Out at the Praia Formosa—which is no more a beach than it is beautiful—I found a mob of drenched and wilted people fighting about a tiny, discolored hole in the station wall, of the height of the average man’s knees, for the privilege of buying tickets to the “summer capital.” For though there were many daily trains, even when train schedules were being reduced all over Brazil because of the war-created difficulty of importing coal, there were thousands of regular commuters and few places left for the poorer Cariocas who scraped together enough for a round-trip ticket or two during the season. Most of the commuters had their permanent seats, with their names and their business or rank posted on the backs of them, and the mere traveler had to wander through several cars before he could find a place, like a stranger seeking a pew in a fashionable church.
The Leopoldina Railway between Rio and Petropolis is the oldest in Brazil, having been opened to the foot of the range in 1854 so that Emperor Pedro II could flee from hot weather and yellow fever in the summer months. We raced without interruption across a low, jungled plain until the mountains grew up impassable above us. Formerly this region was well cultivated, but man was unequal to the grim struggle with nature, especially after the emancipation of the only race that could cope with the swampy, matted jungle, and to-day the ruins of many a plantation house lie buried beneath the invading bush, while the few hovels with their little fenced gardens look like islands in the tangled wilderness. Yet we sped through many suburban villages shaded with palm-trees and adorned with immense tumbled rocks. On top of one of these, high above the surrounding landscape, sat the two-spired church of Penha, a famous place of pilgrimage. A few peasants were plowing and loading cut grass upon carts drawn by zebu-sired oxen. Puffs of white clouds, like exploded shells, hung here and there above the brilliant horizon. The three-cows advertisement of a well-known malted milk company suddenly loomed up against the background of jungle, its Portuguese words making it doubly fantastic in this exotic setting. Here and there we passed section gangs poling themselves homeward in their unpumpable hand-cars with long bamboo staffs, like Dutch canal boats.
The first-class seats, cane-covered in respect for the climate, were divided by an extra arm in the middle, obviating personal contact, which is the way train seats should be, no matter what fat men or honeymooning couples may prefer. Many of my fellow-travelers were as much worth watching as the scenes along the way. Here a man as black as a beachcomber’s hopes of signing on in Singapore leaned back in pompous full-dress in his placarded seat, acting like the millionaire president of some great corporation as he pored over the contents of his elaborate leather portfolio. I would have given the price of a Brazilian meal to have seen the couple across the aisle from me suddenly transported to one of our “Jim Crow” states. He was a self-important mountain of a man, as white as you or I; she, just as self-important, dressed in rich plumes and Paris fashions, hideous with diamonds and other glittering pebbles, was about one-third negro. One poor woman farther on had only ten fingers, two ears, and as many wrists—her skirts covered her ankles, strangely enough—on which to wear her jewelry, though she had made the most of her meager opportunities by putting three or four rings on each finger. Still farther along an old woman in mourning had bits of black cloth sewed over her earrings. A nice jet nose ring about two inches in diameter would have been so much more original, and as becoming, and would have made conspicuous one’s poignant grief even to those who might miss so commonplace an adornment as earrings.
There came a stretch of swamp and uninhabited lowland, thick with bulrushes, then heavily wooded hills grew up before us and we came to a halt at the edge of the plain. A little engine, built like a kangaroo, took charge of two of our cars and shoved them up the steep mountainside on a rackrail track. Now we were buried in narrow cuttings, now gazing upon magnificent panoramas that opened out through dense woods. There overhung the line many tremendous boulders, on one of which, large as a house, some wag had written in red paint, “Va com esta” (Take this along with you). The vegetation presently became sodden wet; the incessant singing of the jungle, scarcely noticed until it stopped, died away and vast views opened out on what we had left behind. Flooded with the rays of a full moon, the far-off range of mountains cut a jagged line across the sky. It grew cooler every minute; the air became clearer, and as the oppression of wilting heat wore away a drowsiness came upon us. At Alto da Serra, some 2500 feet above but barely a mile farther on than the station at the foot of the range, civilization began again, with all its pleasant and unpleasant concomitants.
Petropolis, fashionable resort of the wealthy Cariocas, national legislators and foreign diplomats, lies snugly ensconced among the cool hills, a charming assemblage of villas peering forth from tropical gardens. The former emperor for which it is named made the town to order by importing three thousand German and Swiss settlers in 1845, as examples of cleanliness and industry to his own people. Formerly the entire government came here during the summer months, but when the mosquito and his playmate, yellow fever, were routed, most of the native officials went back to the city, though the diplomats remain, pleasantly cut off from the rough world of practical politics, which seems far away indeed, instead of merely an hour and a half distant by Brazil’s best train service. There is a suggestion of a German watering-place about Petropolis, with its bizarre little residences, its trim streets lined by bamboo hedges, its roses, hydrangeas and honeysuckle, its “kiss-flowers” gathering honey from the fuchsia-trees. The Teutonic type has persisted in spite of interbreeding and comparative isolation from the fatherland in a strong Brazilian environment, and up to the beginning of the war there were still German schools in Petropolis. A spotless room in one of its quiet summer hostelries is a relief after months of Brazilian hotel squalor and uproar; or, if one’s income is limited, there are cheap and pleasant rooms to be had with the German inn-keepers.
But Petropolis is tropical enough to be unpleasantly warm on a summer noonday, and among her honeysuckle are horrid hairy spiders as large as belt-buckles, with perhaps a deadly bite. Like Rio, the town spreads up many narrowing valleys, fresh green Cascatinha with its weaving-mill beside a rivulet sliding down a sloping rock and breaking in little cascades at the bottom, or the restful tree-lined banks of canals meandering away through the wooded hills. Through the gap by which the railway creeps up to the plateau may be dimly made out all the Carioca range and, faintly, the well-known form of the Pão d’Assucar. There is a vast panorama of Guanabara Bay and all its islands, but Rio is only hazily suggested, and nearer views of it are much more striking. Another world on quite another plane spreads out below, careless, happy-go-lucky negro huts straggling up the wooded valleys as high as they can easily climb, the soothing sound of mountain brooks, playfully taking little rocky tumbles here and there without much hurt, joining the birds in making a kind of sylvan music.
Pedro II still sits out here in a little palm-topped square under the filtered sunlight or the summer moon, his book closed over a finger, the tails of his Prince Albert falling on either side of his armchair, his congress gaiters fitting the ease of his posture, gazing benignly forth from his great black shovel beard with the studious, half-dreamy look of the man who hated action. He is by no means our preconceived notion of an emperor, but a dreamy, easy-going, democratic aristocrat who seems eminently in his place here in this quiet village far from the rumble of the world and the heat and labors of the day below. Small wonder he was the last emperor of this turbulent, pushing western hemisphere. “A great Brazilian,” they had called him in celebrating his birthday a few days before, “who gave happiness to his people during almost half a century.”
“Dudú,” looking most comfortable and contented with life, was driving about the quiet streets of Petropolis with his girl wife behind a pair of prancing iron-gray horses and a liveried driver frozen in stone. As in all towns where kings and presidents are regular residents, no one paid him the slightest attention, though the same pair would no doubt at that moment have brought the business, and perhaps the peace, of Rio to a standstill.
There was a nice little up-to-date cinema just outside my window that would have been an ideal place for us to have made several hundred dollars—if only we had come to Brazil when the world was still going round. For the moment it was inhabited by a Portuguese barn-storming company, and the manager had not only lost heart over the “brutal crisis,” but had so extraordinarily good an opinion of himself and his establishment that nothing would induce him to offer us more than forty per cent. I would not have made a contract at that rate with St. Peter for a series of performances on the Golden Stairs, and as the only other cinema in town was small and unimportant, and run by an Italian too artless to do business with to advantage, there was nothing left but to fold up my arguments and say good-day.
I came down to Rio to see the show come in, but got a scare instead, for it did not appear, and we were due to open in Copacabana the following night. They turned up that evening, however, with a tale to tell. When they reached Ouro Fino for the Saturday engagement, they found that bandits had torn up the railway between there and Itajubá, evidently out of spite against the new president. “Tut” had been equal to the occasion, however, for though they could not fulfill the Itajubá contract—the only one we ever failed to carry out—they did not lose the date, but played a second time in Ouro Fino to a good Sunday house. Then they had returned to São Paulo, catching the night train and paying a fortune of 400$ to get themselves and the outfit back to Rio in time, though nothing like what they would have had to pay had not the baggage-man mistaken them for “artists” and the trunks for their wardrobe and stage costumes. Otherwise all had gone smoothly with them, except for one flattering error on the part of a charming young society lady of Franca. That town had been placarded, as usual, with our large three-sheet posters of Edison, and it was natural that “Tut’s” six feet and more of height should have drawn the attention of the susceptible sex as he sauntered about the streets. That evening the young lady in question was heard remarking to her escort, “Isn’t it strange that Senhor Edison looks so old in his pictures when he is really so young and handsome?”