CHAPTER 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.