colonel” Ruben was an engaging fellow, and though I made it plain to him that I would not trust him out of my sight, he took it good-naturedly and assured me he welcomed all the “fiscalization” I could give him.

“I notice you don’t trust people to any great extent yourself,” I smiled, thinking to let him down easy.

“Trust!” cried Ruben, with a serio-comic gesture, “I trust my own teeth—and they bite my tongue!”

I took him at his word and, having designed a rubber stamp, made him produce packets of the four kinds of tickets used, ran them through a consecutive enumerator, and stamped them all. He who has never tried to stamp 1500 tickets an hour by hand will not realize what a daily task I had laid out for myself merely for the satisfaction of giving Ruben and his satellites proper “fiscalization.” These stamped tickets I handed each night to the ticket-seller and at least one and sometimes all three of us stood at the door ready to protest if anyone entered without a stamped ticket, as well as to see that all went into the locked box beside the door-keeper. After the show all unsold tickets were turned over to me, the treasurer gave me a copy of the official borderaux, or statement of tickets sold and the amount of money taken in, I unlocked the door-boxes and carried home their contents to check him up, and one half the day’s receipts in ragged Brazilian cash went into my pocket before I could be budged out of the “São João” office.

I unmasked one trickster at the very first performance. Being still stranger enough to most of the “São João” force to pass incognito, I wandered up the dingy back stairs to the gallinheiro (chicken roost), as “nigger heaven” is called in Brazil, and found that the negro at the door was accepting money in lieu of tickets. It was not that the money was not quite as good, if anything it was a trifle less flimsy, but somehow it could not be forced into the ticket-box at the taker’s elbow. He resigned from Ruben’s staff less than a minute later.

Long before the first session ended we had closed the inner doors and the lobby was threatening to overflow. For the first time in Brazil I had permitted other “special attractions” to be offered with our own; that is, in addition to the ordinary films Ruben had engaged two stray Italian females who howled through several spasms of what they and most of the audience seemed to think was music. As they had been hired before our contract was made, and their wages were nothing out of our pockets, I could only reasonably demand that the Kinetophone remain the head-liner. The blacks of Bahia, we soon discovered, have not yet reached even the moving-picture stage of development, rum, dances, and church festivals being their high-water mark in recreation, and not ten per cent. of our paid audiences were negroes, in a town where fully three fourths of the population is of that race. But our audiences were large for all that, because the lighter minority came again and again to see the chief novelty that had reached Bahia in several seasons. Even this near-white class, however, was not conspicuous for its prepossessing appearance, and the calm, steadfast, efficient face of Edison, gazing out from our posters through these throngs of indolent, ambitionless mortals, insignificant of physique and racially entangled, gave a striking contrast, typical of the two continents of the New World.

Our first Sunday, in particular, was a busy day. It is the custom all over Brazil for the “excellentissimas familias” to go to the “movies” on Sunday afternoon or evening, and the habit is so fixed that they prefer to pack in to the point of drowning in their own perspiration, even at double prices, rather than see a better show on a week day. For managers naturally take advantage of this fad and offer their poorest attractions—just as Ruben withdrew his “imported artists” on this day—knowing they will fill their houses anyway. If only we could have taken Sunday with us, movable, transportable, and played on that day in every town, we would have made as great a fortune as if the World War had never cast the pall of a “brutal crisis” over Brazil.

By one in the afternoon I was at the theater door in impresario full-dress and managerial smile, greeting the considerable crowd that came to the matinée, and disrupting the plans of those who had hoped to drag five or six children by in the shadow of their skirts or trousers. Then, with scarcely time for a meat-laden Brazilian supper in our disreputable hotel across the street, I came back to the most crowded theater I had seen in months. By 7:30 we had already closed the inner doors and the élite of Bahia continued to stack up in the lobby until that, too, had overflowed long before the first session ended. We were compelled to send policemen in to eject the first audience, and when the house had been emptied and the gates opened again, it flooded full from floor to “paradise” five stories up as quickly as a lock at Panama does with water. Even then all could not crowd in, and we herded them up once more in preparation for a third session, which, though not beginning until after ten, was also packed. Nothing so warms the cockles of a manager’s heart as to watch an unbroken sea of flushed and eager faces following his entertainment. By this time I had met most of the high society of Bahia, all her white and near-white “best families,” with now and then some physically very attractive girls among them, having marched at least once past my eagle eye. That night I carried off more money than had fallen to our lot since our first days in Rio and São Paulo.

Though silver was conspicuous by its scarcity in Bahia, there were other troubles attached to the handling of money. Those familiar only with the quick and convenient methods of American banks can have little conception of the difficulties of banking in South America. No two banks in any city in Brazil, for instance, would accept one another’s checks; worse still, two branches of the same bank in neighboring cities would not transfer funds of their depositors without all the formalities and expense involved in such transactions between foreign countries. Where there is no mutual confidence there can be no credit system, and instead of giving or receiving a check, one must carry a roll of cash, like a professional gambler or a manipulator of politicians. By the time I had four contos laid away in a British bank, exchange had bounded skyward again, and it would only have been to waste what little Linton was making to buy drafts as that rate; yet the bank refused to transfer our account to their own institution in Rio or Pernambuco, except at a high commission. When the day came for us to move northward again I was forced to draw out our earnings in ragged bills of tiny denominations and carry them with me.

Of “deadheads” and official mendicants the “São João” had its full share. Ruben sent ten tickets a day to police headquarters, but those who came on duty gave these tickets to friends and bootblacks and negro relatives, and thrust their way in on the strength of their uniform or badge. We were overrun with grafters filling seats and using up programs for which honest people would have been willing to pay money, while a dozen of the best boxes were permanently allocated to state and municipal officials and powerful politicians. When I protested to “Colonel” Ruben, I learned another interesting little fact,—he was forced to be kind to politicians because, thanks to his political pull, he got this great four-tier theater, built by the government in viceroy days and now belonging to the State of Bahia, rent free! As to the police, he confided to me that he had to be lenient with them in order that they might not be too harsh with him when he offered shows of the “sem roupa” or undress variety.

For all the resentment of frustrated “deadheads” and the attitude of Bahia’s newspapers, which at first gave five lines to Edison’s invention and full pages to the religious debauch of Bomfim, the success of the Kinetophone forced the five or six dailies to give our engagement increasing attention. They were all rather pitiful sheets, and in a town where at least three-fourths of the population never reads it would have seemed highly advisable to have combined them into one good newspaper. That of course would have been impossible, because of Latin-America’s lack of team-work and mutual confidence, as well as the demand of each political faction for its own organ of propaganda. One day there appeared in the best of these sorry journals a long and learned article by a Brazilian purist who, though flattering to the invention and the inventor, asserted that it should be called “Cinephonio” rather than “Kinetophone.” I was feeling in good Portuguese form by this time, and having leisure enough to dig back through the layers of philology to ancient Greece, I sent in an equally long and learned answer that decidedly surprised editor, contributor, and reading public, accustomed only to the type of American business man who is utterly ignorant of, and wholly uninterested in, the native tongue. Comments on this controversy and its astonishing dénouement drifted to my ears from our throngs for more than a week afterward.

Such experiences as this emphasized the unwisdom of the habit of many American firms of sending the same “drummer” to cover both Brazil and Spanish-America. Brazilians have a rivalry toward Argentinos which amounts to hatred; they consider the Castilian tongue particularly the language of the Argentine and at least pretend to regard it as a corruption of their own, of which they are unreasonably proud. Hence the traveling-man who addresses them in Spanish is more apt to arouse resentment than commercial interest. If he cannot speak Portuguese, he will do better to stick to English, using an interpreter when necessary, or take a chance on his French, which most educated Brazilians understand more or less, rather than deliberately to incense them by using the tongue of their rivals and implying its importance over their own.

We had now reached a latitude where it is doubly wise for the white man to exercise regularly, and the daily walk that had always been a custom I now made a stern requirement. Complaints against sluggish livers were almost universal in the small foreign colony, but I noted that they invariably went with large liquor bills and a scorn of pedestrianism, even in its mildest forms. Personally, though it was unquestionably hot and perspiration flowed at the least physical exertion, I found the climate of Bahia agreeing splendidly with me, and a few miles of brisk walking, followed by a refreshing “rain bath,” became a pleasure to which to look forward. “Tut” could frequently be coaxed to go with me, but his Brazilian training made Carlos prefer to loaf about the theater and watch the rehearsing of dancing girls, in the face of my warning that he was now in a different land than his cool and temperate São Paulo. There were fine points to Carlos; one often caught a suggestion that in some such stern environment as the United States he would have turned out a man of parts, but the error of his parents in turning south instead of north across the Atlantic made his struggle with environment a pitched battle, with the odds against him.

There are endless wooded hills and valleys in Bahia, with old forts on every projecting angle of the city, on both the bay and the ocean side, which recall the days when São Salvador was the proud capital of Brazil, unworried by the suspicion of a future rival. Out beyond the élite section along the Rua Victoria, past the old church said to stand on the very site in which the city was founded, a nose of land jutting out into the sea and swept by unfailing breezes was shaded by an aged fort and lighthouse that made its sloping greensward or quaint stone benches the most ideal place in South America to spend an afternoon lolling over a book. If one felt more energetic, there were amusing characters among the curious wicker fish-traps down on the beach below. Often I walked all morning long entirely within the city limits through dense uninhabited jungle, following soft earth roads down through great valleys with clusters of negro cabins, and shops of the equally superstitious Portuguese with whom they trade, bearing such names as “Fé em Deus,” “Esperanç aem Deus,” “Todo com Deus,” the householders lolling in the shade beneath them and letting Deus do the rest. Here the motto seemed to be “God helps those who wave a flag with His name on it.” It was almost a relief to run across such frankly cynical shop-names as “A Protectora da Probeza” (The Protector of Poverty).

Bahia is built on a peninsula connected with the rest of the continent by a narrow neck of land, and out this runs its railway line, soon to split into three branches which wander away into the interior of the state. My random wandering brought me out across this one morning and on along the shore of an inner arm of the bay, here endlessly lined with negro huts. I was quenching my tropical thirst with a juicy watermelon when a negro stopped to ask if I did not know that I would die if I ate watermelon in the middle of the day, and soon brought a crowd of excited blacks chattering and gesticulating about me. South America is full of such amusing superstitions, concerning the danger of eating certain foods at certain times, or of eating simultaneously two that do not “fit together.” An old dugout sailed me across the breezy neck of the inner bay from Brandão to Itapagipe, sparing me a return tramp of five miles, for at this point the electric cars pass frequently. There is a long beach in this middle-class suburb of Itapagipe, and a little wharf at which crude sailing boats from about the bay unload watermelons and mangos, bananas and big luscious pineapples, the latter selling on the spot for a mere tostão, or those with empty pockets may fish slightly damaged ones out of the water for nothing. On such excursions one must take care not to dress too carelessly, for there are, of course, two classes in the Philadelphia-made street-cars of Bahia and little visible sign to distinguish them, so that on almost every tour through the first-class car the conductor is forced to order men without coats, or collars, or socks, or real shoes, or a proper haircut to go back into the other. On the other hand he, too, has his rebuffs, for almost anyone wearing a frock-coat says haughtily, “I have a pass,” though never offering to show it, and the conductor sneaks obsequiously on.

A favorite recreation of foreign residents and wealthy white natives of Bahia is to visit the principal ships that anchor in the harbor. To many this is the one touch of civilization superior to that at home, as the trains in which the people come to sit for a few minutes are to the inhabitants of interior villages. But most of them come for more material purposes,—the foreign residents to imbibe “real booze” once more, the élite among the natives to defraud the country’s revenues by replenishing their wardrobes at the ship’s barber shop, buying boxes of chocolate, scented soap, perfumes, lingerie, all the smaller luxuries which can only be had at much higher price or not at all on shore, “women of the life” on professional errands or merely to catch a breath of their beloved Europe. There was a steam-laundry on the ships I visited and had I thought of it in time I might have brought my soiled “linen” on board, as did not a few residents, and had it back when the boat returned from Buenos Aires. To entrust anything to the native washerwomen of Brazil, particularly of Bahia, is to risk having it worn for a week or more by the laundress’s husband or lover, and to insure that it shall be beaten to a pulp in some mud-hole, dried among goat-dung, and returned a fortnight or so later more torn and soiled than when it departed.

About a week after we opened in Bahia, Ruben drifted around to my usual station in the course of the evening and said that he would like to lengthen our contract from twenty-five to ninety days. I declined at once, at least on a fifty per cent. basis. He next offered to pay the baggage haul in addition; then he promised to defray all our traveling expenses, and to cover all the territory from Bahia to Pernambuco. I promised to think this over.

Though I had not found Ruben “crooked as a bed-spring,” as some of his former business associates described him, I knew that he had not been designed with a T-square—and Ruben knew that I knew it. But he was a good “mixer” and an excellent manipulator of politicians, which is a great advantage in Brazil, and is acquired with great difficulty by a foreigner, no matter how well he may learn the language. Besides, Ruben had the most American ideas on advertising of any Brazilian I had ever met and though, of course, he expected to make something out of us, it was a question whether we would not get more ourselves while he was making his profit than we could make alone. Sometimes a crook, well watched, is a better business partner than an honest man, for he is likely to take a chance and is rarely as slow to see an opportunity as are more sincere individuals.

I did not, however, care to spend three months in that corner of the world. I hoped, in fact, to be well up the Amazon by that time, and after sleeping on it I agreed with the “colonel” on a sixty-day contract at the terms he had offered. By this time my practice in Portuguese made it easy to draw up an elaborate document of twelve articles that even a corporation lawyer would have had difficulty in evading. In effect, it made Ruben our advance agent, with the privilege of paying himself, and left me merely my managerial duties. Indeed, this document and what had led up to it so took the “colonel’s” eye that next day he informed me he needed a man of my “pulse,” or American energy, and that as soon as I got the Kinetophone back to the United States I must return and become manager of the big new theater he was soon going to build on the triangular vacant lot near the “São João”!

“Muito obrigado,” I replied, that being Brazilian for “much obliged.”

We were to play in Bahia and about the bay until carnival time, come back to the “São João” for those festive days, and then turn northward. On the morning of January 26 we tore down the show and loaded it into the special baggage-tramcar Ruben had furnished, moving under guidance of his part-Indian mulatto sub-manager out to the suburb of Rio Vermelho. This was a sea-beach village of mainly well-to-do white residents—though no one seemed to bathe, at least in the sea, in Bahia—three miles from the center of town through densely wooded valleys of mango and alligator-pear, jack-fruit and bread-fruit trees, all heavily loaded with their products. We played to packed houses, with few “deadheads,” for here Ruben had little fear either of politicians or police. The cinema of A Barra, another seaside suburb to which we moved three days later, was an outdoor place of sandy bottom, a sheet-iron wall, and only a suggestion of roof, always comfortable with the trade wind sweeping through it. There I could go to the show and look at the brilliant moon at the same time, and our film-men could be heard talking and singing blocks away.

Having performed the extraordinary feat of sleeping seventeen consecutive nights in the same bed, I decided that I needed a change of scene. Up at the head of the bay was a town called Santo Amaro da Purificação, where Ruben had planned to take us; but a religious festival having broken out there, he changed his mind, saying that negroes celebrating church festas do not spend money on cinemas. I went over to see whether he was right, and incidentally to revel in the “purification” attached to the town’s name.

One of the little steamers of the “Navegação Bahiana” that sail the bay, leaving three times a week for most of the towns around it, departed at high tide with a considerable crowd bound for the festa. It was hot under the lee of the land, but once out on the blue water nothing could have been more pleasant, at least in so far as weather was concerned. We stopped at three towns on as many islands and passed many smaller ones along the base of the bay shore, almost everywhere piled up in hundred-foot cliffs. The soil, even on the smallest islands, was of that deep-red color common to much of Brazil, and royal palms lifted their proud heads over a reed-and-mud negro hut on many a little island. We picked up festa-dressed passengers at several villages. Perhaps one out of twenty of my fellow-travelers showed no traces of negro ancestry. Bad teeth were universal among them, more unsightly still in the case of those with a smile like a flash of a brass-shop window, who could afford the ministrations of the wandering “dentists” that inflict interior Brazil.

By and by the water turned from the dense clear-blue of the bay to a grayish color. Several large time-blackened churches appeared on commanding, breezy noses of land, with a few poor houses and miserable huts tucked away in the hollows beneath them. We entered a small river that wound in S-shape through a sort of marsh, passing a three-story agricultural school that loomed up through the palm-tree jungle in apparently utter isolation, and at sunset tied up at the end of a long causeway across a swamp, where a dozen quaint little mule-cars were waiting for us. The fare on these for a two-mile ride was a milreis, which was bad enough, but the driver, singling me out as the only foreigner and person of wealth among the festa-bound horde, and no doubt short of cash for his own celebration, demanded that I pay double fare, and was invited to go to the devil for his pains.

He was going there anyway, it turned out, for if the manager of the more populous afterworld does not own Santo Amaro da Purificação it would be hard to get anyone else to claim it. A long, thin, one-story town, stretching out for a mile or more through low, soggy land, it is inhabited almost entirely by animal-like blacks festooned in dirty rags. Groups of loafing negroes filled every doorway, covered every shady spot, occupied the narrow remnants of dilapidated sidewalks, doing nothing for a living, not even taking in one another’s washing, and living happily ever after for all that. A cross between a ditch and a river flows—or rather, lies—through the length of the town, and in this stagnant sewage the inhabitants not only attempt to swim when the whim comes upon them, but dip up water for cooking purposes. To drink it would evidently kill even a Brazilian negro, so in various parts of the town there are public spigots shut in by iron fences, with an elaborate “office” and a turnstile that can be passed only by paying a vintem for a can of water. Along the noisome canal are a few distilleries, dirty as the rest of the town, and a bit of sugar-cane is grown in the vicinity, but on its edges Saint Amaro of the Purification breaks at once into green rolling campo, which the swarming inhabitants are too indolent to cultivate. Two automobiles had come to show off at the festa, and were so rare a sight that whenever they appeared, jouncing and bumping down one of the so-called streets, with a dozen of the town notables clinging wide-eyed to the seats, all the children and most of the adults took to pursuing them with shouts of “Oo ah-oo-tah-mave!”

The festival really did not begin until next day, but as often happens in Latin-America, the people could not wait and were already celebrating the véspera. About the matrix, or main church, surged immense throngs of leprous, unwashed negroes, hilarious with the drunken-religious orgy. Native rum flowed everywhere. There were forty-two gambling tables running full blast, with crowds of children from six to sixty—if anyone ever lives to that age in Santo Amaro—throwing their money upon them, many so poor that they had only coppers to hazard. Any negro boy who could get a table, mark a square of cloth or cardboard with numbers or colors, and produce a tin can and three dice or any kind of home-made roulette wheel, became forthwith the proprietor of a gambling establishment. The town was lighted by gas—except that most of this was now used to illuminate an “AVE MARIA” in letters ten feet high on the façade of the church. Under this a band blew itself almost brown in the face in honor of the tin Virgin inside the musty old church, before which throngs of gaudily but raggedly dressed negroes were bowing down, crossing themselves on the face, mouth, navel, and finally the body, and displaying curious intermixtures of Catholicism and African fetish worship.

All night long the hubbub lasted. My unknown Brazilian roommate in the “Pensão Universal,” a human sty which had recently opened as a public hostelry and would no doubt close again after the festival, had usurped the bed by piling his junk upon it, and left me a crippled canvas cot. I was awakened frequently by the cold coming up through this, though by no means so often as by the amorous negro swains and wenches retiring from the exciting festivities to adjoining rooms.

High noon found me struggling to get a railway-ticket back to Bahia. It was no easy feat. Eventually we had to break into the inner office and corner the befuddled agent, who replied to our excited demands with a tropically phlegmatic, “But there is no hurry; the train will not really leave at twelve.” Subsequent events proved that he was a better prophet than the printed time-table. We finally dragged away about two, on a railroad built in 1881 and still retaining the same roadbed, rolling-stock, swell-headed old engines and point of view, and rambled along most of the afternoon, until we came to a derailed train and were told to get out and walk. Luckily we were only a few miles from Agoa Cumprida (Long Water), where this branch line is joined by one from up the coast—and on the whole it might be a good thing to make travelers by rail get off every little while and walk a few miles. As the first long cove of the beautiful bay came into view I dropped off and was sailed across the neck of water in one of the ferry dugouts to Itapagipe, where one engagement at the “Theatro Popular” was proving popular indeed.

Three days later all of us, including Ruben in person, took a side-wheel steamer across the bay to São Felix, planning to spend a week away from the city. Across the deck from me sat a white woman with three chain bracelets, one wrist watch, seven very large rings on four fingers of the left hand, six more on the four fingers of the right hand, a gold watch-chain some two yards long about her neck, enormous showy earrings, a gold locket and pendant, and various other gaudy odds and ends. This paragon of taste, it turned out, was one of our party. She was from Montevideo and Ruben had brought her along to do a Spanish dance sem roupa—no wonder she needed to be covered with jewelry—for the benefit of the matutos, or “country gawks,” of the interior.

A couple of hours carried us across the main bay and we entered a narrow inlet which soon swelled into another and smaller bay that gradually narrowed down until we found ourselves in an immense river, the Paraguassú, with low bushy sides and water well up to the branches of the few trees at high tide. Villages, towns, and single old fazenda-houses under their majestic royal palms appeared here and there, at some of which we tied up. Others sent on board or took ashore two or three of the plantation family in flimsy dugout logs paddled by more or less naked negroes. Most of the towns had names ending in “gipe” and lived on their exports of fumo and charutos (tobacco and cigars), that weed, as well as fruit and cacao, growing abundantly back in what looked like rather a barren and bushy land. The river narrowed, winding through low hills, and at sunset we sighted the twin towns of São Felix and Cachoeira, on opposite sides of the stream and connected by a long railway-and-foot-bridge, at the foot of a series of rapids over black jagged rocks that halt navigation and give the latter town its name.

As usual bedlam broke loose between the chaotic-minded passengers and the aggressive boatmen, carregadores, and touts fighting for business. Though there was an abundance of men in ragged, baggy uniforms, no one seemed to have any authority. One evil-eyed, half-baked looking fellow who drew a razor in the midst of the turmoil turned out to be the hotel-keeper who had been told to prepare rooms for “the entire Kinetophone company,” and who did not propose to be outwitted by a rival. We let them fight it out, put our light baggage into a ferry “canoe” with Carlos and the undress “artist,” and sent them across the river—our theater being in São Felix and the boat-landing in Cachoeira. Then we walked a mile or more along the rough-and-tumble stone streets of what appeared by the weak gas-lamps to be a town transported bodily from the heart of the Andes, paid sixty reis at the bridge turnstile, and brought up at the tiny “Cinema São Felix.” There Ruben and the Italian owner broke into such garrulous greetings that it was after eight before we finally dragged our guide and mentor away to the “hotel” of the belligerent seeker-after-guests, who was now grieving over the unexpected scantiness of our “company.”

Of the pseudo-meal foisted upon us after two hours of shouting, swearing, and insisting, I will say nothing, and even less of the boiler-factory din that seethed through the tiny pens divided by thin wooden partitions reaching only halfway to the un-ceiled roof, except to remark that, as soon as the show was installed next morning, “Tut” and I might have been seen moving across the river to the “Hotel das Naçoes” in Cachoeira. This second city of the State of Bahia—equal in size to Texas—was only a languid backward village, without electric-lights, without even a wheeled vehicle, unless one counts the tri-weekly side-wheel steamer or the little railway that rattles up to Feira do Sant’ Anna and straggles 165 miles west into the interior of the state. There are several moderately large tobacco and cigar warehouses, but almost the only sign of industry in either of the twin towns was our advertising,—a deluge of posters and handbills, and a parade of taboletas, or large movable street-signs, accompanied by negro boys beating cymbals, drums, and tin pans. We charged double prices, because the theater was too small to make anything less worthwhile—and we played to 128 paying clients and a score of “deadheads”!

Next day the Italian cinema-man begged us with tears in his voice to cut the entrance fee in two, and as some such drastic action seemed necessary to save us from bankruptcy, I agreed—and that night we had 89 paid admissions! These interior towns are so sunk in sloth that they seem to resent any attempt to shake them out of the somnolence of their ancestors, out of that apathetic indifference to the advances of civilization which makes them scorn even the few opportunities of a life-time to see something new and important, to get some hint of the world’s progress. Only the barbaric recreation of drunken church festivals appeals to them.

I took advantage of the Sunday train to visit Feira do Sant’ Anna, thirty miles up-country. This line was built back in the seventies, yet the names of Hugh Wilson and other Americans still appear on various bridges and viaducts. The train climbed for half an hour, and still we could look down upon the twin towns close below, but once up on top of the flat, rather dry and sandy, plateau it raced along at decent Brazilian speed. The slender branches of the mandioca were numerous, and here I saw my first tobacco-fields in Brazil. At one station a mile from the town it served saddle-horses were waiting for the men and enormous, bungling, two-wheeled mule-carts with wicker armchairs in them for the women. It would have been dreadful if one of the white-collar class had been forced to walk that mile along the smooth, dry, cool summer road. For it was pleasant and breezy up here, though the elevation was not great; even at summer midday one could walk comfortably in the sun bareheaded—provided one could walk anywhere comfortably. My preconceived notions of this region proved entirely false. I had expected dense jungle and forest, and humid, leaden heat; on the contrary, it was not only dry and cool, but almost bare of vegetation.

Feira do Sant’ Anna, so named for the great cattle-fairs that were held here on St. Ann’s day, is less than a century old, a one-story town sitting out unsheltered on a dry, sandy, plain. Two streets wider than Broadway cross at right angles in the center of town, and are fully paved with cobblestones and lined with small bushy shade trees. On Monday market-days these are thronged with countrymen and women from a hundred miles around. To-day a cockfight under a big tree on the outskirts seemed to be the only activity. Two roosters without artificial spurs, but with bloody heads and necks, entirely featherless in spots, pecked at each other eternally, while bullet-headed negroes and mulattoes stood around them betting—if they still had any coppers—one owner or the other occasionally picking up his bird, spraying a mouthful of rum-and-water on its head and neck, and setting them at it again, until one fell from utter exhaustion and the other, wabbling drunkenly on his bloody feet, uttered a feeble crow of victory. Wells with good American force-pumps marked the town a rare one for interior South America, where the inhabitants generally drink from some nearby creek or mud-hole; but drought had left little at the bottoms even of the wells, and this scant supply negro boys were delivering to various parts of town in casks on mule or donkey-back, a blue enameled government license on the forehead of each four-footed animal.

When we got back to Bahia on February 10 a brand new hotel had been opened on the space left between Ruben’s present theater and the invisible one I had the opportunity of some day managing. It was a five-story, flat-iron placete on the height of the city, the highest building in Bahia, or, indeed, in the state, and was the wonder of the region. The only elevator in the paunch of South America, except the outdoor one between the lower and higher city, ran all the way up it, but when “Tut” and I entered, it refused at first to work, whereupon I stepped out again to get something I had forgotten.

“Oh, don’t be afraid!” cried the servant, himself ashy with fear, who was attempting to manipulate it, “it won’t fall.”

On the fifth floor, spoken of with a catch of the breath in Bahia, we had a pleasant little room with a vast outlook over city and ocean—and as it was starting in to acquire a reputation, the place was strictly a hotel and not a brothel. Materially it was a great relief from what we had been enduring for weeks past, and the unwonted sensation of living in well-nigh civilized surroundings again was welcome, but a hotel, after all, takes its tone from its guests and servants, and these being Bahianos, it was doubtful whether so expensive an establishment would be able to keep its head above water. Speaking of water, the shower-baths were extra, as usual in Brazil, but when I confided to the manager that I would move out again next day, he hastened to assure me that no one would notice when I bathed.

Street-cars and walls were again flaunting Kinetophone advertisements inviting everyone to come and see the “marvel of the age.” But it was “reheated soup” in Bahia now, and out at Itapagipe, where we had played three nights to crowded houses only a week before, the Latin enthusiasm had effervesced and we had only a straggling audience. If only we had had some new numbers, say a couple of Caruso! The second night was worse, with our share only 36$, and the owner refused to give a show at all on the next and last night, saying the few days before carnival were the worst in the year in the theatrical business, as everyone with a tostão was keeping it to buy masks, confetti, and scented water.

Carnival costumes and the silly soprano speech that goes with them were already beginning to appear in the streets, and by noon on Sunday negroes and half-negroes in fantastic make-up were everywhere. Most of the “São João” employees were drunk or excited or parading the streets by the time we opened for the matinée, and as I could watch the door as well from there, I sat down behind the wicket and became ticket-seller. Few ticket-offices in the world can compare with that of the old “São João” in situation, under the deep colonial porch, open to all the trade winds of the blue Atlantic, golden-bathed by day and silver-lighted by night, lying a few hundred feet below and stretching away unbrokenly to the coast of Africa.

Masked figures came, asking for tickets in the falsetto they hoped would disguise their voices, as well as the usual haughty, tar-brushed class in the full dress of public appearance. I quickly acquired the professional ticket-seller’s “snappy” language and could toss out a handful of change or a concise bit of information quite as scornfully as the most experienced station-agent in my native land. Not a great many spectators entered that afternoon, however, for which I did not blame them. Why pay to go inside a musty old theater when the brilliant summer day outside is full of free entertainments? Only two weeks before there had been a similar celebration, but there is a constant string of this expensive tomfoolery the year round in Bahia. The amount spent on trolley-car and automobile floats alone would have built a good school-house, to say nothing of the bands of music, costumes, and playthings. Scores of automobiles filled with fantastically garbed men and girls crawled through the streets, while thousands afoot were arrayed in wild and generally ugly and orderless fantasy, with masks or head-pieces equal to Bottom the Weaver. It was evident that the paraders were mainly from the lower classes and had little originality of ideas in designing costumes. Nearly everyone’s slight sense of humor prompted him to pose as the opposite of what he was in real life; every negro who could afford it wore a rosy-cheeked mask and white gloves; many of the few whites had blacked up or donned negro masks, and perhaps half the men were made up as women, while there was a perfect rage, particularly among the part-negro girls, to appear in male attire, their hips bursting through their otherwise loosely flapping nether garments. “Ladies of the life” took advantage of the spirit of the day and sat bare-legged in their balconies over the main streets, the police, of course, never interfering, since correction or suppression are unusual and unpopular in South America. We cancelled the third “section” that night and joined the throng parading the streets amid cloud-bursts of confetti, rivers of scented water, and maudlin uproar, and after looking in at a popular ball that had many suggestions of a witch dance in the heart of Africa I went home for my last night’s sleep in São Salvador da Bahia.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVI. EASTERNMOST AMERICA

The new contract with “Colonel” Ruben permitted me to absent myself from the show and travel when and where I saw fit, he to pay my transportation only by the most direct routes between the towns in which the Kinetophone appeared. My faith in Ruben was always limited and my preference for land over sea travel notorious, hence I decided to strike off up-country a few days before the date set for us to sail for Maceió, not only to indulge my incurable wanderlust but to prepare for any sudden collapse of our sixty-day contract.

“Chemins de Fer Fédéraux de l’Est Bréslienne” seemed as top-heavy a name for the narrow grass-grown track up the coast as the mammoth stacks made the little old locomotives. Its tiny cars were designed for the use of women rather than men, for the seats, instead of facing the open windows and the world outside, stared into mirrors set in the car walls. We ground away along the water, past Bomfim, topped by its white “miracle” church, past Itapagipe beyond the widening water with its little sailing dugout ferries, crept timidly across the long and aged wooden trestle over this innermost arm of the bay, and at length lost Bahia to view just a month from the moment I had first set eyes upon it.

There were a dozen stops at languid little cocoanut villages along the fringe of the inner bay before the water gave way to dry and bushy pasture-land at Agoa Cumprida. Most of the passengers changed there for Santo Amaro, and for the rest of the journey we had more room than company, which is usually an advantage in Brazil. Heaps of charcoal, burned from the scrub trees that abound in this fairly fertile but dry and little cultivated region, lay at most of the stations, at all of which throngs of men, women, and boys strove to sell dusty fruit and home-made cakes to the apathetic passengers. The dust lay thick upon us also when we drew up at noon in Alagoinhas, eighty miles north. That day’s train was bound up-country to Joazeiro on the São Francisco river, and it would be twenty-four hours before I could continue along the coast.

Some chap with a tendency for exaggeration has said that the night has a thousand eyes; but that is nothing compared to almost any interior village of South America when a white stranger comes strolling through it. To walk the length of a street of Alagoinhas was like trying to stare down some mammoth, bovine, fixedly gaping face, until a sensitive man could scarcely have refrained from screaming, “For Heaven’s sake go and do something, or at least draw in your stupid faces!” Spattered over a lap of broken country and half-hidden in cocoanut and palm groves, it would be difficult to decide how many of the 15,000 inhabitants it claims actually dwell in it, were it not their unfailing custom to line up to be counted. There was not a street in town, which is well inland and at a slight elevation, but merely wide sloughs of sand between the monotonous rows of houses; yet I was astonished to find two large and well-kept cinemas. This, it turned out, was due to a local feud. Two brothers who owned the “Cinema Popular” had been bosom friends of the richest man in town, until they, too, bought an automobile. This so enraged the rich man that he attempted to get even by building another “movie” house in the hope of putting the brothers out of business. So far he had not succeeded, and was all the less likely to do so after I had signed a contract with the brothers for five nights at the “Popular.” Ruben might take the show to Maceió and Pernambuco as he had promised, but I did not propose to be caught napping, and if he did, the Alagoinhas contract would be good in June or July when the Kinetophone returned without me.

Another car so loose-jointed that the walls constantly creaked and swayed toiled all the afternoon and into the night to carry a scattering of passengers to Barracão, another name for Nowhere. It consisted merely of several huts and a tile-roofed building in which all passengers by rail from Bahia to Aracajú, or vice versa, must spend the night. The engine, whistling up about a cord of wood, awakened us long before daylight and at least an hour earlier than was necessary, for I was already sitting in our six o’clock train when the other pulled out Bahia-ward at five. The same seat, the same conductor, and the same swaying walls as the day before made one feel like a trans-Siberian traveler, though the 278 miles the train worries through in two days is scarcely a Siberian distance. The salt-tainted breath of the Atlantic slashed us now and then in the faces as we rumbled along, for we were not far inland now. It was gently rolling country, of gray rather than red soil, producing next to nothing, with here and there some bananas and mandioca, and long unbroken stretches of scrub jungle. The tucú, a grape-like fruit growing on a palm tree and so thick of skin and large of stone that there is only a bit of sweetish dampness between them, was sold at the rare stations.

Soon we crossed an iron bridge and what might have been a river had it tried harder, into the State of Sergipe, the smallest of Brazil. This and the little larger State of Alagoas are sliced out of the respective states of Bahia and Pernambuco down near the mouth of the São Francisco, which divides them. It is not apparent why they need be separate states—but then, a foreigner ignorant of local conditions no doubt wonders in looking at a map of our own country why a little nubbin of land down at the end of Connecticut must have its own name, capital, and government, or why both those bits of territory should not join Massachusetts. The state lines of Brazil follow largely the old colonial divisions, some natural but more of them artificial, set by the Pope or the King of Portugal. Of the twenty Brazilian states, nine or ten have aboriginal Indian names. It is another evidence of the higher value of time to the American that we have an abbreviation for each of our states, while the Brazilian has none. North and South American incompatability of temperament is perhaps nowhere more definitely demonstrated than in the attitude of the two races toward time. Brevity, conciseness, and promptitude rank almost as bad manners among Latin-Americans, whose editorial writers often break forth in dissertations on “punctuality, that virtue of kings and bad custom of Anglo-Saxons. Enthusiasts for liberty, we cannot admit that a man shall be the slave of his watch. Life proves that punctuality is an excellent virtue for a machine, but a grave defect for a man.”

In the blazing afternoon we came down off the interior plateau, ever lower to the northward, here reminiscent of southern Texas or northern Mexico in its aridity, its scattered, thorny, scrub plant life, its occasional adobe huts, to a flat sea-level littoral that was almost entirely a dreary waste of snow-white sand, rarely punctuated with cactus and a few other waterless bushes. Aracajú, capital of the State of Sergipe, is set in this nearly desert landscape. The large room with a mosquito-net canopied bed in which I was soon installed in the “Hotel International” was the best the town had to offer befriended strangers. Like all the rest of Aracajú, it was on the ground floor, looking out on a quiet garden of deep sand, and was as airy as the exhaust from a hot-air furnace. I had already taken it when my eye fell upon a notice to the effect that for lack of water guests would not be allowed to bathe for three days. By shouting until the whole hotel force was gathered about me, and offering to make them all candidates for hospital treatment, I was conducted, as a special favor to another of those half-mad “gringos,” into a special “rain bath” for ladies, and freed myself at last from the soil of Bahia. Then, having induced the landlord to change the wooden-floored bed for one “of wire,” though he could not understand why anyone should consider this an improvement, I relaxed and sallied forth to see what Aracajú had to offer.

Sergipe, it seems, was a part of Bahia until nearly the end of the colonial period, when it proclaimed itself a sovereign state with the capital at São Cristovam, a straggling town some twenty miles back along the railway by which I had come. But that was a league from a harbor, and the government at length moved to an Indian village on the edge of this cucumber-shaped bay. Ara is a Tupi Indian word for plenty, and cajú is the Brazilian name for a fruit that thrives in such semi-desert regions as the littoral of Sergipe. This is shaped like a small plump pear, with a smooth silky skin of saffron or brilliant red color, which grows upside down on a tree not unlike the apple in appearance, and is particularly conspicuous for the fact that the seed, shaped like a parrot’s beak, gray in color, and containing a nut that is delicious when roasted, grows entirely outside the fruit itself, protruding from its larger end. The meat is white, exceedingly acid, and sure death alike to thirst and the dye-stuff of garments. There were barely a dozen Indian fishermen’s huts at Aracajú when it became the capital in 1855; hence it has an appearance of newness rather than age, and only two churches—quite sufficient, to be sure, but a great contrast to Bahia. There is nothing particularly individual about the place, its “palaces,” houses, or people, who are sufficient for all the Lord meant them to be in this world and very few of whom are going to the next, if I may judge by the size of the congregation and the priestly remarks thereon at early mass the morning after my arrival.

The predominating type of aracajuano is the gray or brown mestiço, and a mixed race is rarely prepossessing in appearance. There are few full negroes, even fewer pure whites, but every known mixture of the two, no small number of mamelucos, or crosses between Indians and Europeans, and too many bodes (literally male goats) as the offspring of Indian and negro are clandestinely called. The cucumber-shaped bay is really the River Sery-gipe, a name said to mean the abode of a kind of shrimp which abounds here, and has a troublesome moving sandbar at its mouth, with less than four meters depth at low tide, making Aracajú the only Brazilian coast capital which transatlantic steamers cannot enter. One may see the waves breaking on this bar from almost any point in town, but the open sea is in view only from the top of the cathedral or the crest of the highest sand-dunes. Half the coast of Sergipe is made up of this snow-white sand, in dunes that move with the wind, immense heaps of the purest white sand covering whole blocks and rising a hundred feet or more high within two minutes’ stroll of the main hotel. All but a very few of the streets are ankle-deep in sand, as are the palm-trees. These few are paved with large flat rocks fitted together in all manner of irregular patterns. The “bonds” were still operated by mule-power. There is a pleasing central praça, facing the waterfront and backed by a little garden with a vista of the cathedral through royal palms, pleasing perhaps because its bit of green lawn is in such welcome contrast to the glaring sandy brightness elsewhere, but marred by the statue of some local hero who, according to this monument, stepped out of somewhere wearing a frock-coat and waving a most properly creased soft felt hat, crying, “I am going to die for my country!” If he could see it now he might regret his heroism.

In full sunlight at midday I could have used my umbrella to advantage as a parasol, if some miserable son of a Brazilian had not stolen it in Victoria. But he who never walks in tropical sunshine will never enjoy to the full sitting in the shade, and at least the nights were cool and breezy. The only thing to grow profane over was that the steamer which was to carry me to Maceió had not even left Bahia, “because everybody there is busy with the carnival.” This meant at least three days squatting among the sand heaps, and perhaps not reaching Maceió until after the show did, since that was to travel by direct steamer. Worse still, I had read all the Brazilian novels in my bag, and Aracajú was not the kind of place to support a bookstore. There was nothing left but walking, and that soon palls in a sun-glazed town closely surrounded on all sides by shoe-filling sand-dunes.

This dreary and unproductive soil stretches from five to ten miles inland for the whole length of the state, with a broad strip of stony, rolling, clay soil back of that, on which sugar and cotton, tobacco and farinha are produced in moderate quantity, while the western half of the state is sertão, in which graze scattered herds of cattle. There is a large weaving-mill in the capital, said to be the best in Brazil, but still capable of improvement. During my strolls I came upon the slaughter-house one afternoon and found scores of children showing great glee at the struggles of the cattle as the blood poured from their throats until they dropped in their own gore. Such was evidently the chief education to be had by youthful Aracajú. Here, as in the other tobacco producing state, Bahia, most of the negro women smoked pipes. The lazy scrape of tamancos was suggestive not only of the indolence but of the moral looseness of the place. Though one might have had the companionship of comely mulatto and quadroon girls for less than the asking, I sought in vain for a person of even the rudiments of intelligence with whom to pass the time, and was forced to take refuge in the state public library instead. Even this was no monument of learning, though several sergipanos have won Brazilian fame as men of letters. The building itself lacked nothing in elaborateness, but the books were those least needed and only half a dozen youths drifted in daily to read the newspapers and the silly “comic” weeklies from Rio. Here, however, I learned that “there are two kinds of climate in the State of Sergipe—hot and humid on the coast and hot and dry in the interior,” and that the bronze gentleman in the frock-coat and Parisian hat in the main praça was a “politician, a poet, and a great orator” who tried to start a revolution here in 1906 and was quite naturally shot full of holes by federal soldiers. No one can blame him, however, for wanting to start something in Aracajú; his foolishness lay in the fact that he seemed to think it was possible.

A two-line cable or two a week, usually on trivial matters and more likely than not denied a few days later, constituted Sergipe’s connection with the outside world. No doubt I needed the experience to realize how dreary life is in these miserable little capitals when one cannot hurry on as soon as the first interest and novelty has worn off. The total lack of inspiration, of good example, of anything approaching an ideal, could not but have killed any originality or ambition, even had one of these half-breed youths been born with one or the other. There was no goal in life. Even I felt that in my few days there; how must it have been with a person born there and suspecting no other life on the globe? A man may advance under his own gasoline, but unless he has someone to crank him up he is very apt to die about where he began. Few of us are equipped with self-starters.

Such reflections as these made me wonder sometimes whether the moving picture, for all its imperfections and dangers and false view of life, for all the peculiar inanity and childishness inherent in its dramas, is not doing as much as anything to give the masses of South America, particularly of the interior, at least a knowledge of better personal habits, even if not higher aspirations. Much as this remarkable invention has been prostituted by cheap mortals, it is an incredible boon to communities so far from civilization that they never get more of the great outside world than the films bring them. If you lived in some sleepy little village in a remote corner of South America, far from theaters or any other living form of life and thought, you would find the daily round exceedingly dull, you would passionately crave some variety, some entertainment, even mildly intellectual, or not at all so, something to take you for an hour out of the dreary village routine of a life-time and bring you in touch, if ever so slightly and momentarily, with the great moving outside world. Thus you would welcome with considerable enthusiasm even a bad “movie”—unless generations of this life had so sunk you in sloth that you resented any attempt to drag you out of it.

But though the “Cinema Rio Branco,” otherwise the state-owned “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” in the next block was free to me, I found that at best a stupid way for a man from the outside world to spend his time. Some of that on my hands I had whiled away by booking the Kinetophone for three to seven days on its return trip to Rio, we—or rather, they, for by that time I should be far distant—to wire the manager at least five days before their arrival. Thus I proposed to make a string of contracts for “Tut’s” return trip, and leave my duty doubly done when I doffed my movie-magnate hat up on the Amazon.

One morning I was rowed across the river, or harbor, in a dugout and tramped for hours in the sand-carpeted forest of cocoanut-palms on the Ilha dos Coqueiros. It was market-day in the town, and boatloads of the nuts were coming across to compete with other native products from farther up the river. The wind was sighing through the cocoanut fronds, and I discovered that there are windfalls among cocoanuts also, for there were so many large green ones under the trees that I had only to stop and drink as often as I got thirsty. Numbers of them rot around the edge of the stem and fall, and if they are not soon picked up, the decay penetrates the shell and the nut spills its milk in the sand, leaving only the husk to be used as fuel or roofing. Even here one was reminded of the human race. The high trees of aristocratic arrogance ordinarily had only half a dozen nuts, while the sturdy, ugly, short and squatty ones bore from fifty to a hundred in tight clusters at the hub from which the leaves radiate in all directions. A group of inhabitants scattered along the near side of the island lived in cocoanut husk-and-leaf huts and produced, besides their staple, which grows itself, mandioca, melons, and children, all equally weedy and ill-tended. Everyone above the age of ten or twelve seemed to have his dugout log, a paddle, a square sail, and a trailing-board, all guarded in his hut when not in use, and a bright-eyed bronze boy of part Indian ancestry sailed me back across the harbor in a snapping sea breeze.

The dugouts and fishermen’s sailboats that always stretch along the waterfront of Aracajú had been augmented by a steamer, the long-awaited Ilheos of the “Companhia Bahiana de Navegação,” which had at last drifted over the sandbar at the harbor’s mouth. I hastened to the company’s office, only to be struck in the eye by a sign headed “23 á 6 horas,” in other words, it being then Saturday, the Ilheos would not sail until Tuesday morning! By that time the Kinetophone would long since have left Maceió, even if good “Colonel” Ruben did not run away with the whole concern during my prolonged absence. If only the sea had frozen over I could have walked it in far less time than there was still to wait, for it was only 105 miles to Maceió. But it would have been many times that in this sand, and there was no other way of covering the only break in railway travel—except the one between Victoria and Bahia—along the whole eastern coast of South America.

The trouble was, it turned out, that Aracajú had next day to inaugurate a new bishop, the first “son of Sergipe” ever to rise to that honor, and of course Monday would be needed to recover from the celebration. The archbishop of Bahia, the bishop of Maceió, and a swarm of lesser wearers of the black robe had come to add dignity to the occasion, and, when I came to think of it, of course it was they who were holding up the steamer. Eight on Sunday morning found me at the egreja matrix, or mother church, mingling with many pious negroes ready to give the new bishop a proper send-off. But the edifice was already filled to about seven times its capacity with people chiefly of color, and I withdrew hastily to windward and a park bench. By Monday afternoon recovery from the inauguration set in, and I ventured to buy my steamer-ticket, took my last wade in the sands of Aracajú, and went on board for the night. The bishop of Alagoas had the next cabin to my own and we slept with our heads against opposite sides of the same half-inch partition. But I suppose it was because I had no little purple dunce-cap to wear over my bald spot that the dusky ladies of Aracajú did not come, glistening with jewels embedded in their well-fed forms, to kiss me good-night—on the hand.

We began to move at four in the morning, and I went out to watch by the light of half a moon and the Southern Cross our exit from one of the most difficult ports in South America. Barely had we crossed the bar when our sea-going tug began to rock like a canoe, and not only the bishop but even as old a seadog as I took no interest in the ten o’clock “breakfast.” The Ilheos claimed to have twin screws, but they must have been turning in opposite directions, for we made far less speed than the coast swells that rolled us about like an empty bottle. The shore was made up almost entirely of dreary wastes of white sand, sometimes in broad flat stretches, sometimes drifted up into dunes. At times a suggestion of forest appeared far back of this, but there were few if any signs of habitation.

About noon the water about us turned from deep blue to a muddy red, a great streak of which thrust itself out into the ocean from the outlet of the River São Francisco. We turned into this across a broad sandbar and found it a mile or more wide, though frequently split up by islands, long, flat, and green. This river, largest between the Plata and the Amazon, rises far to the south, near the old capital of Minas Geraes, and has about the same volume of water as the Hudson. Thatched villages and small cities line its banks for hundreds of miles and side-wheel river steamers mount it in two sections, to Pirapora, in Minas Geraes, terminus of the “Central Railway of Brazil.” We stopped at several villages near the mouth, then pushed on inland. The rolling had ceased and the bishop was out now parading the deck behind a big black cigar. The shores were sandy and nearly flat, with palm-trees, some sugar-cane, and a considerable population of more or less negroes. At length the town of Villa Nova, two centuries old for all its name, appeared on the nose of a bluff, and beyond, on the right-hand or Alagoas bank, the city of Penedo, not unlike a smaller Bahia in situation, with several bulking old churches and here and there a majestic imperial palm-tree rising above all else.

We dropped anchor before Villa Nova, with its several textile mills, and were soon completely hemmed in by cargo barges, though not before I had slipped across to Penedo, from which we were to sail at four in the morning. Considering the time it had taken to get there, it was hard to believe that this was only forty-five miles north of Aracajú! Before the town lay one of the side-wheel river steamers, and many “chatties,” barges, and sailboats, not to mention countless dugout canoes, which ply the lower São Francisco to the falls of Paulo Affonso, two hundred miles up and “greater than Niagara,” according to my fellow-passengers. Here and there groups of women were dipping up water and washing garments, in the same spots. All the dwellers along its shore drink the muddy São Francisco, nature, or at best filtered through a porous stone. No one is ever seen swimming in these parts, either in river or sea.

I was surprised to find a large number of white people in Penedo, though mulattoes were in the majority. There was some Indian blood, shown chiefly in high cheek-bones and wide faces, and as usual there was a big jail full of happy singing negroes. Full-white brats rolling stark naked in the mud suggested one of the unfortunate effects of living in a mainly negro country. Some streets climbed laboriously past overgrown old churches with Portuguese crowns cut in stone on them, past projecting balconies that carried the mind back to viceregal days, to the grass-grown central praça high up on the ridge, overlooking a long stretch of the red-brown river. It was the affair of a moment to convince the owner of the “Theatro Sete de Setembro,” alias “Cinema Ideal,” that the Kinetophone should halt here for three days on its return trip. He was the big man of the town, with a dozen separate enterprises, and when a score of persons crowded around us in his drugstore to listen to our conversation and read over his shoulder whatever I showed him, we agreed to leave the signing of the contract for the next day on board the Ilheos, on which he, too, was to take passage.

Anarchy reigned about the decks all night, sailors, stokers, and visiting parties from shore keeping up a constant hubbub until we got under way about dawn. A couple of hours sleep as we descended the river were cut short as we struck the open sea, for though this looked calm and smooth as a frog pond, the Ilheos rolled like a log and soon took on the aspect of a phantom ship, with everyone lying like dead wherever misfortune overtook them. The dreary sandy coast was sometimes broken by spurs of the low, flat, wooded plateau that stretches all along this region farther inland. At two in the afternoon we sighted Maceió and its port of Jaraguá, a smaller city far out on a point of land, with a reef protecting a scallop in the coast but no real harbor. In one of the score of sailboats that rushed out to meet us I was astonished to see Carlos and later “Tut,” whom I supposed already in Pernambuco. They had lost Wednesday and Thursday of the week before in getting here, had played four days to tolerable business, and had lost the night just past in waiting for the boat they now expected to take at any moment.

I took “Tut’s” room at the “Hotel Petropolis,” a massive, one-story building on a sort of terrace that caught a hit of breeze and on the sides of which were painted letters several feet high announcing it the “Only Place in Maceió without Mosquitoes.” It had little of anything else, for that matter, except good mosquito-nets over the beds to keep out the mosquitoes it did not have. By dark the “Lloyd-Brazileiro” steamer Bahia arrived, and “Tut” and Carlos and Ruben’s mulatto sub-manager sailed away, while I went over to the theater in which they had played and contracted not only for three days on their return trip, but for five days in Parahyba, capital of the state north of Pernambuco. How hard Maceió had been hit by the prevailing hard times was suggested on every hand, not only in out-of-works and light cinema receipts, but by such posted information as:

NOTICE

On this date our telephone was disconnected from the respective Company until our further orders, in view of the brutal crisis which at the present time atrophies everything and everyone.

Maceió, January 1, 1915. João Ramos e Cia.

The capital of Alagoas, however, proved to be more of a city than it looks from a distance. Most of it lies in a pocket between the sea and a ridge, a large, almost land-locked bay running far in behind it. Mainly three-story buildings lined the well-paved streets in the business section, and new American street-cars of the electric “Companhia Alagoana de Trilhos Urbanos” covered several pleasant suburbs. No sooner, however, does one return to a region of railways and street cars than missing arms and legs begin to appear. The people of Maceió were visibly of higher class than those of the State of Bahia, though by no means beyond possible improvement. Even the outskirt huts were whitewashed and often noticeably clean, and women and children, and even men, in many cases wore spotless white garments. Heaps of cotton bales at the railway station and on the wharves reminded one of our own South, but though there was ample evidence of African ancestry, there were almost no full-blooded negroes among the population. The percentage of white and near-white inhabitants was striking after Bahia; but here, too, were the familiar north-Brazil concomitants of huge churches and tiny one-room schools. Mangos and bread-fruit dropped in the central praça, amid the myriad remains of tropical bugs lured to death by its blazing electric-lights.

My only personal acquaintance with the élite of Maceió was due to professional duties. When the show arrived, “Tut” had discovered that the local electricity was of a freak type,—100 volts and 100 cycles, whatever that means—a sort of non-union electricity evidently, for all our phonograph motors refused to work with it. The English engineer at the power-house figured out on paper that all would be well, but as the “juice” is not turned on in Maceió until 6 P. M., his error was discovered only when the audience was storming the doors on the opening night. While the manager strove to keep the house amused with ordinary films, “Tut” and Carlos raced about town and at last found in a café a little electric fan. They borrowed the motor that operated it, but this had to be cleaned and oiled before it would take up its new task, so that it was nine o’clock before our part of the show was given; and as Maceió usually goes to bed by eight, Ruben had to give back much of the money, and the bungled estrea injured business during the rest of our stay. It turned out that the café and the fan belonged, sub rosa, to one Dr. Armando Vedigal, a well-to-do lawyer and member of one of Maceió’s “best families.” True to his race, as well as to his calling, this gentleman, finding he had someone in a tight place, proceeded to squeeze him. He demanded 100$ for the use of the motor for four nights, of at most thirty minutes each. The whole fan costs six to eight dollars new in the United States, and perhaps 35$ in Brazil; and as its perfection was mainly due to Edison, it amounted almost to renting an apparatus for two hours’ use to the inventor thereof at three times its original cost.

“Tut” had left the payment to me. Unfortunately I could not ignore it, as I should have preferred, because the lawyer was a political power and would have made it unpleasant for the owner of the theater unless his “rake-off” was forthcoming, so the only American thing to do was to pay what he demanded. I determined, however, to have at least the satisfaction of expressing our gratitude to the fellow in person, and after considerable insisting I was shown the way to his house. It was an ostentatious one enclosed in a large private garden in the best part of town and filled with those things into which persons of wealth and “social standing” the world round turn the proceeds of such clever “strokes of business.” The great man received me with a dignity befitting his lofty station, and invited me into his chair-forested parlor. He had the dainty aristocratic fingers, hands, and form of those who, for generations back, have taken good care not to let their muscles develop, lest someone suspect them of having once earned a dollar by vulgar work, and he was dressed in the very proper heavy, black, full frock-coat dress of his class, even on the equator.

I began by expressing our thanks for the use of the motor, to which he instantly replied, “Ah, to be sure, I was so delighted to be able to serve you, and—and——”

He was plainly waiting for me to encourage him with, “Yes, that was so kind of you” and a gentle pat on the shoulder, instead of the swift kick farther down which he so richly deserved. I bowed, and took to expressing in the most polished Portuguese I could summon my admiration for a man who had the nerve to demand several times the price of a machine for such a brief use of it. I had intended to work him up slowly to the point where my remarks would feel like the threshing of nettles on a bare skin, but the men of northern Brazil are dynamic with pride and quick to flare up at any suggested slight, so that I had barely reached the word roubar (rob), first of a long and culminative list with a sting, when he bounded into the air and asked if I really knew the meaning of that word in Portuguese. I assured him that I did, and the action, too, in any land or clime, whereupon he demanded in a neighbor-waking voice whether I had come to call him a thief in his own house. When I informed him that I had come for that express purpose, he bellowed, “Rua! Off with you! Out of my sight,” at the same time hastening to pick my hat off the rack and hand it to me. I was going anyway, now that he had caught my hint, but I did not propose to let his wrath hasten matters. As I stepped leisurely out upon the veranda he slammed the door and informed me in the bellow of a mad bull that he would “pay me back”—not the 100$ unfortunately—“the first time he met me on the street—to-morrow!”

“Why not to-day?” I queried, for it was barely dusk and there were street-cars, if it was beneath his dignity to walk.

This redoubled his fury. “Era uma fita”—it was a regular movie, as the Brazilians say, to see him giving an impersonation of a fire-eater for the benefit of his wife and children, and shouting. “Let me at him! Let me eat him!” while his wife and three small sons clung to his arms, legs, and other appendages, screaming the Brazilian form of, “Don’t kill him, Pa! Oh, don’t shoot him, for my sake!” He allowed the pistol he had caught up to be wrested from his hand, but the howls and screams of the whole family could still be heard when I turned the next corner—and I was not running at that.

It was playing with fire, of course, not because these hot-headed northerners are particularly brave, but because of the disadvantage which a stranger and a foreigner would have in any contest with a powerful local politician. Had he shot me, it would probably not have been difficult for him to “fix it” to escape punishment, whereas the reverse would almost certainly have meant many years in an unpleasant climate. I was too exasperated to consider these things at the time, however, and having returned to the mosquito-less hotel and strapped on my revolver, I spent the evening hanging about the cinema, the town billiard-room, and the other nightly gathering-places where a “gentleman” with such a debt might come to pay it; but the lawyer’s strength must have been unequal to that of his frenzied wife and children, for I saw no more of him during my stay in Maceió.

The “G.W.B.R.,” or Great Western of Brazil Railway, is English, which accounts for its being so called, though it runs from Maceió to Natal through the easternmost part of the four easternmost states in the western hemisphere. On the first day of the month in which I arrived daily service had been inaugurated between Maceió and Pernambuco, but lack of coal was making it impossible to keep this up and the line was soon to go back to the old schedule of three trains a week. In other words, I had accidentally chosen just the time to spare myself another day in the capital of Alagoas. The train that left at dawn on the 225-mile run was long and heavy, with all reasonable comforts and many minor evidences of English management, among them the habit of being on time. This line is a part of the 786 miles leased for sixty years to the British corporation by the government, and the contract reads that no rental shall be paid for it until the gross income for all of them exceeds 6,200$ per kilometer, after which ten per cent. of the receipts shall be paid into the public treasury. The result is a problem similar to that on the line from São Paulo to Santos. One million pounds sterling was spent to improve the leased lines, but even that would not have been enough had the company not been so fortunate, as the chairman of the stockholders in London told them, as to have had a partial failure of crops along their lines that year and to have been thereby saved from contributing £36,000 to the government! The largest expense of the company is for coal and its largest income from the hauling of sugar, with second-class passengers next, according to an item in the official report headed “Passenger and Live Stock Transportation.” No doubt it would be hard to separate the two in Brazil.

The line to Pernambuco ran well inland through a dry and dusty but fertile land, varying from rolling to big rounded hills, among which the train wandered back and forth seeking an outlet. In places it was somewhat forested, or seemed recently to have been cleared; but most of it was thickly inhabited, compared with almost any other part of Brazil. Big engenhos, or sugar mills, often punctuated the landscape with tall, smoke-belching stacks; immense fields of sugar cane were everywhere being harvested, and though it was February, workmen were hoeing with big clumsy enxadas cane-sprouts in the same plots in which mature cane was being cut. Most of the canes came from the fields tied in two bundles on the backs of horses, to be dumped in heaps at the stations and then carefully corded on the railway cars. At least half the stations had a long train of red and yellow cane loaded or loading on the sidetrack, and our way was frequently blocked by similar trains bound for Recife. These and the many large engenhos, the little private railways on the fazendas, with their screeching English or Belgian dwarf locomotives, and the evidence of movement and industry everywhere, gave one the feeling of having once more reached a land of ambition. Pernambuco is Brazil’s greatest sugar-producing state. Thanks to this fact and to an unusually honest government, it enjoys a prosperity second only to that of São Paulo, and possibly of Rio Grande do Sul, in the entire republic. Cotton and mandioca also are important crops, often growing together, and bales of the former lay piled up at many stations. Everything, the cane-fields, the sugar-mills, the large old plantation-houses in choice locations and guarded by half a dozen majestic royal palms, even the swarms of beggars at the stations—gave the impression of an old and long-established community.

It was a constant surprise to find it cooler up on this slight plateau than in the sugar-fields of Tucumán, twenty-five degrees nearer the South Pole, and I never could reconcile myself to the total absence of jungle. Both these conditions were evidently due to the same cause,—the constant strong trade winds that sweep across all this paunch of South America and blow the rains, without which jungle cannot grow even on the equator, farther inland. Water was so scarce that there were only shallow mud-holes for the rare cattle, and all the region appeared sorely in need of irrigation. As in Egypt, the dry soil or the glaring sun seemed to produce blindness, and there were many sightless wretches among the beggars that swarmed every station. Indeed, the sugar-cane, the cotton, the lack of moisture in air and soil, the very engenhos, carried the mind back to the land of the Nile. Mendicants in the last stages of every loathsome disease thrust their ailments, their frightful faces, their leprous finger-stumps upon one wherever the train halted. All the people of this region,—beggars, bootblacks, or politicians—have the habit of touching, patting, pawing one over to attract attention, and it was only by constant vigilance that I could keep myself free from often noisome personal contacts. Then, in that liberty-is-license South American way, swarms of ragged urchins and shiftless men poured into the cars at every station, fingering the spout of the empty water-can, squatting in the vacant seats, thrusting their attentions upon the passengers, stark naked children, with navels protruding several inches from their rounded stomachs, scampered in and out of every opening, no attempt whatever being made by trainmen or station police to reduce this annoying anarchy. Many beggars and tramps used a sugar-cane as a staff—perhaps as a sort of last straw against starvation.

I do not believe in charity, or at least in promiscuous giving, but the Brazilian does, and every one of the beggars who flock about the stations throughout northern Brazil seems to get something for his trouble. Some of them were frankly Africans, but there were others whose negro blood showed only in their love of sucking a sugar-cane, the most work for the least gain of any labor on earth. Even the prosperous cities are not free from this eleemosynary multitude. When the archbishop of Pernambuco returned to his palace after the inauguration of the “son of Sergipe,” he found 235 beggars waiting at his door. The Brazilian no doubt feels that to give alms through an institution would be to pay most of it into the capacious pockets of its managers or sponsors, whereas if he gives himself, he knows that the gift actually reaches the needy person—if, indeed, he is needy. Also, he is more apt than not to be superstitious and to fancy that if he does not give, his own affairs will not prosper; most of all, he is constantly at his old pastime of “fazendo fita”—showing off. Hence impudent, able-bodied beggars are a pest to society and to the travelers’ peace throughout the country, particularly in the blazing north.

A brilliant moon waiting at the edge of the stage to do its turn even before that of the unclouded sun was finished, gave us a continuous performance, with the lighting never dimmed. As we neared Recife there was less cultivation, and beyond Cabo White flat sand and miserable huts took the place of the rolling, fertile, well-housed country—though even here there was not the squalor of Bahia. A desert of sand, an almost unpeopled wilderness had surrounded us for some time before the low lights of Recife began to spring up across the level moon-bathed landscape, and the sandy and swampy land of the Brazilian littoral continued until our train rumbled out upon the very beach of the moon-silvered Atlantic.

It was already 7:40, and there was no time to be lost if I was to take up my professional duties that evening. About noon we had met the up-train with the day’s newspapers and I had caught up with the world and its doings again. Pernambuco has the best journals north of Rio, one of which claims to be the oldest in Latin-America, and I had been delighted to find in several of the most important dailies half-page Kinetophone advertisements, and in all of them articles to the effect that “Edison’s new marvel” had opened the night before with all three sessions crowded to capacity by delighted audiences. But newspaper stories and facts often have little in common. I sprang into the first automobile to offer its services and, after a jouncing over cobblestones that felt like being tossed in a blanket, was set down at the “Hotel Recife.” This was said to be the best in town—which was certainly slanderous language toward the others. Razor and shower-bath having transformed me from a dust-bin discard to the personification of Beau Brummel on a tropical excursion, I raced away to the “Theatro Moderno.” There I was agreeably surprised. Ruben met me with the fraternal embrace at the door of a large new theater, perhaps the most sumptuous in which we had played in Brazil; the receipts the night before had been the best in weeks, and crowds were even then clamoring for admission. The sugar-prosperity of Pernambuco, abetted rather than injured by the World War, combined with plentiful advertising in newspaper displays and articles, in posters and handbills, and by the gyrations through the streets of two bonecos, or dolls, ten feet high, had done the trick. The fact that the bonecos represented a friar and a dancing-girl respectively, and that their public promenading was accompanied by antics which a more circumspect people would have considered highly indecent, seemed to have been an advantage rather than otherwise in Pernambuco.

“Tut” had found the hotels so uninviting that he was sleeping in his hammock on the stage of the theater. Our first move, therefore, was to investigate what all foreign residents assured us was the best stopping-place in Recife,—a pensão kept by a European woman known as the “Baroness.” It was out in the suburb of Magdalena, twenty minutes by electric tramway from the center of town—except that passengers lost more time than that in walking across a condemned bridge which would not carry the cars. The pension consisted of several buildings, one large and pretentious, the rest simple and of one story, scattered about a big enclosed yard shaded by many magnificent tropical trees and looking out behind on one of the many arms of the sea which divide Recife into separate sections. We took a large room together, opening directly on the garden, with a mammoth tree over our very door. There were some drawbacks—no electric lights, for instance, that improvement not yet having reached Pernambuco in public form, though a few places had a private plant. Also the “garden” was deep in sand, for lawns are unknown in this part of the world. But a high fence, as well as dogs and servants, made it possible to leave our doors wide open night and day to the ever-cooling trade wind, and there was a quiet homelikeness as well as cleanliness about the place that made us feel as if we had suddenly left dirty, noisy, quarrelsome Brazil behind.

The “Baroness” had the advantage of good servants from German steamers interned in Pernambuco, the nearest port of refuge for many of those in the South Atlantic when the war broke out. In fact, all Pernambuco was fortunate in having about five hundred men of similar antecedents to serve it that winter. The excellent band of the Cap Vilano, for instance, made not only the most energetic but the best music in North Brazil at the “Café Chic,” just around the corner from our theater—at the equivalent of a dollar a night to each of the musicians. The war had brought Recife other things. Its sugar and cotton having kept it from succumbing to the “brutal crisis” that flagellated the rest of Brazil, it had the reputation of being the best-to-do city in the country. Consequently, adventuresses of all nationalities had come up in droves from dead Rio and impoverished São Paulo, and Recife had more high class members of the profession that needs no training than most cities of five times its population.

Though we often hear of it, there is really no city of Pernambuco. What we call by that name is properly designated by one almost unknown to foreigners. Pernambuco is an old Indian word that is only correctly applied to the entire state, but it has long been the custom not only of seafaring men and all foreigners, but of the Brazilians themselves not resident within the state, to call its capital Pernambuco. Its real name is Recife, and the story of its founding is not without interest. In 1531 Pedro Lopez Pereira established on the only hill in this vicinity a town which was called Olinda, and which in time became a very aristocratic center. But though it had a beautiful site on the open ocean, Olinda had no port, and boats could only land behind the recife, or reef, some miles farther south. On Christmas day of 1598 Jeronymo de Albuquerque formally gave the name Recife to the cluster of trading posts that had grown up there, and built the fortress by which the city is still, at least in theory, defended. The settlers at the “Reef” were almost entirely Portuguese merchants, whom the aristocrats of the proud residential town of Olinda called “mascates”—peddlers or hawkers. The rivalry and ill-feeling between the two towns grew apace. The colonial nobility of Olinda, resenting any interference from their lowborn neighbors, wished to form an independent republic on the style of Venice, and the quarrel finally developed into what is known in Brazilian history as the “War of the Mascates.” Naturally the “peddlers,” having nearly all the material advantages, had the best of it; new authorities arriving from Portugal ended the struggle, and Recife became the city, port, and capital of the region, leaving Olinda, small and isolated on its hill, still proud of its aristocratic origin, but a mere suburb of the modern city.

Unlike Bahia, Recife had no ridge to build on; hence it is deadly flat, with only Olinda five miles to the northwest rising above the featureless landscape, though far behind the city one may make out the wooded hills that merge gradually into the flat-topped chapadas of the sertão of the interior. It stands on the sandy beach of a lagoon delta where two rivers, neither of them of much importance, meet, and the compact old town, with the wharves, banks, and most of the business houses, is really on an island, protected now not only by the natural reef, but by a long breakwater behind which ships anchor. There is no bay; hence steamers which do not enter the inner port must in rough weather land their passengers in a “chair” running on a cable from the breakwater. Many a traveler to South America remembers nothing of Pernambuco except that hair-raising landing.

As Bahia is a city of hills and wooded ridges, so Pernambuco is one of waterways and bridges. The so-called River Capibaribe runs, or at least ebbs and flows, through town, and there are a score of natural canals, estuaries, and mud sloughs filling and emptying with each tide, while hundreds of dwellers in thatched huts of the suburbs have the advantages of Venice in so far as a chance to pole themselves about on their rude rafts goes. Marshy salt water comes in and around the city at every tide, and the rivers, coves, or quagmires to be crossed in a journey through it are numerous—doubly so since several of its many bridges have been condemned for vehicular traffic. Palm trees, chiefly of the cocoanut family, grow everywhere, and between its waterways the city of bridges is noted for its dry and sandy soil; hence one can scarcely stray from the paved streets without wading either in water, mud, or sand.

Properly speaking, Recife is the older section of the town, out near the reef, and given over mainly to business. The modern city covers several times more territory than that, including country-like outskirts of such suggestive names as Capunga, Afflictos, and Sertãozinho among its suburbs. There is Afogados (Drowned Man) out past the Five Points station on the beach, a big suburb of mud and thatched huts among swamp bushes and a network of tidewater, with lanes of mud that snap like the cracking of a Sicilian whip when the tide is out and the tropical sun blazing down upon them. In other directions, still within the city limits, are miles of old estates and aged plantation-houses living out their dotage under magnificent royal palms. To get about this broken up city there were big new English and American street-cars, so new that passengers were not yet permitted to put their feet on the seats. It was less than a year since the old mule-cars for which Pernambuco was long famous, had been superseded—in the outskirt of Torre they might still be seen—and ragamuffins who had never heard the word “bond” in its ordinary significance made frequent use of it in its Brazilian sense. The new company was pushing its lines in every direction and already the tramway was advertising itself as ready to furnish electric-light to business houses along its lines. Thus, though one had the sense of treading on the heels of modernity in Pernambuco, in all northern Brazil, the pre-invention age always succeeded in eluding one and escaping just over the edge of the horizon.

Besides its brand new electric street-car system and the three lines of the “Great Western” leaving it in as many directions, Recife has five amusing little railroads, “toy locomotives hitched to a string of baby-carriages,” as “Tut” called them, which do a volume of noisy, dirty, dusty business to the north and northeast of the city. For many years these ancient contrivances of an English company were the only urban traffic in and about Recife. One crowds into a tenement-house of a station, wages pitched battle about a knee-high hole in the wall to buy a ticket, enters an ancient closed wooden box on wheels suggestive of what trains must have been in the days of Charlemagne, amalgamates with variegated Brazilians on a hard, misshapen wooden seat, and waits. When one has waited long enough to run down to “B.A.” and back, there come ten or twelve ear-splitting screeches and back-breaking jolts, and the train is off for some other “station” fifty yards away, with a deluge of smoke, soot, and cinders which penetrate to the utmost recesses of one’s person. For a long hour the contrivance screams its sooty way through endless dusty streets in which the irreconcilable tropical sunlight of February strikes one full in the face like the fist of an enemy, and at the end of that time the weary traveler may descend five or even six, miles away, at Olinda, or at some of the plantation-town suburbs shaded by many trees, yet dreary with their sand in place of grass. There are two such lines to Olinda, out past Santo Amaro with its British cemetery and across a broad swamp by a causeway; but the company claims that the concession is no longer worth the holding since the coming of electric competition. No doubt Pernambucanos considered these medieval trains a wonderful innovation and convenience when they first appeared, but it is more pleasant now to depend on electricity—or to walk.

I waded for miles barefoot along the beach to Olinda one day. Palm-trees edged the curve of the shore with their inimitable plumage, streaking the staring white sunlight with slender shadows. Thatched huts along the beach, with all the Atlantic and its breezes spread out before them, suggested where many a well-to-do family of Recife spends its summers. An old wreck here and there protruded from the surface of the sea, relics of some collision with the easternmost point of the New World. Olinda piled high on its hill amid palm-trees and many huge old churches, takes on the air of both, of age and reverence and the regal dignity of the royal palm. Its many old buildings are clustered rather closely together; it seems still to scorn business as thoroughly as in the olden days, and to spend most of its time gazing across the swampy flatlands at its materialistic rival, or out upon the blue sea which is so rarely seen from Recife.

The city we call Pernambuco claims 200,000 inhabitants, and of these perhaps one in three could pass as white. Even in the huts lining the water or mud labyrinths of the outskirts whites are numerous, though often as trashy as the negroes. It is surprising that as one nears the equator in Brazil the proportion of Caucasian blood increases, but it is easily explained. All that part of South America which thrusts itself halfway across the sea to Africa had many slaves, but Bahia not only grew a crop which required more labor, but, its port being then the national capital, it had the advantage of fame, as well as its great bay as a safe landing-place. The result is that while Bahia is a negro town, Pernambuco is a city of mulattoes, with a mixture of types that can only be differentiated by the rich color-terminology of Brazil. On the whole, the Recifense is a more pleasant individual than the blacker, more slovenly, more impudent Bahiano. Like most of the people of North Brazil, he talks in a kind of singsong, ending almost every sentence with não (no) or ouvioú? (did you hear?). There are few really masculine voices in Brazil, and the persistent cackle of poor, cracked trebles, chattering constantly at high speed about nothing, eventually gets on the nerves, unless one has been spared that troublesome equipment. The chief business of the city is still that of the “mascates,” in a larger sense,—the exporting of sugar and cotton and the importing of things needed by the growers of sugar and cotton, with the usual large proportion of the benefits sticking to the fingers of the fortunately placed middlemen. Carregadores de assucar, or sugar porters, wearing a sort of football head-mask over their hats, are among the most familiar sights of the old city, and the pungent odor of crude sugar strikes one in the face everywhere in the wharf and warehouse section. The sugar comes from the engenhos in crude, dark-brown form; the tropical heat causes it to ooze out until not only the bags but the half-naked negroes who handle them are dripping and smeared with molasses from top to bottom. When the rotting bag bursts entirely the contents is spread out in the sun and barefoot negroes are sent to wade ankle-deep back and forth in it, until it is dry enough to be shoveled up again.

There are not so many churches per capita in Recife as in Bahia, but they are by no means scarce, while the schools are if anything worse,—miserable little one-den huts hanging on the edges of mud-holes or salt-water marshes, according to the state of the tide. The president of Pernambuco asserted in his annual message that the state schools could not afford to import from the United States the school furniture needed, because of the high tax imposed upon it by the federal government! Of higher institutions, of course, there is no such scarcity as in the elemental grades. The Gymnasio Pernambucano, or High School of Pernambuco, where are promulgated the bachelor degrees that make men “doctors,” and not much else, is a large conspicuous building next that of the state congress—and it had 69 pupils. Of the Faculdade de Dereito, or Law School, similar remarks may be made. In the old business section of Recife especially the condition of streets and buildings left much to be desired, but under the energetic and honest new president promising progress was already beginning to be made.

On Saturday night our share of the receipts had been more than a conto and toward midnight on Sunday I carried home a roll of ragged Brazilian bills large enough to choke a rain-pipe. I was somewhat surprised, therefore, that the “bust-up” came as early as the following Wednesday. I knew it would come sooner or later, but I had expected to be able to stave it off a week or more longer. When “Colonel” Ruben turned up that night, we had already been reduced to “reheated soup.” This, coupled with the fact that he had loudly and widely advertised “Six Days Only!” and had now decided to stay five more, had greatly reduced our audiences. Ruben took one look at the house during the first section, suddenly decided that he had received a cable from his wife requiring his immediate return to Bahia, and disappeared in that direction so swiftly that I have never seen him since. Up to the last he had insisted daily, if not hourly, that I must return when my contract with Linton expired and become manager of his theater-to-be. He departed owing me a paltry 83$ as our share of that evening’s receipts, but he left on my hands not only the “Theatro Moderno” until the following Sunday at a rental of 300$ daily, two dusky young gentlemen whom he had brought with him from Bahia as his assistants, and the unpaid bills for several half-page advertisements in the local papers, but so many other creditors that he saw fit to embark at daylight from an unusual place.

Still, this was little compared with what he might have done, and probably we had made more money with his experienced assistance than we should have made alone. I, too, might have run away, had I cared to leave Americans in general and Edison in particular in such repute as Ruben enjoys to this day in Pernambuco. Instead, I spent a breathless Thursday preparing to meet the new conditions that had been forced upon us. We were certain to lose money that night and the next, but by special advertising and improved programs I hoped to make it up on Saturday and Sunday. We still had the two calungos, or ten-foot monk and dancing-girl figures on men’s legs, for though one of Ruben’s creditors had attached these, he allowed us to use them until our departure. I sent them out with drums and handbills, not only through the town, but to all its suburbs and outskirts, including even aristocratic Olinda. In short, for the first time I was a full-fledged theatrical manager, renting, advertising, managing, auditing, running the whole show—even mechanically, too, for that night “Tut” got a touch of some tropical ill and had to be sent home—and, unfortunately, paying the bills. For in spite of all our efforts Saturday night left us with the balance slightly on the side of expenditures. I had already begun, however, to prepare the territory ahead. J. A. Vinhães, Junior, a Carioca engaged in the film-furnishing business in North Brazil, had offered to take over Ruben’s contract and extend it to the Amazon. He was an unusually honest-looking, energetic young man, good company and experienced, as well as widely known in “movie” circles, and before the week was ended he had sailed away toward Pará, and possibly Manaos, as our self-paid advance agent.

My troubles apparently ended, “Tut” and I were sitting at “breakfast” Sunday morning in proper best-boarding-house-in-town style when the waiter suddenly handed me several letters from Linton, bearing neither stamps nor signs of post-office handling. They had been written on board ship on the way north from Buenos Aires, and announced that, the Kinetophone having ended its labors in the Argentine, Linton was on his way home, as soon as he could find a wife he had left in Rio, with the two Spanish-speaking outfits. With the letters he forwarded some new posters and Turco Morandi, formerly manager of one of the largest theaters in “B.A.,” lately advance agent for the Argentine Kinetophone, and noted for his double-width, steel-riveted honesty. It was he who had brought the letters to Pernambuco, and about noon he appeared in person, dressed in the latest Jockey Club style, and announced himself as the new manager of the Kinetophone in Brazil.

There was nothing niggardly about Linton. My six months being up, he offered to let me turn over the job at once, take the first boat either to Manaos or to the United States at his expense, draw my salary up to the time the show started south again, collect traveling expenses from Manaos back to the mouth of the Amazon, and promised to pay me later whatever might be due on my commission basis. “Tut” was to get a percentage of the receipts for taking charge of the show, and to make such use of Morandi, to whom Linton had already advanced a considerable sum, as he saw fit. When they ran out of audiences in the North, the three were to take the show back down the coast, playing in the smaller towns until Linton himself returned to pick them up.

Had there been any evidence that my labors had been unsatisfactory, I should have vanished forthwith. But the letters expressed satisfaction, and Linton was not a man to indulge in flattery. Moreover, I wished to see the rest of Brazil, and I did not want to see it as a foot-loose tourist. I much preferred to go on to Manaos as manager of the Kinetophone, with all the prestige thereunto appertaining, to be forced to mix with all kinds of people, to be mistaken now and then for Edison himself. Besides, I could not take advantage of Linton’s extraordinary generosity. Instead of needing another man we could easily have gotten along with one less, for “Tut,” who was some little inventor himself, had improved upon Edison by wiring the phonograph in such a way that it could be touched off from the booth, and any fool could be taught in a few minutes to put on and take off the records. Then there was Vinhães, already on his way. If Morandi had arrived a few days earlier, I might have sent him on ahead instead, or left him with the show and played advance agent myself. Worst of all, however, Linton, as almost any American would have done under the circumstances, had chosen the worst possible man to send to Brazil. Morandi not only spoke Spanish, but was an argentino, and if there is one thing Brazilians resent more than being spoken to in Castilian it is to hear it spoken with the accent of their greatest national rivals. In the end I coaxed the fashionable newcomer to go away somewhere and lose himself, while I spent what I had looked forward to as a pleasant Sunday afternoon wondering who I could get to drown him.

For the first time in Brazil I had to cut out the Sunday matinée and announced an evening performance given over entirely to the Kinetophone—six numbers in each section, with a ten-minute interval in which to change audiences. This meant double labor for “Tut” and Carlos, but it would save us 50$ for the rent of ordinary films, 10$ for a native operator, and should prove a great drawing card. It did. Unfortunately I had set the opening at the early hour of six, and the coming of Morandi caused both “Tut” and me to forget the change. Accustomed to arrive at the theater at 6:30 and have half an hour of ordinary films before our turn came, we sauntered down town as usual, and, as we stepped off the street-car, what should greet our astonished ears but the notes of one of our numbers known as the “Musical Blacksmiths.” It was like hearing one’s own voice issuing from the lips of a stranger. Never in all Brazil had a Kinetophone number been given without either “Tut” or myself in attendance. We dashed into the theater—and found Carlos calmly running the show! The audience had taken to stamping and giving other evidences of impatience, and the plucky Paulista, having taught a native how to put on the records, had started the performance. I raised his salary forthwith.

In our three sections that night we took in considerably more than a million, recouping all our losses, and it was a double pleasure not to have to split the receipts with Ruben. But there was that dashed argentino to spoil the effect of our efforts. Luckily, he was already complaining of the “insupportable” heat and complete loss of appetite, while kind, if unknown, friends had filled him full of tales of yellow fever and the plague, so that he had come to me almost with tears in his eyes and called my attention to the wife and five children he had left in Buenos Aires. It took us the better part of Monday and Tuesday, and cost nearly half a million reis to pay his debts, release him from the slimy tentacles of the customhouse, and set him on his way with a ticket to Rio, but the relief was worth the exertion.

By this time we had moved over to the “Polytheama,” an open-air theater in which I had arranged to play three nights at popular prices. I took advantage of this breathing-spell to run out into the interior of the state, not to the end of the line, for that would have meant two days absence and missing a performance, but as far as Bezerros, where the daily train meets itself coming back. The branch runs due west from Recife, and by starting at seven and getting back at five, with constant traveling, I covered 72 miles and return!

Jaboatão on its knoll was buzzing with energy where the shops of the combined railways had concentrated. Hills shrouded in blue veils began to appear as soon as we had crossed the sandy coast strip. Farther inland it grew rolling, everywhere dreary, dry, and bushy, with many tunnels and long iron viaducts. Cotton was growing here and there in the arid soil, but it was scant and small, with one bush where in our southern states there would have been eight or ten. This region of rare reed-and-mud huts bore slight resemblance to that along the line from Maceió northward, with its endless trains of cane, its crowded population, and mammoth old fazenda houses. Negro blood was noticeably less as we left the coast, for slaves were imported chiefly by sugar-planters and were not needed, nor, indeed, useful, in the grazing regions. There were said to be many cattle in the state, but they must have been farther inland, where there was still something to drink. Passengers had to carry water with them, for neither trains nor stations furnished it. Yet only two years before this region had complained of heavy rains! Even the dining-car service of the lines to the north and south of Recife was lacking, because some petty politician of the interior had a contract with the government to furnish passengers an alleged meal at one of the stations, and the English who have taken the line over are compelled, during the sixty years of their lease, to stop every train there for twenty minutes.

At the “Polytheama” that night we had a remarkably good audience, many evidently having put off coming, Brazilian fashion, until the last performance. When we had torn down the show and packed up, “Tut” went home and Carlos to wherever he slept, and after a shower-bath under a spigot, I swung “Tut’s” hammock between two pillars of the open-air theater. This was to be almost my first actual traveling with the show, and it was time I tried out what my companions had been enduring for months. It is many years since I have waked with that curious sensation of wondering where I am, so that I had no difficulty in orienting myself when there came a beating on the cinema door at daybreak. One of the carters I had hired to take our stuff to the station had arrived with one of those tiny, ancient, two-wheeled carts of North Brazil in which the misplacing of a bag of flour suspends the horse in the air. His companion did not turn up until an hour later, after the other had dragged all the trunks to the door, and it was perilously near train-time when I at last sent them hurrying across the cobblestones to the Brum station way over in old Recife. By the time the usual hubbub and quarreling, grafting and exorbitant charges, coaxing and assisting the insufficient and lazy railway employees to get our outfit on board was ended, I was congratulating myself on my foresight in having arranged for another man to pay our traveling expenses. There was 12$500 duty to pay for taking our trunks out of the state, a similar amount for importing them into the next state north, express charges about equal to first-class tickets for each trunk, and while the fares were not high—five dollars for nearly three hundred miles—the twenty per cent. surcharges of the federal and state governments respectively on the tickets made the final total a considerable sum.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us