CHAPTER 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.