The exit from Natal harbor is as difficult as the oldest seadog would care to attempt in a large steamer. The long jagged reef has only one break in it, and just inside that there is a series of sharp and mainly submerged rocks. A ship of any size, therefore, must make a right-angle turn in almost her own length, through an opening barely her own width by which at low tide there is scarcely exit for a rowboat. The rusted boiler and ribs of a steamer piled up close beside the entrance showed that the passage has not always been as successful as ours, and there was a general sigh of relief and a settling down to deck-chair ease as the Pará took to pulsating steadily across a smooth blue sea toward the setting sun.
The coast of Brazil resembles Broadway,—a main thoroughfare along which, if one travel it long enough, many faces become familiar. There were half a dozen men on the Pará whom even I, accustomed to crawl along the land wherever possible, instead of following the broad sea route of Brazilian travel, had seen before somewhere—along the Avenida of Rio, at some theater in São Paulo, on the streets of Bahia or Pernambuco. If I had ever wondered during my dust-laden, cinder-bitten, oft-broken journey from the Rio Grande of the South to the far different one of the North how Brazilian ladies or the more finnicky of their male contemporaries travel from one city to another, here was the answer. They take to the sea, either in one of the foreign ships that ply up and down the coast or in the sometimes no less luxurious steamers of their own national line.
The “Lloyd-Brazileiro,” like the “Central Railway,” is operated by the Brazilian Government, and is thereby subject to many of the same misfortunes. If one can believe a fourth of the tales that float up and down the coast, the national temperament is as much at home on the rolling main as on Brazilian soil. Rumor has it—and verification is often thrust upon the traveler who is in the habit of leaving his berth—that the line has three times as many employees as are required,—needy friends of politicians ranging all the way from pantry-boys without potatoes to peel to captains and managers with nothing to command or direct. “Deadheads” are notoriously so numerous that any Brazilian who pays his fare runs the risk of losing caste among his clever friends. Congressmen and the like not only travel on government boats free of charge as a legal right, but carry with them whole Brazilian families, from upholstered mama and her dusky maid down through the whole stairway of children and their servants to the pet poodles and shrieking parrots. Even the mere citizen who plans to take to the sea is said to have no difficulty in obtaining his ticket without the troublesome formalities of the pocketbook route—provided, of course, that his political affiliations are suitable. Those are only foolish travelers, native or foreign, scandal has it, who pay, even to New York, more than the fare in the class next below the one in which they wish to make the journey, for it is a simple matter to “fix it up” after they get on board. The “Lloyd-Brazileiro” steamers carry livestock and fowls as food on their journeys. When a ship arrives in Pará or Manaos, the story runs, the steward sells those that are left—and an hour later he goes ashore and buys back the same animals for the return trip, naturally not at the same price at which they were sold. The line has always been noted for its generous yearly deficit. In 1914 the government tried to sell it, but there was not a single bid. Private owners knew the insuperable obstacles to discharging or refusing to carry free the swarms of political favorites and putting the boats on a paying basis.
On board, however, few evidences of these things meet the naked eye. Outward propriety, from scandal-less grafting to frock-coat and spats, is a fixed Brazilian characteristic. The Pará was one of the large new ships of the line, British made, and even government ownership had not yet succeeded in ruining it. In the sumptuous music-room reigned the air of a salon gathering in high society, the nearest approach to luxury which many a Brazilian ever gets. I sat late into the moonlighted evening, broken by music and attempts thereat, idly comparing and checking off the pretty girls who flitted in and out among the rather pompous gathering. There were a few who, could one have extracted what they had in place of them and inserted brains, would have made quite passable domestic ornaments—for the few years until they were overtaken by that fatal faded fatness that comes so early upon South American women.
At ten next morning the boundless sea was broken on the port bow by a long white strip of sand, behind which gradually grew up a shadowy range of almost mountains. By noon, but long after the midday meal, we dropped anchor before Ceará, capital of the state of the same name, a flat and sandy town, with the usual churches and palm-trees rising above it, as did two dimly seen clusters of hills against the fathomless horizon.
Ceará is the worst landing-place on the coast of Brazil, being no port at all but merely a sandy shore, marked by a lighthouse far out on the end of a tongue of sand and open to all the winds from off the North Atlantic. What it might be in bad weather was not hard to guess, for even with the slight swell of a calm and cloudless day the scores of heavy rowboats and freight barges that came out a mile or more to meet us rolled and pitched like capering schoolboys. That we would be ducked in getting ashore was taken for granted, that being a common disaster in the port of Ceará; my fears were rather for our outfit, which seemed several times on the point of being hopelessly smashed or dropped overboard before we got it lowered into one of the toy barges. Even passengers have been lost here, and the rusted carcass of an old steamer lay piled up on the beach. At the shore end the landing facilities were even worse. A high and flimsy wooden wharf thrust itself far out to barge depth where, with the boat rising and falling twenty feet or more with every swell, half a dozen languid negroes, tugging at the extreme end of an often too-short rope and liable, in their Brazilian apathy, to let go at any moment, slowly hoisted our travel-battered old maroon trunks upon it. To have dropped almost any one of them would have meant the immediate canceling of the Kinetophone tour of Brazil.
As things were landed on the wharf, negroes put the lighter articles on their heads and straggled ashore—not, of course, without mishaps. One haughty lady, returning from Rio or Paris, had among her belongings six huge pasteboard boxes, which she or her maid had carelessly tied shut, and which an equally careless negro tried to carry off all at once without securing them. He had taken three steps when the roaring sea wind picked two boxes off his head, opened them, and tossed the latest creation in head-gear and feathers into the sea, a fate from which another dream in pink and froth was saved only by being stepped on by a barefoot but unusually quick-witted negro. They would not have been cheap hats anywhere, and in Brazil they certainly would have cost four times as much. The owner having already gone ashore before the mishap occurred, the negro waded out into the surf and rescued the feathered contraption, which he put back into the box and delivered as if nothing had happened, getting his pay and fading from the landscape before milady opened the box to prepare for the gala first performance of a new invention at the municipal-state theater that evening.
It took us four hours to get all our outfit from the ship to the theater. Vinhães, however, had everything prepared for an immediate estrea under conditions that promised excellent results. By manipulating certain political filaments he had obtained the “Theatro José d’Alencar,” named for Brazil’s greatest novelist and the most famous “son” of Ceará. It is government owned and the most important one in northeastern Brazil, generally closed except when some second-rate Caruso or a European dramatic company comes to give Fortaleza the sensation of being the center of the universe. The nominal sum of 130$ covered the salaries of the countless government employees attached to the place, though there was no knowing how many permanent passes Vinhães had issued for the five days he had advertised. His posters, articles, and newspaper displays had penetrated to the last hut in town; and he had even had special tickets printed, the stamping of which, in addition to the thousand and one other things essential to a proper début, left us little time to loiter between the landing and a hurried supper.
Our time, taken from the ship and Rio, was twenty minutes later than that of the town, so that when I returned to the theater at sunset Vinhães greeted me halfway across the square with the tightly pursed lips and the closely compressed fingers of the upraised right hand which, in Brazil’s complete language of gestures, meant a densely packed house. It was, and more than that the crowded audience was getting vociferous in its demands for the show to begin, that they might judge for themselves this new wonder. Despite all these favoring circumstances our opening came near resulting in disaster. The state theater was not equipped as a moving-picture house. Vinhães had hired the only available lantern in town and arranged with a local operator to run the ordinary films he had himself brought along. But the operator had not recovered from the celebration made possible by the advance he had demanded on his wages, and the lantern was so aged and the lens so worthless that barely the outline of the pictures reached the screen. Protest was rapidly developing into uproar when I saved the day by ordering the ordinary films run through our special machine. This was contrary to my contract with Vinhães and something we had never done before; but I waived that clause for once and agreed to have “Tut” and Carlos run the whole show, provided Vinhães paid them 10$ a night each for their extra labor. Thus their salaries were in a twinkling raised high above my own, while to me was left the brunt of fighting the crowd at the door.
It may be that his sudden and unexpected good luck turned Carlos’ head. It was now trebly important for the Kinetophone to do its best,—the ordinary films had been a disappointment, the house was crowded with an audience which would carry good or bad word of our performance to every corner of the city, nay, of all Ceará, and the state president himself sat in the center of the regal central box, surrounded by all the most influential members of the political and social world. I had chosen our program with care, the introductory film to be followed by a portion of “Il Trovatore,” a well-sung number which always delighted the higher class of Brazilian audiences. As the title flashed on the screen a murmur of satisfaction rippled across the house. The president readjusted the broad red ribbon across his paunch and settled down for what he plainly expected to be a treat. On the screen a romantic figure, dressed in the elaborate garb of the days of knights and troubadours, advanced with the supreme grace of medieval heroes, at least as it has been brought down to us by Italian tenors, and with a princely gesture opened his mouth and—and in the nasal twang of an untraveled native of rural Indiana said, “Gentlemen, be seated!” Carlos had put on the record that went with our minstrel show!