I was obliged to stop a day at the Hotel Central on my return to Chillán owing to the failure of the administration of the Termas to telephone to Monsieur Heguy reserving me a room at the Hotel de France. The Central is not bad, but it seems to have no proper management; it is a costly establishment but is not as clean as the Hotel de France. As the hotel was filled, I was obliged to sleep in a sample room. Because I presented an uncouth appearance upon my arrival, due to a week's "roughing it," the obsequious boy who acts as head push, hotel runner, etc., thought that I was a bum and intended giving me a cot in a room with a couple of "drunks" on the top floor, to which I made serious objections. At the Central the better a person is dressed upon arrival, the better a room he gets. The size of a piece of meat served in the dining-room is equal to that of a walnut.
At Pinto I met Don Vicente Mendez U, governor of the Province of Ñuble. He was returning from a tour of inspection of the farmers' mutual railway. He was very much interested in North American customs which he wanted to see introduced in Chile especially in his province, chiefly the prohibition propaganda of which he had read much. He thought that it would be a good thing to have the Province of Ñuble go dry and advocated it strongly. Later on in conversation with him when I told him that I was in Chile to look the country over in view of starting up a new industry, stating that I thought that a brewery would pay in Chillán, he changed his views and said that it would be quite the thing because the Julius Jenson brewery did not do a big enough business to satisfy the wants of the inhabitants, and that the inhabitants of the city had to import beer from Valdivia and Talca. He made an appointment to meet me the next day and brought with him the mayor of the city and some of the important officials. There was proposed to me that if I would build a brewery in Chillán, I should receive as a concession a track of land on the railroad besides an exemption from taxes for a number of years. They were very enthusiastic about the proposition. The governor also said that it would pay in Chillán to found a hypothecary agricultural bank. I doubt the feasibility of this because crops often go to waste on account of no market. My friend the doctor from Rancagua grew twenty thousand bushels of barley in 1916; of this he was only able to dispose of one carload.
In 1916 there was a great railroad strike on the State Railroads of Chile; owing to it trains were invariably late and did not run nights. I was therefore obliged to stop off overnight at Curicó en route to Santiago. At the stations of San Carlos and Villa Alegre there were enough watermelons, here called sandias, piled up to supply the entire republic. There are no freight sheds at the stations large enough to store the crops about to be exported, so it is not uncommon for a farmer to have his whole grain crop spoiled by rain as it lies in sacks near the platforms.
We arrived at Curicó at night and stopped at the Hotel Curicó, which is run in connection with the eating-house at the depot. It is a large brick old-fashioned building. The daughter of the landlady is one of the most attractive girls I have ever had the fortune of meeting, and in the two days that I was there I had a feeling for her that can be described as infatuation. She was rather tall and slender but well built, a brunette, and about twenty-two years old. She was also refined and possessed good sense. I did not try to become well acquainted with her as I had no desire to play with fire, but these attractions of hers I was able to perceive without intimate acquaintanceship.
Curicó is the capital of the province of the same name. This province and that of Talca are the two poorest in Central Chile in agriculture, although the land is fertile and in some parts is highly cultivated. The city lies in the center of the Central Valley and owing to its geographical situation it has become quite a busy town. Its population in 1917 was 22,452 inhabitants against 17,573 in 1907. It is the twelfth city of Chile. Curicó has far better government, public and private buildings than Chillán, and its main streets teem with life. The streets are narrow and are paved with small sharp stones. The Calle Prat is the street that leads to the railroad station and is one of the main ones. Four blocks east of the station it is intersected by another main street which runs north and south. Following this street south one arrives at a beautiful plaza, on which is the severe but stately Capitol and several other large buildings which are of the Georgian type of architecture. Besides the Hotel Curicó, there are six or seven other hotels, the Central, the Comercio, etc. Of these the Central is the best. It has two patios above one of which is a grape trellis from which, when I saw it, dangled bunches of fruit, blue, red, and green.
CHAPTER XII
NORTHWARD TO ANTOFAGASTA BY RAIL. COPIAPÓ, ANTOFAGASTA, AND IQUIQUE
I remained a couple of months in Santiago after returning from Chillán which I put in profitably by making excursions and foot tours to the nearby mountain canyons, visiting the small towns in the neighborhood and studying the business possibilities of the future as applied to the Chilean capital.
One night as I sat having my shoes shined in a bootblack stand underneath the Portal Fernans on the south side of the Plaza de Armas, I noticed passing by an Englishman named Greenberg, an old acquaintance whom I last saw in Arequipa, Peru, in 1913. Greenberg was a salesman for the Browning Arms Company, originally hailing from Liverpool but had been quite a few years on the West Coast. In Arequipa we were introduced to a wealthy family named Larramendi and were frequent guests at their house. They had three charming daughters. One night while Greenberg and I were calling on the Larramendi girls, I overheard him proposing marriage to the oldest one, Felipa. I was considerably annoyed at this because Greenberg had already a wife and children in the old country. I upbraided him for his actions but was surprised when he answered me that he was sincere in his proposal and that since he and his wife did not get along very well together, he intended marrying Felipa and settling down in Arequipa. I knew that sooner or later he would be found out and as I did not care to be a witness of such an act towards a family that had shown me so much consideration, I quietly left Arequipa saying nothing to Greenberg about my departure.
