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.