As the time was drawing near when we must move on, I appointed the most responsible man in town unofficial guardian for Carlos and turned over to him, against ample receipts, his back pay, his salary to the end of the month, and his fare back to Rio. This should have sufficed amply to pay his hospital bills and carry him home with something to spare, and I had no authority to give him more. Next morning we discovered that Carlos had taken with him our duplicate set of keys, and “Tut” went up to the hospital to get them. The nun-nurse had them in safe-keeping and would not turn them over without Carlos’ permission. He could not talk, but after staring at “Tut” for a long time he faintly nodded. After still longer effort they succeeded in getting, in faintly whispered monosyllables, the address of his family in São Paulo. As “Tut” was leaving, a doctor bustled cheerily into the ward and casually informed him that Carlos had yellow fever.
The indifferent way in which São Luiz took such things gave one a creepy feeling that life was held cheaply in those parts. When Carlos’ condition was mentioned to patrons of the cinema that evening they said, between yawns, “Ja estã liquidado—Oh, he is finished all right,” and went in to weep at some silly film drama and to giggle at Kinetophone humor. I insisted on remaining optimistic. Had we not heard a hundred times that native Brazilians never die of yellow fever, that its fatalities are confined to white foreigners? In other words, while “Tut” and I were constant prospective candidates for an Amazonian cemetery, a man born in São Paulo, accustomed all his life to Brazilian conditions, should be in no great danger. I was still telling myself these things when word reached us that Carlos was dead.
By this time we were already on our way to Pará, for ten-day steamers and theatrical engagements wait for no man. When three men have lived more closely together than brothers for more than half a year the loss of one of them is an astonishingly heavy subtraction, one which we felt all the way from the longer time it took the two of us to tear down the show and send it on board the Ceará, to all those little daily reminders of the loss of a familiar companion. Of course, when we came to think it over, natives do die of yellow fever; but as those living in the regions where it flourishes have either died of it, or recovered from it, in childhood, the survivors are immune and the effect is as if the disease were fatal only to Caucasian visitors. Besides, Carlos, born of Italian parents on the cool Brazilian plateau more than twenty degrees to the south, was virtually a foreigner up here on the steaming equator. The period of incubation being longer than the time we had spent in São Luiz, it was probably the mosquitoes of Ceará that had been his undoing.
We refitted the phonograph with “Tut’s” automatic starting device, which had fallen into disrepair, so that North Brazil might continue to be amused as long as one of us survived. For our troupe, at least, would perform while anyone remained to turn the crank. There were frail young ladies in it, and very few who were acclimated to tropical travel; yet they appeared night after night without changing a hair, doing exactly as good work as when they left New York, playing fully as well to a scattering audience on a sweltering afternoon as to a packed house on a cool evening, never disturbing us with a display of mood or temperament, never showing the slightest impairment from the climate, the soggy Brazilian food, the thousand little tropical and Latin-American annoyances, and never dying of yellow fever. More than once I woke up dreaming that they were subject to all the ills of living men and women, or sweated through a nightmare of trying to transport them all in a small boat, or house them all in a ten-room hotel already half occupied by persons with whom respectable Americans should not come in contact.
A broad light streak on the ocean ahead announced our approach to the mouth of the Amazon, the “river-sea,” as the Brazilians often call it, discoloring the deep-blue Atlantic as far as the eye could reach. Later the water turned a muddy brown and we began to see the smoke from the Pará power-house across the flat featureless landscape. Monotonous dense greenery soon surrounded us, flat, impenetrable forests spreading from the very edge of the river to infinity on either hand. Everywhere the vast stream was dotted with sailboats, their lateen sails all dyed some single bright color,—blue, saffron, red, faded pink. Then flat wooded islands scattered all about appeared, and finally an opening in the flat landscape disclosed the low City of Pará, still so far away as to be almost indistinguishable, and before we could steam up to it swift tropical darkness had fallen.
We dropped anchor for the night before its long row of lights, the passengers whiling away the evening with music and dancing, no one apparently sorry to save a hotel-bill out in the cool breezes of the quiet river. We were so close to the town that we could hear the night life under the trees in the central praça and see the electric street-cars go frequently slipping past. It may have been the sight of the cathedral, bulking forth out of the night above the rest of the city, that turned the group of Brazilian men gathered on the after saloon deck to a discussion of religion—though it was not a particularly religious discussion. In fact, the crux of every one of a score of anecdotes was the grafting of priests, and the men one and all agreed that the ecclesiastics were even more diligent and clever at it than politicians; but they all took care that the women on board should hear none of their stories.
A steward called us at daybreak, escaping before I could get hold of the revolver in the bottom of my valise. A fog half concealed the city, gradually disclosing, as the equatorial sun burned it away, long rows of docks and warehouses, the “new” town floor-flat, with a water-tower standing above the rest, and a fish-market swarming with sailboats and clamoring people, the old city rising slightly on a knoll topped by the cathedral. It was more than two hours later that the port doctor came on board to examine us. As I replied “All right” to the steward who came to tell me to report, and continued reading in my steamer-chair without hearing from him again, I fancy it must have been a thorough examination. The sunshine was falling in streams of molten lead when we finally hoisted our mud-hook and pulled up to a dock—for the first time since we had landed in Bahia. A large crowd, astonishingly European in origin, was gathered along the quay, giving little or no attention to the heavy showers that every now and then broke forth from a half cloudless sky.
Vinhães was on hand, with a dozen newspapers containing large Kinetophone displays, and together we went down into the hubbub of the hold, through the chaotic network of third-class hammocks, to fight to have our baggage landed in time for an evening performance. A few ports back our phonograph had nearly been put out of business by a careless drayman, and since then I had been taking no chances, though I had to dog the steps of two negroes, ordered to carry it by the handles, to keep them from putting it on their heads. In up-to-date Pará, however, we had only to have it placed in a large and luxurious taxicab and drive away with it to the “Bar Paraense.” This half-open theater out in the Nazareth section of town was somewhat more distant from the center than we should have preferred; but it was the best Vinhães had been able to get. The labor of setting up emphasized the loss of Carlos, especially as this was one of those big ramshackle buildings we now and then came across where it took a score of pulleys to carry our synchronizing cord from the booth to the phonograph. But at least we returned to comfortable quarters when our labors were over. The “Café da Paz” was as well run under its Swiss maître d’hôtel as a high-class European hostelry with several tropical improvements, and as it was owned by the same cultured and upright copper-tinted gentleman who had a half interest in the “Bar Paraense,” the cost of our excellent accommodation was less than we had paid in some unspeakable hovels. To be sure, hard times had given several rapid young ladies admission even here, but they were not on our airy third story, with its huge blind-shaded windows and its view of all Pará. In the halcyon days of rubber, ended barely two years before, the “Café da Paz” was the best hotel in North Brazil, where a small room alone cost more than we were paying now for full accommodation and where one paid 2$ for a place at table and at least as much for each dish ordered.
“Tut” and I had come on the same ticket from Maranhão. In the list of passengers published in that evening’s papers we appeared as “Wayne Tuthill and 1 child.” At dinner we were handed an order from the sanitary department of the State of Pará, commanding “Wayne Tuthill e Harrey” to appear at the yellow fever section for examination. It was evident from the document that only one person was meant by this Latin-American style of double-barreled name; but out of some mixture of curiosity and honesty I took it upon myself next morning to point out the error. For my pains I, too, was commanded to appear at three every afternoon for the next thirteen days, under penalty of fine and imprisonment. I protested that I could not regulate my life in any such bourgeois fashion, and being taken before the head doctor, I informed him that it was my habit and intention to wander about the state during my stay in Pará. So effective was my command of Brazilian super-courtesy by this time that he replied in the same vein, saying all foreigners coming from either Ceará or Manaos, where yellow fever had broken out, were put under observation, but that in my case it would be sufficient if I would report at any time between seven and five on those days when I happened to be in town.
Strictly speaking, there is no city of Pará, nor is it on the Amazon. In 1615 Castello Branco left Maranhão and founded on the spot where the old castle of Pará now stands a village at the junction of the Guajará and Guamá rivers. Both of these are a part of the Amazon system, but they are separated from the mouth of the river proper by the enormous island of Marajó, considerably larger than the Republic of Portugal. The Tupinamba Indians who inhabited the spot were friendly to the newcomers, and as he had left Maranhão on Christmas Day, Branco named the town Nossa Senhora de Belém (Our Lady of Bethlehem); and Belém the capital of the state of Pará is officially and locally to this day. Just two centuries later “Grão Pará” definitely separated from the capitania of Maranhão and became a province, a province of slight importance then, in spite of its enormous size and unlimited tropical forests. In 1852 a Paraense sent the first steamer up the Amazon, but it was not until 1867 that the world’s greatest river was opened to foreign navigation. Ten years later the most famous drought in the history of Ceará sent thousands of Cearenses to open up the great rubber-fields of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, from which the great riches of Belém and Manaos resulted.