I came more or less near requiring his services in his least popular capacity. As we were drawing into the station the mob of porters and hackmen had given me their special attention, one negro in particular thrusting his uninviting face through the car-window and pawing me with his long unwashed hands in that half-affectionate, half-wheedling way of his class and profession throughout Brazil, at the same time offering his undesired services some seventy-five times at the top of his voice. When I could endure him no longer, I rapped him over the knuckles with the handle of my umbrella. Now a blow, however light and for whatever provocation, is a shocking indignity in Brazil, only to be properly wiped out in blood. I was not long, therefore, in recognizing the fellow again when, during my stroll about town, he suddenly bobbed up noiselessly out of the night and, after bawling a mouthful of vile language after me, slipped away again with the information that he would fix me yet. I gave him no more attention than one usually does a half-drunken negro in tropical lands, and had entirely forgotten the incident when I boarded another tottering little train next morning. All at once a sound caused me to look up from my reading in the first-class car I was sharing with one other passenger, to see the same negro advancing swiftly down the aisle toward me, grasping a long and sinister-looking knife. It was my luck to be unarmed for the first time in Brazil that I had needed a weapon, having left my revolver with “Tut” as a protection for the money he might take in. Even my umbrella, which would not have been wholly useless in a hand-to-hand encounter, was in the rack above me, and to rise and grasp it might suggest fear. I sat where I was, therefore, with my feet drawn up on the opposite seat, where they could shoot out quickly if danger became really imminent, and stared at the fellow with the unwinking eye of the professional lion-tamer. Whether it was this or his lack of any other intention than to retrieve his reputation among his fellows and salve his injured feelings by a threatening gesture, he confined himself to flourishing the knife, advancing several times with rolling eyes almost to within reach of my feet, and then backing away again. Finally he retreated toward the door with an expression ludicrously like that of a whipped animal, while I rose and walked leisurely down upon him with the same fixed stare until he stepped to the ground. During it all neither train nor local authorities made any attempt to come to my assistance, and I carried away the impression that I should not have gotten out of Araguary in a hurry had circumstances forced me to shoot a man of the same color as the majority of the population.
We tossed and creaked along all the morning to cover the seventy miles of the little bankrupt line that penetrates the south-westernmost corner of the great interior State of Goyaz. The bustling modern civilization of São Paulo and the coast had gradually petered out to nothing more than two telegraph wires jumping from pole to crooked pole across a more or less rolling wilderness of bushy forest, pura matta, as the Brazilians call uncleared country, in a voice almost of terror. Here and there were vast, heavily wooded basins around the edge of which we slowly circled, fighting wood-burner sparks with one eye while taking in the slight scenery with the other. There was a bit of coffee-growing and a bit of lumber was being cut, but as a whole the region was completely undeveloped and unexploited. A flaming purple tree here and there broke the rolling, bushy, brown monotony. The scant population was a sort of semi-wild outcast of civilization, wedded to dirt and inconvenience, living in open-work pole houses covered with aged thatched roofs that resembled dilapidated and sun-faded straw hats. The men wore wide belts, with many silver, or imitation silver, ornaments and with half a dozen leather compartments in them for their money and other small possessions. In a pocket of their thin cotton coats even our local fellow-passengers carried the dried covering of an ear of corn, and when they wished to smoke, which was almost incessantly, they pulled off a corn-husk, shaped it with a knife, rolled it up and put it behind an ear, cut off a bit of tobacco from a twist plug, crushed it between their palms, and rolled a corn-husk cigarette.
At eight we rumbled across the River Paranahyba into the State of Goyaz. At the same time we crossed the nineteenth parallel of latitude, and the climate should have been warm and humid; but as all this vast tableland averages 2500 feet above sea-level, it had distinctly the atmosphere of the temperate zones. There were a few cattle, less well-bred than those of Minas. At Goyandira, a few scattered huts beside a small stream, we were given time to gorge the customary Brazilian meal on a table already crowded with dishes when we arrived, and at eleven we drew up at Catalão, last outpost of civilization in this direction, and a personified End of the Railroad.
It was evident at a glance that I need not consider Catalão from a business standpoint. Though from a distance it had looked like quite a town, it was merely a village of a scanty thousand inhabitants scattered along a small creek, with mangos trodden underfoot, its houses built of mud plastered on sticks and then whitewashed. Compared even with the Mineiros over the nearby state border, the Goyanos were backwoodsmen; beside the energetic, up-to-date Paulistas they had the vacant expression of ruminating cattle. About the town an almost treeless world, rather dry for lack of rain, stretched endlessly away in every direction. When the midday heat had somewhat abated—for there was nothing cold about Catalão, for all its altitude—I climbed to a barren hillock topped by an old ruined church in which scores of black rooks had built their nests and from which bushy and rolling Goyaz spread away like a lightly broken sea. The view was so vast that one could see the curve of the earth, the blue haze ever thickening until it grew almost opaque on a horizon so distant that it seemed raised well above the general level. The line of this was quite distinct for its entire sweep, yet it joined almost imperceptibly a sky heaped and piled with irregular masses of white clouds that cast their broken, fantastic shadows everywhere across the spreading plains, yet did not conceal overhead the sky of mother-of-pearl tint. Below, the village, like a capricious waif that has come here far from nowhere out of mere spite or unsociability, made itself as comfortable as possible in its shallow hollow among dark-green masses of mango-trees. Roads, just born rather than made, straggled out of it in all directions, soon to be lost in the green and haze-blue immensity, as if man had dared venture only a little way out into the unpeopled universe, vast and trackless as the sea. A few venturesome fazenda houses peered forth from their mango groves a mile or two from the town, but these did not noticeably break the uninhabited and virgin world, the sertão or matta, which mere mention of “the plains of Goyaz” calls up in the imagination. It was a distinct pleasure to be again entirely beyond the hubbub of cities, beyond the reach even of the ubiquitous trolley, with the world below deadly silent but for the occasional far distant, yet piercing scream of an ox-cart creeping imperceptibly along one of the languid, haphazard, straggling trails that appeared from somewhere out in the wilderness. They sounded like factory whistles, these distant carros de boi, with their solid wooden wheels and total innocence of grease on their turning axles, the scream of which—chiar, the Brazilians call it, aping the sound—ceased at length abruptly before the principal shop, run by a “Turk,” where the eight or ten oxen, steered by a driver who prodded them in the neck with a goad lying over his shoulder without so much as glancing back, and whom they followed unerringly, fell into the spirit of the scene, the silence broken now only by the occasional sharp, vexed note of a worried rook and the somnolent humming of flies. The End of the Railroad means far away and quiet, indeed, in these seething modern days. Before long we may not be able to find it at all; yet one feels at times impelled to come to such ends of the road and climb to a high place overlooking the world, there to sit and unravel the tangled threads of life into some semblance of order again before descending to plunge once more headlong into the fray.
The worst of coming 710 miles up-country from Santos—and the time it had taken made it seem ten times that—was that I must spend as long, without even the reward of new sights and experiences, to come down again. The same glorified way-freight carried us southward in the morning, and for once it was crowded. Not only were there all my fellow-guests at the run-down hovel owned by a “Turk” who had lived so long in Brazil that he seemed to prefer Portuguese to his native Arabic, all of whom had spent the night playing some noisy form of poker, but a new fork of the railroad was being opened that day to Roncador (“Snorer,” it would be in English), and everyone in Catalão who owned shoes had been invited to ride out and help inaugurate. In consequence our tiny two-car train was so densely packed with well-meaning but unpleasing mortals of all ages, sexes, sizes and colors that we mere ticket-holders were crowded out of seats and forced to stand on the swaying platforms as far as the junction of Goyandyra. There we had to go without “breakfast,” because the inaugurators assaulted the limited table supplies in such force that passengers could not get within grabbing distance. It was perhaps as well, for hunger is slight suffering compared with watching at close range the contortions of such a throng stoking away whole knife-lengths of those viands which they did not spill on the earth floor.
Below Uberaba the “Mogyana” branches, giving me new territory all the way back to Campinas. Most of it looked unpromising for our purposes, until nightfall brought me to Franca, only three hours north of Riberão Preto and the terminus of a daily express. Here were two cinemas, side by side on the central praça. I drifted into one of them and handed my card to the owner-manager. When the crowd at last gave us a chance to talk it over, I set my remarks to the tune of “Oh, this is an unimportant, far-away little place and I don’t believe we will bother with it.” The result was that I soon had the man all but on his knees to have us come. He offered to rent the theater for ten per cent. of the total receipts, and when I declined the trouble of staging the affair ourselves, he begged me to let him do everything and take as our share seventy per cent. of the proceeds. At last I had equalled that fabulous Chilean contract! Indeed, had I been born with a mean disposition I fancy I could have made that pillar of Franca do anything, short of presenting me with his playhouse, to keep me outside the doors of his hated rival.
I was gone again at sunrise and know naught of Franca, except what may be seen at night and one added bit of information. It has a match factory in which a huge stock of an article that the region still imports from the outside world is locked up by government order because the owners cannot raise the seven contos in twenty-reis stamps needed to decorate the boxes before they can be placed on the market. Only once during that day’s journey did I halt. At Cascavel, fittingly named Rattlesnake, I took a branch line into the cool, grassy uplands of the “Brazilian Switzerland” and spent the night in Poços de Caldas. This is far-famed throughout the country as a watering-place at a goodly elevation for Brazil, with sulphurous hot springs much frequented by well-to-do natives during the season. But that was over; the barracks-like hotel with its monasterial cells of rooms had only a scattering of guests, and there was no visible reason why the Kinetophone should journey to a spot that had fallen upon such lean days. Half a day south I might have taken a direct line from Mogy Mirim to Rio, but it was eleven days since I had heard our artists sing or learned how things were faring with my two companions without a tongue between them. I hurried on, therefore, to Campinas in time to be refused admittance to our first performance at the “Rink”—until the youthful manager, catching sight of me, thrust the door-keeper aside with extended hand.
I found “Tut” and Carlos conversing freely together in a language that was not Portuguese and certainly was not English. In Jundiahy they had carried out my first contract so well in the face of rainy weather, toboggan streets of uncobbled red mud, and a reputation as a “poor show town,” as to win high praise, while even here in such a metropolis as Campinas they showed every evidence of being able to give their performance, watch the doors and at least count the “deadheads,” and collect our share of the money without my assistance. The manager of the “Rink” had lived up to his promise in the matter of advertising, and had sent a street-car carrying a band and entirely covered with posters and the likeness of Edison over every trolley-line in town. Yet our audiences were not all they should have been on Brazil’s second Independence Day, whether by reason of the possibility of a political upheaval at the change of the national administration, that musical Campinas was too “high-brow” for what Edison had to offer, or, as we suspected, because city, state and nation were beginning to feel seriously the pinch of the “brutal hard times.”
On the morning after our Campinas engagement the show and I again parted company. While the former sped away up the broad-gauge “Paulista” to São Carlos and points beyond, I took the slow and narrow “Mogyana” back the way I had come, intending to catch the noon train westward from Mogy Mirim toward Rio. But the pleading of a compatriot slightly altered my plans. In Campinas we had made the acquaintance of a man from New York and Jerusalem who was misusing his racial talents in strenuous efforts to refute, in the interests of an American insurance company, the Brazilian argument of “But why should I have my life insured and leave my wife a lot of money to spend on some other man when I die?” Ideas, specially those with a $ attached, sprouted overnight in the fertile brain of my misplaced fellow-countryman, and bright and early that Thursday morning he came running down to the station with a new one. He had suddenly seen a chance to retrieve recent bad fortune by hiring the Kinetophone outright at the conto for two nights which I had set as the fixed price for small towns and taking it out to his old stamping-ground of Amparo, where he proposed to enlist the services of his bosom companions, the priests, nuns, and other Biblical influences of the town, into selling tickets beforehand on the church-festival plan. I am always ready to let a man make money, especially if he makes some for me at the same time, so we dropped off at Jaguary and took the branch to Amparo.
It was an unusually pleasing little town for Brazil, with all its streets paved in stone blocks, several pretty little parks, and spread along so narrow a valley that one could fancy the beans from its coffee-clad hills rolling right down into the central praça ready for roasting. But, like all the State of São Paulo, Amparo had unwisely put all its eggs in one basket—the coffee basket—and whereas ten milreis an arroba is considered by coffee-growers only a fair price, Brazil’s chief export was then selling for 3$500! Hence the town was “muito ruim,” cold, stony dead from the theatrical point of view, and, though there was a nice little theater with cozy seats and plenty of boxes for the “excellentissimas familias,” the impresario had lost his nerve completely. When my friend and guide gently mentioned 600$ a night as the bargain of a life-time, the manager all but swallowed his neck, then recovered sufficiently to say that a Portuguese company of the type most beloved in Brazil had given a first-night the week before, after an uproar of advertising, and had taken in just 25$! I immediately lost all desire to bring the Kinetophone to Amparo, though my friend from Manhattan and the Holy Land, with the admirable buoyancy of his race, went up to the convent school to talk it over with the mother superior, and saw his efforts crowned with success—to the extent of an invitation to dinner.