Chapter XI: Stranded in Rio (1)

I had long expected far-famed Rio to be the climax and end of my South American wanderings. Portuguese civilization had never aroused any great interest within me; a glimpse of Brazil, with possibly a glance at Venezuela on my way home, to complete my acquaintance with the former Spanish colonies, seemed a fitting conclusion of a journey that had already stretched out into almost three years. When I had “fiscalized” the “Botanical Garden” street-car line for nearly a fortnight, therefore, and seen the chief sights of the Brazilian capital, I began to think of looking into the question of getting back to the United States.

Contrary to my earlier expectations, it would not be necessary to sign on as a sailor or stoke my way across the equator. With my unanticipated salary of six thousand a day and by dint of long experience in sidestepping high prices, I had succeeded in clinging to the equivalent of a hundred dollars from my consular earnings, as a reserve fund for this last emergency. With that munificent sum on hand, I might even scorn the long-familiar steerage and treat myself to a second-class passage on any of the steamers sailing frequently from Rio to New York.

Unfortunately I had not been keeping my ear to the ground. Years of care-free wandering in those sections of the earth where life is simple and in which man learns to depend chiefly on himself had caused me to overlook certain characteristics of the more complicated world I was rejoining. There even a vagabond is only to a limited degree a free agent. The reserve fund I had unexpectedly saved from the maw of Brazilian profiteers was in paper milreis and as one had been able for more than a decade to turn 300$000 into twenty English gold sovereigns at will, I had neglected to do so at once. On the bright “winter” morning of Saturday, the first of August, I strolled out of my modest hotel and along the Avenida Central with my habitual air of a care-free man of unlimited leisure—almost instantly to recognize that there was something strange in the wind. Before the offices of the _Jornal do Commercio_ and the _Jornal do Brazil_ were gathered seething crowds, eagerly spelling out the voluminous bulletins in their windows. I paused to read with them. Some one, it seemed, had kicked over the balance of power in Europe and France and Russia had decided to try to give Germany the trouncing for which she had so long been spoiling.

The news came to me out of a tropically clear sky. I did recall having glanced at a brief newspaper paragraph somewhere during my journey northward from Uruguay, to the effect that some prince of Austria and his consort had been killed at a Serbian town of which I had never heard; but I had known other assassinations of Europeans of high degree to blow over without a war resulting. Squabbling was always going on in the Balkans anyway. Pessimists had it that there was going to be a long and a real war; in common with all other wise men of the period I smiled condescendingly at the silly notion.

Yet here were very decided rumors of war. Maps were already appearing in the windows of newspaper offices, with scores of black and red-headed pins on them to show the advance of the various armies. The flurry might not amount to much, but it was high time I turned my paper milreis into real money, bought my ticket, and got out of this temperamental country before something serious really did happen. I strolled on and dropped into one of the countless “exchange” booths that flourish in and about the Avenida Central. Handing out my three hundred thousand reis I requested the man inside to hand me back twenty gold sovereigns. He looked at me scornfully, pointed to a small paragraph in the newspaper under my elbow, and went on painting a sign on a piece of cardboard. Perusing these I learned the astounding news that the milreis, which had been rated fifteen to the English sovereign as far back as men with average memories could recall, had dropped overnight to _twenty-three_ to the pound! In other words of the same profane nature, my hundred dollars had dwindled in a few hours, merely on the strength of a bit of news from squabbling Europe, to about seventy. I refused to be “done” in that fashion. It was merely the old familiar trick of bankers who were taking advantage of a temporary scare to rob the garden variety of mankind of our hard-won earnings. In a day or so honesty, or at least competition, would prevail, and my three hundred milreis would be worth more nearly their honest value again. I re-pocketed them and decided to wait until the exchange moderated—and two days later my seventy dollars was worth less than sixty!

It may seem ridiculous that a man with three hundred thousand in his pocket should worry—at least to those who do not know Brazil, her currency, her prices, and her profiteers. But I began to feel uneasy. Not merely was the money I had by superhuman efforts saved to carry me home calmly melting away in my pocket without even being touched, but before long touching became unavoidable. In less time than would have seemed possible a third of my miserable bills had disappeared. Even if I got away at once, I should have to go straight home without stopping at Venezuela, and if I did not hurry I should not get home at all. I raced to the steamship offices—only to get a new shock. Not only had the value of my money been cut in two, and a third of it used up, but the price of steamship tickets had suddenly and mysteriously doubled, and only English gold was accepted. If I could have jumped upon a steamer that day, I could still have paid for a third-class passage. But there was no boat due for three days, and there were good chances that this would be several days late!

The air was full of war-bred excitement. Before it was announced that England had declared war, the British cruiser that had been lying in the harbor for nearly a week with her fires up was out stopping and searching all traffic along the coast. Several ships flying the German flag were anxiously awaiting orders in the bay, little realizing that their last voyage under that banner was over. Another German vessel forcibly put ashore fifty Russian steerage passengers who had embarked in Buenos Aires with all their savings, generously giving them back one-third the money they had paid for passage to Europe. Detachments of rifle-bearing Brazilian policemen patrolled the wharves to preserve order between the various nationalities. The German consul general had ordered all Germans on the reserve list in Brazil to report to the nearest consulate prepared to sail for home. German reservists poured into the capital from the southern states until it was only by climbing over a score or so of them that I could reach my room, into which two of them had been thrust. A standing client of the hotel, a business man of some standing and education, presumed upon our slight acquaintance to insist one evening that I walk out with him. As we stood before the bulletin-blinded window of the _Jornal do Brazil_ with its pin-spotted map of Europe, my companion gloated loudly over each piece of news:

“In two veeks ve are in Parees! I go mineself to-morrow morning to offer me to der gonsul. Oh, py Gott, ven only Eng-lant stop noytral, ven only Eng-lant stop noytral!”

Unfortunately, from the German point of view, England did not “stop noytral,” and a few days later the German reservists began drifting back to the _fazendas_ and _chacaras_ from which they had been called.

A twelve-day holiday was declared by the government, so that even those who had money in the banks were as badly off as I, and as the value of the milreis went steadily downward, prices went skyrocketing. Day after day I invaded every steamship office in Rio, without distinction as to race, color, or customary rascality. I took captive every ship’s captain who ventured ashore, offering to do anything for my passage from shoveling coal to parading the poop with his wife’s pet poodle. Nothing doing! Even if a ship did now and then lift anchor and sneak away in the general direction of the United States, there were crowds of would-be passengers with vastly more influence, and far more mesmerism over the root of evil, than I, who were quite as willing to do anything within the pale of respectability to reach “God’s country.” I might, of course, have cabled home for passage money. There were one or two persons in my native land who probably had both the wealth and the confidence required to answer properly to such an appeal. But I had long since made it a point of honor that when I got myself in a hole I should get out again without screaming for a rope.

Psychologists as well as mere world roustabouts will probably admit that the more nearly penniless a man is the more ready is he to “take a chance.” His condition cannot be worse, and it may suddenly become much better. A vagabond evidently is subject to the same laws as more respectable members of society. At any rate, with only a few milreis left, I grew bold and instead of squeezing the last loaf of bread out of them, I squandered them for lottery tickets. On the following Saturday there was to be a “drawing extraordinary,” with the first prize nothing less than a hundred million reis! With that amount I might even buy a steamer for the trip home; besides, I had long wished to know how it feels to be a multimillionaire. Even in real money and at normal exchange a hundred million reis reached the respectable sum of $325,000, and though Brazilian shin-plasters had dropped to half their pre-war value, though every “piece” of ticket must pay a commission to the vendor and must bear the ubiquitous “consumption” tax in the form of a stamp, though the government takes five per cent. of all winnings and loads down the lucky ticket-holder with so many other stamps, taxes, and grafts that it requires a lawyer to dig him from under them, there would still remain the price of the bridal suite on any steamer plying the east coast of South America.

A crowd of mainly collarless and rather vacant-faced men and women, who for many years had been chasing that will o’ the wisp called the winning number by buying a “piece” of ticket whenever possible, were already gathered in and about the frontless shop down behind the main post-office of Rio when I reached it. No small number of them were plainly so carried away by visions of what they were going to do with their winnings that they had played hooky and jeopardized their real source of income. Even I felt the subtle breath of hope, fed mainly on ardent desire, that swept through the sour-scented throng as the formalities began. Five little girls in spotless white, but of several shades of color—as if the officials in charge had sought to have every complexion of their clients represented—stood behind as many whirligigs fitted with the figures from 0 to 9. Every twenty seconds the girls gave these a simultaneous whirl, and when they stopped the number indicated by the five figures visible to the audience was called out by an official in the front row. Then another girl thrust a hand into a globe-shaped urn and, with averted face, drew out a wooden marble on which was engraved the conventional signs for a sum of money. That represented the amount of the prize for the number just whirled, and, like it, was called out and then written down three times on as many printed slips by dozens of men and boys seated around the walls of the room, some of them government officials, some representatives of the various lottery agencies.

There are at least fifty prizes at each drawing, ranging all the way from about the price of a ticket, the occasional winning of which keeps the disgruntled clients from abandoning the game, up to the capital prize. The deadly sameness of the process made the formality a soporific which, combined with the tropical heat and the fetid breath of the multitude, soon left me drowsily leaning against my compact neighbors. Time and again some insignificant prize was announced and set down by the scribes around the walls, until I began sleepily to wonder if the hundred million ball had inadvertently been left out of the urn. When the “_cem contos de reis_” was at last droned out by the wooden-voiced announcer in the same bored, monotonous tone with which he had so often mentioned the equivalent of a dollar, my thoughts were wool-gathering and it was not until a flutter went through the crowd that I recognized the significance of the announcement. I glanced at the ticket in my hand, then at the number on the whirligigs. Protector of the Penniless! They were the same—at least the first three numbers on them were! An African-pated blockhead of unusual height blotted the last two of those on the platform out of my field of vision. I shouldered him aside, treading under foot a few immediate by-standers. The surge of pleasure that was mounting my spine turned to angry disgust. The last two figures were not even near enough my own to give me the “approximation” prize. With my usual carelessness and stupidity I had bought the wrong ticket, and the glamor of being a multimillionaire faded to the real but familiar experience of being “dead broke” in a foreign land. My disappointment was evidently widespread, for the tightly packed throng began instantly to melt away like molasses from a broken jug, so that by the time I reached the street there were hundreds of other glum-faced individuals shuffling off in both directions. Only then did I realize that the _cambio_ in which I had spent my last milreis was quite fittingly named “_Sonho do Ouro_”—the “Golden Dream.”

But at least, if one must be stranded, there were few finer spots than Rio to be stranded in. I returned to my sight-seeing duties on the street-cars, and, by dint of outwitting the German proprietor of my hotel that evening, managed to save enough of that day’s six thousand to run an appeal next morning in the two principal newspapers of the capital. In all frankness it should have been lachrymose, but I had long since learned that a bold and boastful manner, with a facetious tinge, is more likely to bring real results:

American Writer and Explorer,
university graduate, widely traveled
but still young, knowing fluently
Spanish, French, and German, and
understanding Portuguese and
Italian, being marooned here by the
present situation, will accept
temporarily any reasonable
employment, in Rio or the interior,
of sufficient interest to pass the
time.

With no available means of moving on, I had time for anything—except to be bored.

That very evening I came within an ace of getting employment without even waiting for replies to my printed appeal—or at least I came as near it as did the suitor who would have been accepted but for the slight matter of the answer being “no” instead of “yes.” The first Brazilian singer ever heard in grand opera in Brazil was announced to appear at the Municipal Theater, and with that splendid sense of propriety for which the Latin-American is noted he had chosen, or been chosen, to make his début before his admiring fellow-countrymen as the hero of Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West.” The ticket speculators were out in full force when I scuffed my way down the mosaic-paved Avenida, but their machinations were naturally of little interest to a man who could not rub two coppers together. What had won my attention was rather a rumor that a group of stage cowboys was needed, and as my worst enemy could not have failed to admit that I came more nearly looking that part than anyone else wandering the streets of Rio, here was my opportunity to behold at close range the Brazilian misconception of the American wild west and its bloodthirsty denizens; besides, the two milreis paid to “supers” looked good to me. A veritable mob of loafers, rowdies, and _gatunos_ surged back and forth in the narrow street behind the theater, sweeping down upon the fist-less old “master of supers” as often as he ventured outside the stage door. Several times he fled in dismay, but at length, when the opera was about to begin and the marshaling of cowboys was imperative, he ventured forth with the air of a man who is taking his life in his hands and began letting his selections be thrust upon him. I footballed my way through the crowd that was swinging to and fro with his every footstep and offered my services. My wide-brimmed felt hat alone should have won me a place. The harried functionary glanced at me, mumbled something to the effect that I did not in the least fit the part, and finally retreated within the stage door, followed by a motley collection of spindle-shanked _Carioca_ street loafers who would have made an ideal background to a melodrama set in a tar-brushed Whitechapel.

Hardly was my last milreis gone when exchange improved and Brazilian money came halfway back to normal. The inevitable profiteer had already grasped his opportunity, scattered groups of _populares_ took to mobbing the shops that had most flagrantly boosted food prices, and though even the courts did not function, because of the twelve-day holiday, the government was finally compelled to take advantage of the state of siege to punish a few of the most heartless offenders and publish a list of prices which could not be exceeded without loss of license and possible imprisonment. But the ways of the Brazilian are devious, and no great improvement was accomplished. The semi-military police, their rifles loaded with ball cartridges, patrolled not only those parts of town in which the various European nationalities might meet, but wherever disgruntled bands of the _povo_ were likely to gather. It would probably not have been difficult to start a revolution in Brazil during those eventful days.

Meanwhile, not an answer did I get to my stirring call for employment, except an offer to become a combination door-keeper and office-boy, which I did not consider interesting enough even to pass the time. It was after three of a blazing afternoon that I rode out in my official capacity to Ipanema, where I had found behind a mass of rocks a little cove in which no bathing-suit was needed. There was a marvelous private beach, and a rock-walled dressing-room where only a stray negro wench might see me if she chose to look, but from which I could see the tips of the Corcovado and the “Sugar Loaf,” and, across the turquoise bay, silhouetted at this hour against the sun side of the sky, box-shaped Gavea, hazy blue with distance.

I had ridden halfway back to town when I looked up from reading one of Brazil’s epics and caught sight of the back of a head that looked familiar. The hat above it and the coat below I had certainly never seen before, and I could make out little of the face, but that little merely increased my conviction. By the time we had passed the tunnel I decided to make sure and, moving up close behind the man, I pronounced a name in a mild voice that would probably not have attracted attention if it were not the right one. The man turned around quickly, then thrust out a hand. As I had suspected, he was Raymond Linton, not only a fellow-countryman but a fellow-statesman, whom I had last seen in Buenos Aires.

A year before, Linton had acquired the Spanish-American concession for Edison’s recently invented “Kinetophone,” or “talking moving-pictures,” and, having played before all the uncrowned heads of Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and the Argentine, was still operating two separate outfits of this theatrical novelty in the last two of those countries. The entertainment had taken so well in Spanish-America that he had purchased the rights for Brazil also, and, having left Buenos Aires on the last day of July, little suspecting what the world had in store for itself, he was planning to start a third outfit in Rio de Janeiro.

“But I’m in tough luck,” said Linton, after our preliminary greetings and immediate personal history had ended.

“How come?” I asked, rather idly, to tell the truth, for my thoughts were still chiefly on my own predicament.

“You remember my B. A. manager?” he replied. “Splendid fellow and just the man I needed to handle the proposition up here in Brazil as soon as I get it started. But he is a Frenchman, and the day after I sailed he was called home to join the army. So now I’ve got to rush back to B. A. to keep that end going, and I have a brand new outfit, with special films in Portuguese and a man fresh from the Edison plant, landing to-day from the States. This man knows all the mechanical and electrical part of the job to perfection, but he probably never heard of the Portuguese language and couldn’t tell a Brazilian from an honest man. So I am mighty hard up for someone to take charge up here, and I don’t know where on earth I’ll find another fellow like the Frenchman.

“By Jove!” he went on a moment later, as the street-car swung out upon the Beira Mar, “I wish you felt like staying down here six months or so longer. I’d make you a proposition.”

“For instance?” I asked, merely out of idle curiosity. “I will not spend another month in South America under any circumstances, but I may have to in spite of myself.”

“If I could get a man who knows the South American from spats to hair-oil as well as you should after three years down here,” went on Linton with great earnestness, “I’d offer him a salary and a percentage, guaranteeing that he would not get less than——” naming a considerably larger sum than I had ever been paid as a respectable member of society—“a month, with all his actual traveling expenses, first class, all arrangements to be in U. S. currency, to take charge of the Brazilian end of this business and play in every city of over fifteen thousand population in the country—there are about fifty of them—and cover the whole republic, coast and interior, from the Uruguayan border clear up to where the Amazon begins to run down off the Andes. It would mean about six months’ playing the principal towns, and after that the man could take the thing around for another half year to the smaller places, and by the time he got through he’d know Brazil better than Edison knows electricity.”

“Mighty interesting proposition,” I remarked, as the street-car drew up at its destination beside the Largo da Carioca, “and I hope you find the man you need. I have a serious problem on my hands, too, and that is how to get back to the U. S. A. early enough this fall to join in an important coon hunt.”

For I did not for a moment seriously consider the offer as made to me, or at least as acceptable. I had already been three times as long in South America as I had expected to be when I first set out to explore the traces of the old Inca highway between Quito and Cuzco. I was decidedly “fed up” with “Spigs” and all their ways; too long a time outside the United States atmosphere is not good for the mind one wishes to keep American, just as too long a time in the tropics is injurious to the body one would keep robust. Moreover, never having seriously tested it, I was not at all certain I had the charlatanism indispensable to any success in the realms of “practical business”—and there was still a possibility that I might get aboard something or other northward bound.

Next day I took to pursuing ships and skippers with renewed energy. But the town was swarming with stranded Americans willing and able to pay any sum that could be mentioned in one breath for the privilege of sleeping in a stokehole of anything bound for the United States. That afternoon I dropped in on Linton at his hotel and entertained him with a hypothetical question.

“Suppose,” I said in my most casual tone, “suppose such a man as you are looking for would sign a contract for only six months, that he wanted his salary to start at once, instead of the first of September, and that on the day he signed he would need an advance of about five hundred thousand—er—reis to get a proper movie-magnate silk hat and diamond solitaire, what would be your private remarks when you reached the bathroom?”

“If he had your experience with South Americans, for instance,” came the prompt reply, “I’d have the contract ready within half an hour.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I replied. “I just wanted to know, from a sociological point of view.”

Whereupon I set out once more and went over all the steamship offices and captains’ favorite bar-rooms with a fine-toothed comb, only to be more than ever convinced that my native land had lost all desire ever to see me again. So, late that evening, having paused at the edge of the impassable sea to shake a fist at the northern horizon, I stopped at Linton’s hotel to sign the contract he had just drawn up. By its terms I was to take full charge of the tour of the Kinetophone in Brazil, playing the entire country, except the states south of São Paulo that I had already seen, ending up on the Amazon six months later, and receiving my first month’s salary at once—as soon as the banks opened. Early next morning a messenger from the steamship-office I had most often pestered brought me word that if I would report at once I could sign on a ship sailing that evening for Pensacola, Florida; and later in the day I was offered a chance to go to New Orleans as a deck-hand. But then, it would have been a long walk from either of those ports to the place I called home.

During the remaining half of August I did little but spend my first month’s salary, chiefly among the tailors of Rio, at prices which made the advertisements in the New York papers look enticing. Linton had arranged his Buenos Aires business to run on without him until we could give the customary special performance before the president of the republic. This he hoped would be within a week, but he had reckoned without Brazilian red tape. The “outfit” arrived the day after I signed the contract,—eight large pieces of what looked like the baggage of a barn-storming company, and Wayne Tuthill of Long Island and the Edison factory. “Tut,” as it was natural he should be quickly dubbed, was a tall, handsome, ingenuous lad of twenty-four, of that clean-cut, clean-minded type of American youth which makes the libertine _juventud_ of South America stand out in such striking contrast. He had never before been outside the United States—which I rated an asset—but had been the unhesitating choice of the company when Linton wired for their best practical electrician and operator who would accept a year’s contract.

On the following day I bade farewell to my little inside room in the German hotel down in the raw-coffee scented heart of Rio, and moved into a new home with what their “want ad” in the _Jornal do Brasil_ described as a “family of all respectability.” There were hundreds of private families only too glad to patch out their income by taking in a “serious cavalheiro” as a paying guest. My new quarters were on the Praia de Botafogo, in the district out beyond the tiny _praça_ and statue of José de Alencar. From my easy-chair I could look out across the bay at one end of the harbor and, though a headland cut off the “Sugar Loaf,” I had a splendid view of all the long, fantastic sky-line of Rio, now silhouetted against the sun-lighted clouds, now standing out in the brilliant sunshine as if barely a stone’s throw away. The room had a southern exposure, too, which is important in Rio, especially toward the end of August with summer coming on. True, there were a few drawbacks. I had to take board as well as lodging, though I was by no means sure that a glimpse into Brazilian family life would offset the heaviness of Brazilian family food. There were good electric lights, but no carpets or rugs, virtually unknown in Brazil, and not a suggestion either of bookshelf or wastebasket, while the table was a tiny thing implying that at most the occupant might have now and then to write a perfumed lover’s note.

Though it was some time before we got our show started, or even got the outfit ashore, we were a busy trio. First and foremost there was the Herculean problem of getting the thing through the customs. This was no such simple matter as going down to the ugly little green _Alfandega_ building on the water front, opening the boxes, paying our duty, and taking them away. Things are not done in that breathless manner in Brazil. Knowing that it costs more to get a moving-picture film into Brazil than to buy it in Europe or the United States, we were prepared to be held up by the mulatto footpads masquerading as a government, if only they would have it over with at once and let us go our way with whatever we might have left. What we needed first of all, it seemed, was a _despachante_, a native customs broker, familiar with all the ins and outs of the laws on import duties—and an expert in circumventing them. But could we not attend to this matter ourselves, seeing there were three of us in the prime of life, two speaking Spanish and one more or less Portuguese, and with nothing else whatever to do? We could not. We must have the services of a regular _despachante_—just why, we learned all in due season. The broker, however, did not rob us of occupation; in fact, we were still permitted to do almost all the work. We spent several hours one day hunting out our boxes amid an orderless jumble of many ship-loads of warehoused merchandise and wrestling them out into plain sight. The rest of the afternoon we wasted in coaxing the swarm of supercilious officials who lolled about the place to examine them. They paid us not the slightest attention, until our _despachante_ came to vouch for our existence. Then one of them “examined” the eight boxes by gingerly lifting half of the wooden cover of one of them, glancing at the unopened inner tin casing, and ordering the covers nailed down again. This, however, was only a preliminary formality, and while our broker prepared for the next moves in their regular, deliberate order, we contained ourselves in such patience as we possessed.

Meanwhile we learned many interesting details about Brazilian customs laws and those who enforce them. Portland cement, we found, pays duty on gross weight. More than half the barrels of such a shipment had been broken in transit, or by the wharf stevedores who landed it, and all vestige of cement had been lost. The customs men carefully gathered the scattered barrel-staves together, weighed them, and charged the assignee duty on them as cement! Regular merchants in Rio have a _despachante_, we learned, who does all the customs business of his client at a fixed rate of twelve milreis a box, large or small. If he succeeds in avoiding any part of the duty due, the merchant pays him half that amount as a reward. Thus there arrives a box of twenty pairs of shoes, on which the duty would be sixty dollars. The _despachante_ arranges with some of his friends in the customhouse to let the box in for twenty dollars, and the assignee pays that amount in duty and gives the broker, in addition to his customary twelve milreis, one half of the forty dollars saved. The Brazilians have no word for bribery; they use the expression _comer_ (to eat). A merchant who has been forced to pay full legal duty on a bill of goods asks his _despachante_ anxiously, referring to the strict new customs official who passed on it, “_Elle já come?_” To which, perhaps, comes the sad answer, “_Não, ainda não come_” (He doesn’t eat—yet). A few weeks later the merchant sends the honest man a few bottles of perfumery or some equally welcome present. If he sends them back, he is not yet “ripe.” But at length word goes round, “_Já come_” (Now he eats), and the merchants whose goods pass through his hands heave a sigh of relief.

“When your shipment arrives,” a foreigner long engaged in business in Rio explained, “and the duty is large, say twenty or thirty contos, you go to the customhouse yourself and say to the _conferente_, ‘I shall be in my office from three to four to-morrow.’ Then you go away. The _conferente_ is the official examiner; his assistant, who opens and closes the boxes and does the other manual labor, is called his “fiel” (faithful one). You cannot be a successful merchant in Rio without being on friendly terms with your _conferente_ and his “fiel.” When his work ends, at three, he drops in to see you before he goes home, and the matter is fixed up to the satisfaction of both parties. If you try to fight the system you are up against it. Only half the articles that come into Brazil are on the tariff schedule, and if a _conferente_ has it in for you he will decide that your declaration is made out wrong, no matter how you make it out, and will fine you for trying to flimflam the government—and a certain percentage of all fines go to the man who discovers the ‘irregularity.’ Then before goods leave the customhouse they must have the government consumption-tax stamps on them, and there is another fine chance to ‘eat.’ The man who was at the head of the stamp-selling down there for thirty-two years was recently retired on a pension and written up in the papers as ‘a life-long and faithful servant of the Republic’; yet ever since I have lived here he could be ‘fixed’ at from one fourth to one half the legal price of the stamps. The young fellow who now has his job doesn’t ‘eat’ yet, so all the merchants are cursing him, and his fellow-officials accuse him of _fazendo fita_—of showing off. But word is going round now that he is beginning to ‘eat’.”

Beautiful scenery evidently does not beautify character. The dishonest officials cannot plead the excuse of necessity, for their legal income is high. Inspectors get three contos, _conferentes_ eight hundred to a thousand milreis a month, which surely is generous to men who work only from eleven to three, with much “tolerance” as to absences during that time and at least sixty-five legal holidays a year. “Tariff legislation,” says an outspoken Brazilian publicist, “more than any other one thing, has been the source of the corruption that has rotted public service, and in the growth of the sinister privileges fostered by the ‘protective’ system there is almost sole responsibility for the widespread perversion of ideals.”

It took a full week to get our outfit through the customs, and it would have taken longer had nature not gifted me with an impatience capable of developing into profanity. Both our _despachante_ and the endless gantlet of scornful officials which our case was forced to run were firm believers in the efficacy of “amanhã”—which is our old friend “mañana” of Spanish-America. How many sheets there were of laboriously hand-written documents, signed every which way by scores of insufferable loafers in the crowded _Alfandega_, in the intervals between smoking cigarettes, gossiping with friends, scowling with a haughty air upon whoever dared insist on attracting their attention, I have no means of computing. Typewriting is illegal in government business in Brazil, as in most of Latin-America; too many old fogies who know only how to scratch with a pen would have to be dispensed with to make way for such an innovation, and they are the backbone of political parties. In the end Linton had to deposit $700, which it was solemnly promised would be returned to him when the outfit was taken out of the country. Officially, the American dollar is worth 3$120 in Brazil. I immediately reduced the $700 to milreis at that rate, and Linton prepared to pay it. But, we were informed, the government accepts its own money only at 4$120 to the dollar! More figuring resulted in the discovery that we must entrust the Brazilian government with nearly three contos. Thirty-five per cent. of this deposit must be in gold. I began to compute this percentage by dividing by 4$120. The broker smiled at me as at an amusing child. When the milreis is figured _back_ into gold, he explained, the dollar must be taken at 2$120. In other words, a Brazilian government official can demonstrate before your very eyes that thirty-five per cent. of seven hundred dollars is $480!

On the day after our outfit had at last been admitted to practice in Brazil, and the _despachante’s_ seemingly exorbitant demands had been satisfied, one of us happened to be in his office when in dropped the bewhiskered old fossil who had “examined” our stuff. He was cheery and gay now, all dressed up, his sour and haughty official manner wholly gone, and he greeted everyone in the office like old and esteemed friends. After the first embrace or two he and the _despachante_ sat down on opposite sides of the latter’s work table, their hands met once under it, then the fossil rose and went away with a satisfied smile scattered among his untrimmed whiskers and a hand lingering affectionately about one pocket.

Our next task was to hire a lawyer to get the trademark “Kinetophone” registered in Brazil in the name of the Edison Company. This matter is of prime importance to anyone introducing a new invention into the land of “amanhã.” It is not that the Brazilians are so inventive that they can readily imitate new contrivances; on the contrary, their mechanical genius is close to zero. But if he seldom invents or initiates, the “Brazie” is not lazy in the sense of complete indolence. He has the gambling instinct as well as the tropical desire to get through life as easily as possible, and laborious trickery seems to him a lesser effort than work. Being quick to appropriate the ideas of others, he is much given to stealing trademarks.

To tell the truth, the Argentine is worse than Brazil in this respect. There is a regular band of rascals in Buenos Aires who do nothing but steal and register foreign trademarks, while in Rio the traffic is at least unorganized. The laws of both countries give the first person to deposit a trademark in the national archives the sole right to use it. The mark may have belonged for half a century to an American or a European company; it suffices for some _argentino_ or Brazilian to get it registered in his own name to prevent the legitimate owner from using it in that country without paying the thief blackmail. One of this gentry reads in a newspaper or a catalogue of some new foreign invention with a catchy name, rushes to register it as his own, and then lies in wait for the real owner. Even a trademark of the French government tobacco monopoly was stolen by an _argentino_ and France was forced to pay him a handsome sum to get it back. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, Linton had found the Kinetophone already registered. But as the native whose eye had been attracted by the word had not understood what it represented, he had registered it as the name of a _lechería_, or milk-shop! Nevertheless Linton was compelled to pay him several hundred pesos for the privilege of using the word in his advertising or even in the theater, for the moment he put up a poster or ran a film and record in which the word “kinetophone” appeared, he could have been arrested and his outfit confiscated. It costs only 120$000, including lawyer’s fees, to have a trademark registered in Brazil, yet Americans have been blackmailed out of as much as 30,000$000 for neglecting to do so in time.

It turned out that the Kinetophone had been overlooked by Brazilian tricksters, but we had to wait three days to make sure of this before we dared publicly use the name. Meanwhile we had visited incognito the fifty cinemas then running in Rio, with a view to classifying them for future purposes; we had offered the “A. C. M.” a benefit performance later for the privilege of trying out our apparatus in their hall, and had set out in trio to make our first contract.

The chief moving-picture man of Brazil, with a string of cinemas in Rio and São Paulo and connections elsewhere, was a Spanish ex-bootblack. Like his colleagues and rivals, he informed us that it was not customary in Brazil to pay a fixed sum for such a novelty as we had to offer, that he “never risked a cent,” but that he would be willing to talk to us on a percentage basis. Then we found that the ex-bootblack had Missouri blood in his veins—perhaps because he had once driven mules—and that he would not believe in the drawing powers of Edison’s new invention until he had been shown. We had no misgivings as to our ability to show him, so we went out along the Mangue Canal, with its mirrored double row of royal palms on either bank, and rented for a day the old open-work wooden “Theatro Polytheama,” where we gave the doubting Thomases of the “movie” world, and a throng of newspaper men and “influential citizens,” a convincing private exhibition.

Next day we signed a “fifty-fifty” contract with the ex-bootblack to play for sixty days in his establishments in Rio, São Paulo and vicinity. By that time it was already September 7th, the first of Brazil’s two Independence Days, and “Tut” and I had taken up our abode on the Praia do Flamengo in the district called Larangeiras, or “Orange-trees.” It was nearer town than my former room; moreover, while I am duly exhilarated by the beauties of nature, no amount of scenery will make up for a constant diet of black beans and dry rice, surrounded on four sides by a constantly caterwauling Brazilian family dressed in soiled underwear or grease-spotted kimonos. As a matter of fact I lost nothing even of scenery by the change. We had a marvelous view of the “Sugar Loaf,” of all the great bay and its islands, of Nictheroy and the hazy outline of farther Brazil beyond. With our feet on our own railing we could see the steamers that might be bringing us news from home come slipping in at the harbor’s mouth, or watch a blood-red sunset on the cloud billows across the bay. We were four doors from the President’s palace of Cattete, and in the morning we could stroll across the Beira Mar in our bathing-suits to dive off the president’s private wharf and swim out to the little warship he always kept ready for the day when motives of health should force him to leave Brazil in a hurry. Men, women and children, with a towel over their shoulders, were familiar morning sights all along the Beira Mar—the women, of course, chiefly of foreign origin, for no real Brazilian lady would ever dream of bathing—at least in semi-public. Swimming was allowed along Rio’s magnificent driveway until nine in the morning, and some bathers were to be seen now and then at other hours, for, as the resplendent black policeman on our corner told us, while he watched several of them pass. “Oh, yes, they do bathe after nine, but it is against the law.”

Finally, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, the fourteenth of September, we gave the first public exhibition in Brazil of the Kinetophone—and before midnight we had given eleven of them. We had opened in the “Cinema Pathé” on the Avenida Central, in many ways the proudest and most fashionable motion-picture house not only of that sumptuous thoroughfare but of all Brazil; but our début was not attended with the customary formality. For a week Linton had been cooling his heels in the anteroom of the Cattete Palace, hoping to have the honor—and incidentally the prestige and publicity—of giving the president of the republic a private exhibition before disclosing the virtues of the new invention to the general public. But those were busy times in government circles, for, in addition to his manifold political troubles, the president had recently acquired an eighteen-year-old wife, so that at length we were forced to start without his blessing and the customary send-off of important novelties in Latin-American countries. By this time the World War was on in earnest and Brazil was loudly complaining of “_A Crise_,” or hard times; yet when our first day at the “Cinema Pathé” was ended, we found that the box-office had taken in considerably more than three million—reis! Even in real money that was better than a thousand dollars.

That very night Linton fled to Buenos Aires, leaving behind a document making me the “Brazilian concessionary” of the Kinetophone, and the weight of the whole enterprise fell abruptly on my shoulders. My first duty was to get our share of the opening day’s receipts. High noon having been agreed upon as the time to divide the previous day’s earnings, I called at that hour upon the general manager for Rio of the “Companhia Brazileira,” to get our half of the three million in cash—Brazilian cash, unfortunately—and carried it to the British bank. That was a daily formality thereafter, for while we had all due respect for the Brazilian and his business methods, we adopted the same viewpoint in dealing with him as the Scotchman who, asked for a recommendation by a retiring clerk, wrote:

“This is to certify that Sandy McCabe has worked for me the past twelve years. Regarding his honesty I can say nothing, as I never trusted him.”

The Kinetophone consists of a series of films projected from a booth like an ordinary motion-picture film, and of a large electrically operated phonograph, with six-minute records, set on the stage or behind the screen and synchronized with the film by means of tiny stout black cords running over pulleys attached to the walls or the ceiling of the intervening room. As ours could not be thrown from the same projecting machine as the voiceless films, the usual process was to set up our special apparatus in the same booth with the other, if there was room, cutting a second opening in the front of this to “shoot through;” otherwise we required a special booth to be built for us alongside the regular one. Our outfit consisted of fifteen films and their corresponding phonograph records. First of all, on every program was an explanation of the new invention and a demonstration of its power to reproduce all kinds of sounds, a film specially made to order in Portuguese, with the flag of Brazil, the president’s picture, and other patriotism-stirring decorations in the background. The only other film in the native tongue was a dialogue called the “Transformation of Faust,” in which two Portuguese youths, who had somehow been enticed out to the Edison factory, ranted for six minutes through a portion of Goethe’s masterpiece. But there were extracts from five popular Italian operas and three Spanish numbers, all of which took well with Brazilians, and though the remainder were in English, they were musical and comical enough to win interest irrespective of language.

The Kinetophone requires two operators, one in the booth and the other at the phonograph. Thus I was not only manager, auditor and “concessionary,” but obliged to run the stage end of the performance. Fortunately we did not furnish the entire program, our part of the bill consisting of the “Portuguese Lecture” and two other numbers, filling one-third of the hour constituting a “section” and leaving the rest of it to ordinary films or whatever form of entertainment the local manager chose to supply. Every hour, therefore, from one in the afternoon to eleven at night, seven days a week, I had to be on hand to put on the first of our records, jump out to the edge of the audience and signal to “Tut” in his special booth, spring back again and touch off the phonograph at exactly the right instant, repeat this with the other two records, thrust these back into their special trunk, lock it—and spend the next forty minutes, other duties willing, as I saw fit. Never during those eleven hours a day did I dare go far enough away from the theater to get a real let-up from responsibility. The most I could do was to snatch a lunch or stroll down to one end or the other of the Avenida, to see the ships depart or, on windy days, to watch the sea pitching over the sea-wall of the Beira Mar, wetting even the autobusses—and then hurry back again for our part of the next “section.”

Besides running the films, “Tut” had to rewind them after each performance, so that his leisure time was ten minutes less to the “section” than mine. I soon found that he was not only a highly efficient operator, but that he had just those qualities needed to make a long companionship agreeable. Honest and genuine as gold coin in war time, easy-going, optimistic, unexcitable, wholly ignorant of foreign languages, temperaments, or customs, yet pleasant with all races and conditions of men, he was an ideal team-mate, having large quantities of that patience so much needed in tropical and Latin lands, and of which I have so scanty a supply. Thanks to “Tut,” the Brazilians got better Kinetophone performances than most Americans have heard. The novelty did not take particularly well in the United States, though for no fault of its inventor. The essential and all important thing with the Kinetophone is perfect synchronization. If the character on the screen speaks or sings exactly as he opens his mouth, the illusion is remarkable; let there be the slightest interval between the sound and the lip movements and the thing becomes ludicrous. When the invention was first shown in the United States there was perfect synchronization, and a consequent rush of orders for machines and operators. There being no supply of the latter on hand, they had to be trained in a hurry. Many were ill prepared for their duties, with the result that when they were hurriedly sent out on the road they frequently gave distressing performances. Gradually, therefore, the invention was withdrawn, with the promise to perfect it further and make it “fool proof,” so that by the time Linton had taken the concession for Brazil, “Tut,” the expert who had trained others, was available and the new form of entertainment made a much bigger “hit” in Brazil than in the land of its origin.

I had only one serious fault to find with “Tut,” one that added materially to those of my managerial duties which had to do with keeping on pleasant terms with the somewhat sour manager of the “Cinema Pathé.” Less fond than I of strolling the downtown streets during our breathing spells, “Tut” usually spent them with an American novel or magazine in the unoccupied second-story anteroom of the theater. There the “Pathé” had stored its extra chairs, and from them “Tut” was wont to choose a seat, place it at the edge of the stone balustrade of the balcony, where he could look down upon the crowd surging up and down the Avenida, and pass his time in reading. But the chairs, as is usual in South America, were of the frail variety, and “Tut,” a generous six feet in height and by no means diaphanous in weight, had the customary American habit of propping his feet on a level with his head—with the result that at more or less regular intervals “crash!” would go a chair. On the day when the manager, his eyes bloodshot with rage, requested me to visit the second-story anteroom with him, during “Tut’s” absence, the wrecks of eleven chairs were piled in one corner of it. After that I never had the audacity to go up and investigate, but crashing sounds were still heard during the half hour devoted to the silent films.