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.

CHAPTER XVII
THIRSTY NORTH BRAZIL

It was four in the afternoon when we sighted Parahyba, capital of the state of the same name, on its ridge beside a river of similar designation which we had been following for several hours. We were met by a considerable delegation, including the Danish manager of the “Cinema Rio Branco,” a young chap whom Vinhães had left behind to look after his interests, and the German owner of the “Pensão Allemã,” whom some unauthorized friend from Recife had told to prepare rooms for us. As the only other hotel-keeper in town admitted, evidently under the impression that it was a recommendation, that half his rooms were given over to unprotected women, I allowed our personal baggage to be carried away by the solicitous German, while three little carts dragged the rest uphill to the cinema. By the time our apparatus was set up and the tickets stamped, perspiration was oozing from our shoes. I raced back to the pensão to get rid of two days’ dust and whiskers, and by the time I appeared again the house was packed to the roof. But as it held only four hundred, and the president of the state had thrust himself in with half a dozen generously painted females, and a score of other “influential citizens” had followed his example, it was evident that we were not going to win an independent fortune in Parahyba. To make things worse, “Tut” had failed to try out the apparatus before the doors were opened, and our first number flashed on the screen without a sound to accompany it! The phonograph had suffered some slight injury during the rough journey and refused to speak. To my astonishment a great howl of satisfaction went up from the audience, followed by a constant series of cat-calls until the loose screw had been found and the trouble remedied.

It was not merely, as I first suspected, that sense of being greater than the inventor whose invention fails to work which had delighted these lineal descendants of African tree-climbers, but the pleasure of what might be called the anti-Kinetophonists at being able to say, even momentarily, “I told you so!” Formation of petty cliques is one of the chief pastimes in these dawdling old towns off the track of world travel, and Parahyba had divided, without our knowledge, for and against us almost at the moment we descended from the train. Those who sided with the disgruntled hotel-keeper joined the friends of the rival cinema in an effort to boycott us, with the result that, though we did not know it until next day, by the time the show had been set up all Parahyba had been assured that both the Kinetophone and this “gringo” Edison were humbugs of the first water, and that those who came to see it would be wasting their money. The instant destruction of this theory as soon as the phonograph had been readjusted confounded the opposition, but the atmosphere of ill-will, and of doubt, always engendered among the volatile Brazilians by the slightest mishap on an opening night, could be felt as long as we remained in the town.